“We’re all in this together.” That’s the overarching theme of Manifest. After being canceled by NBC, the supernatural drama was saved by Netflix to give it the ending it deserved. The first half of Manifest season 4 was released in December 2022. Fittingly, the final 10 episodes premiered on June 2, the “Death Date” on the show when the passengers of Flight 828 would finally realize their fate.
What was that fate? It was all revealed in the final episode. But first, the passengers had to go through a journey to get there.
Just trying to survive
The final episodes begin with most of the passengers from Flight 828 still being held in a detention center. Scientists are studying their Callings, sending people out in the field to solve them. They also want to determine what is coming next and how to stop it. Some passengers, however, including Angelina (Holly Taylor), have managed to evade capture and are in hiding in the real world.
One passenger who was somehow brought back and is being kept in the detention center is Captain Bill Daly (Frank Deal), the pilot of the flight. Heavily sedated, researchers are trying to figure out as much as they can from him. But little did anyone know that he brought with him destruction. From locusts to boils and turning water into blood, he delivers plagues to the passengers that end up killing several guards.
Out of fear, the researchers shut down the facility with all passengers in it, locking them inside to fend for themselves. Ben (Josh Dallas), naturally, steps up to the plate to lead. Drea (Ellen Tamaki), meanwhile, who is pregnant with Jared’s (J.R. Ramirez) child, has moved into a dilapidated unit beside the facility, secretly breaking down a wall to provide an escape route for the passengers so they can continue doing their important work.
But they are going to need more than saving from the general public because Angelina is on a quest to bring on the end of days and reset the world. With the sapphire now embedded into her hand, she wields the same power as Cal (Ty Doran).
She’s able to appear as the figures of others, killing people one by one that are integral to the plan, including Daly. When she’s eventually captured and they try to remove the sapphire from her hand, it shifts upwards, embedding itself into her central nervous system. She can’t be stopped.
In the process of the attempted removal, she lets out a massive scream that blocks passengers from accessing their Callings. However, Cal realizes he can still access not only his Callings, but those of everyone else. He gets to work trying to dissect them from the divine consciousness, one by one.
Passengers escape through Drea’s home in pairs to try and secretly solve the Callings Cal tells them about in hopes that this will redeem them and save them from the Death Date. But Cal’s Callings are getting weaker.
Connecting sapphires
Through a series of mystical clues, the group realizes that what Cal needs is not to connect to Angelina, but to the piece of Noah’s Ark that contains sapphire. There’s just one problem: Saanvi (Parveen Kaur) threw the driftwood into Storm King Mountain a while back, where the fissure occurred in the Earth. It’s time for a treasure hunt. Ben and others head to the woods to camp out and try to access the piece of wood.
As the group members sleep in tents while waiting to learn from Cal when the right time to act is, he jolts awake and walks toward the fissure. It glows, as does his arm. He realizes what he needs to do, just as Ben arrives to plead with his son not to go. They deliver tearful goodbyes and Cal stands within the sapphire, only to disappear into a streaming blue light that is visible throughout the sky as others look on.
They do more than look, though. All the passengers see the light and feel compelled to follow it to the same spot. This includes Eagan (Ali Lopez-Sohaili) who, for a while, teamed up with Angelina. But he has a crisis of conscience thanks to some convincing by Adrian (Jared Grimes) and decides to defect, returning to the other passengers.
It’s all connected
Why us? That’s the question everyone from Flight 828 wonders. In a campfire discussion on the eve of the Death Date, Michaela (Melissa Roxburgh) suggests that she doesn’t think there was any rhyme or reason. They were just a random group of people on a plane, some good, some bad. Saanvi agrees, noting that we’re a “statistical sample for a divine experiment.”
“We are all connected to one another,” adds Ben. “Everyone on that plane, everyone in the world. We just forget.” Michaela believes the Callings weren’t designed to force them to do good, but rather to choose it. “Bottom line,” adds Ben, “we’re all just supposed to do our part.”
It’s a divine life lesson that makes the show, as corny as it might be at times, much deeper than it might appear to be on the surface. As they discuss what might come next, they get news of volcanoes erupting all around the world.
Judgment day
Judgement day has arrived. The passengers see the fissure turn red and begin to erupt. Out of it emerges Flight 828, perfectly intact. The door opens, welcoming the passengers in. There’s no other choice but to hop aboard. As the passengers file in, one by one, Angelina emerges with her group of seven, wielding a gun and ordering them all to leave.
When she tries to invoke her power from the sapphire, however, nothing happens. Her group abandons her and it’s a showdown between Angelina and Ben. Back home, while researching a mysterious symbol and inscription, Olive (Luna Blaise) discovers that the final judgement is forgiving Angelina. The picture of a man carrying a young woman through fire they saw several seasons ago isn’t of Ben and Olive — it’s of Ben and Angelina. She frantically tries to reach her father to tell him. Thankfully, Ben decides on his own to show mercy and carries an injured Angelina in his arms onto the plane, unaware that this is precisely what he was supposed to do.
They take off, not knowing what’s coming next. Soon, fissures begin to appear in peoples’ skin, and they explode and turn to dust. But not everyone, just the bad people: the cheats, the liars, thieves, and murderers — those who did not work with Ben and his group to help save the Lifeboat. Adrian is affected until Eagan panics and offers himself instead, saying Adrian is a good man. Adrian is saved and when Eagan is about to perish, Adrian pleads with God that offering one’s life for the life of another is the most selfless thing a person can do. It works and Eagan is spared, too.
Saanvi begins to burn: she did take someone’s life, after all. But she’s spared as Ben embraces her and the fissures disappear. Saanvi has done enough to redeem herself. All in all, 11 people die. A smoky figure appears, presumably the Grim Reaper, but the passengers fight back, telling it about all the good they have done. It disappears in a literal puff of smoke.
What happens at the end of Manifest season 4, part 2?
Outside the windows, the world as seen through the plane’s windows appears to have returned to normal. The plane lands, and the passengers reluctantly walk off, unsure of where they will end up. Are they dead? In heaven? It turns out, they are in the airport on April 7, 2013, the date Flight 828 was supposed to land. There waiting for Ben is Grace (Athena Karkanis) and a young Olive (Jenna Kurmemaj). Cal (Jack Messina) has returned to his younger self with no memory of what happened.
Ben excitedly greets Grace and his parents, and when she asks who the woman is that he’s looking at so lovingly, he declares that she’s a doctor named Saanvi who is going to save Cal’s life. Michaela breaks up with Jared, telling him they want different things and there’s a woman out there who is better for him, alluding to Drea, whom he later bumps into leaving the airport.
Michaela rushes outside, knowing Zeke mentioned he was doing airport pickups in his cab that day. She finds him and jumps into the cab, excited that she knows what’s to come, though he has no idea who she is. Ben spots Vance (Daryl Edwards) walking by to investigate the mystery of 11 passengers missing from the plane that just landed from Jamaica.
Everyone gets a second chance, learning to appreciate what they have in life. Secretly, however, they have all become a big family who will forever remain connected to one another. They all have an idea of what’s coming in the future. They’re all still on the same lifeboat together. But this time, they’re finally able to truly live.
Stream Manifest on Netflix.
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