‘Manifest’ Boss on a Meth Head-Passenger Connection and Eureka’s Investigation

[Warning: The below contains MAJOR spoilers for Season 3, Episode 3 of Manifest, “Wingman.”]

Vance (Daryl Edwards) is officially back to investigating what exactly happened to Flight 828, the plane that disappeared for five years before returning … and the passengers hadn’t aged at all in that time. (Vance was the NSA director who greeted them upon their return.)

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The April 15 episode of Manifest also sees the Meth Heads, the three men who kidnapped 828er Cal (Jack Messina) last season, officially separated. Jace (James McMenamin) is still out there, plotting his revenge on Cal and the rest of the Stone family. Kory (Dazmann Still) is home with his family — and a Calling (visions that help the 828ers help others) led passenger Ben Stone (Josh Dallas) to rescue his brother. And Pete (Devin Harjes) is in jail, after separating from the others upon seeing a photo of himself from his childhood that also includes passenger Angelina (Holly Taylor). Still, all three hear Cal in their heads, reciting a childhood rhyme.

Showrunner Jeff Rake teases what’s next.

Vance has been introduced to Eureka, which he brings Ben and Saanvi [Parveen Kaur] to in the Season 3 promo. What can you tease about that part of this season’s investigation?

Jeff Rake: What we’ll come to discover when they get to Eureka is that understandably there’s been an entire world of investigation related to 828 going on, not only since the moment the plane returned but in fact, since the moment the plane disappeared years ago. That of course makes sense. Why wouldn’t there be? But our passengers have never had a window into this world.

Vance allowing Ben and Saanvi to step into Eureka will ultimately constitute a crossover between these worlds because Ben and Saanvi for the first two seasons have conducted their own DIY 828 investigation while elsewhere, all the king’s horses and men, as the saying goes, have spent endless resources investigating. And yet for all of their investigation, the government has been able to uncover very little. What we’ll start to discover in kind of suspenseful, one step at a time peeling of the onion is that the government needs the passengers and the passengers need the government in order to move along the investigation and start understanding the mystery.

NBC

There seems to be some sort of connection between the Meth Heads and Cal, which is bad on quite a few levels, especially with Jayce targeting the Stones. Is that something Cal can use to his advantage? Is it connected to what happened on 828 at all or something that happened after?

There is clearly a profound connection between the Meth Heads and Cal. That’s not to say that they share any agenda in any way — far from it. The Meth Heads come to believe that Cal was instrumental in their death, and they will come to believe that Cal is an instrumental piece in their survival. So from the Meth Heads’ point of view, Cal represents all that has gone wrong in their life of late, but also potentially their salvation. From Cal’s point of view, the Meth Heads represent the ultimate existential threat, not just to Cal and his family.

I can’t reveal what I fully mean by that because that’s all going to become unpacked when we get to the mid-season finale, Episode 306, and then when we unpack that in 307. We will come to learn a lesson in regard to the Meth Heads that will help us understand why they came back and what their return means for the future of the passengers.

There isn’t a shared history between the Meth Heads and the passengers — we’re not, for example, going to come to discover that Jace or Pete or Kory had any connection to the airplane itself, but the fact that they disappeared and returned just like Zeke [Matt Long] disappeared and returned, just like James Griffin [Marc Menchaca] from Season 1. But they’re all pieces of the same ultimate puzzle that will help Ben and Michaela [Melissa Roxburgh] and others unpack from a mythological standpoint, what they as passengers returned for and how they may survive. It’s all connected and the Meth Heads’ return and their demise will be intrinsically connected to the passengers’ fate.

Grace [Athena Karkanis] and her brother Tarik [Warner Miller] are fixing their relationship but they still have a ways to go, considering she’s keeping him in the dark about everything.

So many of our relationship stories are about healing and redemption, [as is this one]. The chasm is very wide when we first find them face-to-face. We discover that there are deep, raw wounds here and that it’s quite mutual that both of them feel a lot of regret and a lot of emptiness in their life. Over the course of the next handful of episodes, we’re going to see them slowly but surely bridge that gap. That’ll happen just in time because we’re going to reach a major crisis point in that story. And when we get there, the relationship between brother and sister will finally get to a point where they can truly be there for each other.

Peter Kramer/Warner Brothers

Can we trust him?

We always should be questioning everyone on the show. Grace and the audience are wondering if we can trust him. And I think he’s wondering if he can trust her.

If he knew everything that was going on, he might not necessarily want to be involved.

That’s a really good point and they’re going to ultimately have that confrontation when the going gets rough.

Manifest, Thursdays, 8/7c, NBC

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