Today, I am going to explain an American supernatural drama television series called “Manifest”. The Stone family is at an airport in Jamaica, waiting for their flight back home to New York. The airline announces that because of a booking overload, some passengers will have to transfer to Flight 828 which will take off a while later. A police detective Michaela, her brother Ben, and his leukemic son Cal decide to take flight 828 while the rest of the family fly home early. In the following scene, the trio are already in flight 828 and is waiting to land. Suddenly, a storm appears out of nowhere, making the plane go through aggressive turbulence. 


The lights go off and emergency lights are turned on making everyone panic. A minute later, everything goes back to normal and they continue their way to the JFK airport. However, the pilot is asked to make a descent to another airport. The operator on the other end sounds nervous upon hearing the name of flight 828. The pilots are told that there will be military and medical personnel waiting for them when they touch down. Still confused, they land the plane. The director of the NSA Vance is the main investigator on the scene. He informs the confused passengers that they flew from Jamaica on April 7, 2013, but the current date is November 4, 2018. Everyone on the flight has been missing and presumed dead for the past five and a half years. Then, we are taken back to the day they were at the airport. 


The daughter Michaela is a detective in the New York police department. She looks at her family and thinks about how stressed they are behind the happy faces. Her brother Ben and his wife Grace have been married for fifteen years and are still in love. They have a pair of twins Cal and Olive. Cal was born with leukemia and has been given six months to live. Ben and Grace are always worried about their son, helplessly trying to find a way to save him. Then, there is Michaela’s mother who is asking her to take a step forward in life and get married. Michaela was recently proposed to by her long-term boyfriend Jared. She is taking her time to give him a reply because she is still recovering from the trauma of something that happened recently. Back in the present, the passengers think this is some kind of sick joke but they soon realize Vance is being dead serious. Upon further investigation, it is clear that the passengers haven’t aged a single day since the departure. 


The people from NSA expect an answer from the passengers but they are as clueless as everyone else. They are kept in a camp for the rest of the night and interrogated individually. All their answers are the same; they do not know what happened. Thirty-six hours later, the news makes it to the world and creates a sensation. The families of the passengers run to the airport to be reunited with their loved ones who they thought died long ago. It is a crazy experience for both the passengers and their families. Ben reunites with his daughter who is now a teenager. Cal is shocked to see that his twin is now double his height. Grace, on the other hand, could not be happier to have them back. However, Ben and Michaela find out that their mother passed away two years ago. 


They have a hard time processing the information, so they decide to go home and rest first. While the rest of the world loses their mind, the family settles into their changed home. Simultaneously, scientists start examining the airplane but find nothing out of the ordinary. Michaela is worried because her fiance Jared didn’t come to meet her at the airport. She goes to her workplace to meet him and is greeted by a senior detective. He welcomes her back to the job even though she has been MIA for five years. Other than the return of flight 828, the news about two girls being abducted from their backyard has also made the television. Jared is the lead detective on the case and is very busy. Upon meeting him, Michaela finds out that it is not the only reason he didn’t come to meet her. It turns out, he married her best friend Lourdes last year. 


Michaela is shocked because to her, it has only been two days since she and Jared were engaged. The first thing Ben does on returning home is take Cal to the doctor. Over the years, researchers have found a way to treat his leukemia which means he can live more than six months. The couple can almost not believe the news. Meanwhile, Michaela is returning home on a bus when she hears a voice asking the driver to slow down. The voice is so strong that she yells at the driver and saves a kid’s life right before the bus is about to hit him. Then, we are introduced to a medical researcher named Saavi. She was also on flight 828 and is returning to her workplace after five years. 


The research she submitted right before her disappearance has been in practice for the past two years and has cured cancer. Her coworkers throw her a surprise party, welcoming her back. The next morning, Michaela goes on a run and comes across two dogs barking at her from inside a gate. She hears the calling in her head for the second time. This time, the voice asks her to let them free. She thinks about it for a second before continuing to jog. Hours pass and it gets dark but the voice doesn’t go away. At midnight, Michaela goes to the dogs again and is joined by Ben a while later. It turns out he also heard the same calling as she did. 


They break open the door and let the dogs free but decide to not tell anyone about the callings. The entire world’s eyes are upon them so if they say something strange, people might want to perform experiments on them. The following day, the police find security footage of the incident. Jared keeps it on a low to keep Michaela out of trouble. He asks her why she let the dogs free but even she doesn’t have an answer to that. They find the dogs and go to the owner to apologize. In the meantime, Ben tries to mend his relationship with Olive, going to her football games and catching up with her life. They decide to take it slow because, after Cal and Ben’s disappearance, Olive had to go to therapy for many years. As soon as Michaela gets closer to the dogs, she again hears the voice asking her to set them free. 


Jared talks to the dog’s owner, explaining the situation to him but Michaela cannot focus because of the voice. She suddenly breaks open the door to a room out of pure instinct. Inside are the two girls who were kidnapped a few days ago. The voice had been asking her to set the girls free, not the dogs. Jared is shocked but he doesn’t have time to comprehend what happened because he has to arrest the kidnapper. The police force believes Michaela is ready to continue her job since she was able to solve the case right after returning. They allow her to come to work but put her on desk duty for a few days. Somewhere else, Ben and the family are playing a board game together. Grace gets a text from her boyfriend saying that he misses her. She was in a relationship with a man before Ben’s return but doesn’t have the guts to tell him yet. At the same time, some passengers on the flight get a slight headache and something in their hearts tells them to go to the airport instantly. 


When they arrive, they are shocked to see each other, knowing that all of them had the same urge. Suddenly, the airplane explodes into pieces without anything triggering it. When the NSA finds out that twenty passengers were present at the scene, they are brought in for interrogation. All of them give the same answer; that they just felt like coming to the airport. They are let go after ten hours of interrogation but the officials keep a close eye on them to make sure they aren’t hiding something. At breakfast the next morning, Jared hears a specific tune playing in his head. No one else hears it which makes him question his sanity. Following the eventful morning, he and Grace bring Cal for chemo where they meet Saanvi. Upon finding out she was also in 828, they are shocked because Cal is being treated using her discovery. Meanwhile, Michaela goes to work and finds Lourdes. 


They used to be best friends but this time, Michaela cannot get herself to talk to her. Later, she is told that she will have to take a psych eval before she gets back to work. Ben is crossing a signal when he hears the same tune again and decides to follow it this time. He reaches a street singer Radd who was also in the fight with them. It turns out that Radd left his thirteen-year-old son with his neighbor when he first boarded the plane. Now, he has found out that his son Adio is in jail but no one is letting the poor man meet him. Jared has been called to him which means he has to help Radd. 


Using his connections in the NYPD, he arranges a meeting between Radd and his son. Adio has been arrested for stealing from a jewelry store he works in but he insists that it wasn’t him. The guy might be lying but something tells Ben that he is not. At home, Ben tells Michaela to keep the callings a secret from Grace as well. He doesn’t want her to feel like he is any different from the Ben he was five years ago. Especially because she has been trying to keep her distance when they are alone together. The next morning, Grace gets a call from her boyfriend who is urging her to tell Ben the truth. As she is explaining the situation to him, Michaela hears her. She promises to not tell Ben but asks Grace to quickly figure out what she wants to do. Later, Michaela digs into Adio’s case and finds that all evidence points towards him being the culprit since there is no sign of forced entry and he used a false ID to get the job. Redd goes to talk to him one more time but Adio insists that it wasn’t him. 


He used the fake ID to get better jobs but would never steal something from the job he worked so hard. At night, Grace buys Cal new toys because his old ones were donated. However, he misses things like his rock collections and limited edition legos. It turns out that without Grace’s knowledge, Olive has stored them in a storage unit. She and Ben go to retrieve the stuff and Ben finds out the unit belongs to Grace’s boyfriend Danny. Olive hugs him and apologizes. Before they can move the boxes, Ben again hears the tune but this time, in real life. He follows it and finds out it is the ringtone of the jewelry shop owner’s son. 


He is the one who stole the jewelry and put the blame on Adio. Ben immediately calls the police and gets him arrested. In the end, Adio is let free and Redd couldn’t be happier. Michaela goes through her Facebook page and finds several messages from Lourdes over the years. It makes her remember the friendship they shared. She goes to Lourdes’s place and reunites with her, forgiving her for everything. Somewhere else, Ben confronts Grace about her love affair. He doesn’t blame Grace for being with someone else to get over the pain of losing her husband and child. Grace is grateful to have such an understanding man as her husband. After that, we are introduced to Kelly, one of the 828 passengers who has been the most vocal about what happened to them. 


She goes on interviews and blames the government for hiding something. Then, when she is watching the news at night, someone shoots her dead. In a few hours, her house is surrounded by police. Ben also finds out about it through the news and asks his family to be careful of strangers because the death might be related to her being a passenger. He gets a call from Saanvi who says that she has found an undiscovered protein in Cal’s blood that wasn’t there before the return. They decide to keep it a secret before she does more research to find out what exactly it is. Following the call, Michaela and Ben go to Kelly’s house to investigate the murder. However, they are interrupted by Vance who kicks them out because the matter related to flight 828 is a matter of national security. Outside, they meet Kelly’s husband Taylor who says that his wife had a calling yesterday. Before they ask him more about it, he walks away. 


Michaela has also been hearing the phrase “Own your truth” repeatedly in her head. She hears Kelly say the same thing in her interview and realizes that she is meant to find Kelly’s killer. Later, she and Ben go to talk to Taylor who is preparing for the funeral. He thinks that Kelly was killed because of the interviews and so does his maid. When they start to receive guests, the siblings see themselves out. However, this reminds Michaela of her friend Evie’s death. A few months before the disappearance of the flight, Michaela was in a car accident with Evie. Evie died in the crash and since Michaela was driving, she never forgave herself. 


To “own her truth”, she goes to Evie’s parents’ home and finds her mother. The last time Michaela was here, she was kicked out because the couple didn’t want to see her. But this time, Beverly invites her in. Michaela soon finds out that she has dementia and still thinks her daughter is alive. Her husband, however, still blames Michaela for Evie’s death. After the encounter, Michaela goes to work and meets Jared. He did some digging on Kelly and found out that she and her husband own a downtown mall. Michaela remembers that the maid mentioned a mall while talking about Kelly yesterday. That place might hold the answers they are looking for. 



Drama Name: Manifest  

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