Michaela and Ben are ready to risk everything to save Cal, but can they reach him before it’s too late? With Zeke’s Death Date mere hours away, Saanvi and Vance try some desperate measures to get help from The Major.

Season finales are always tricky – you build up to them and then have to resolve plot threads satisfactorily while leaving enough dangling to keep your audience excited for the next season. But where else was left for Manifest to go at this point? Turns out, in some ways the answer is a little obvious, and in others less so, but in both cases the question that stayed with me was: where does it go if and when it gets confirmed for a third season?

With Cal held captive, Michaela finds herself the attention of Grace and Ben’s anger, and feels that she only has one option – give the dealers the thing they want (their stash of meth), and hope that she can recover Cal safely. Of course, this being Manifest, it’s never going to be quite that simple, and what starts out as a sneaky little venture involving just Michaela and her closest colleagues and family quickly turns into something much bigger and more complicated.

Meanwhile, Saanvi and Vance are following The Major because Saanvi is convinced only she can help them in refining the cure to save Zeke from his Death Date. When she doesn’t co-operate, Saanvi goes rogue in all the worst ways – up to this point the show has allowed us to see Saanvi going off piste as a good thing as she asserts herself in unexpected ways. Here, it goes… differently and honestly I don’t know what the writers intend next for the character.

As for Cal, well he’s getting along as best he can – turns out that perhaps not all of his captors are quite the heartless bastards we first thought and maybe he can use that to his advantage. It feels as if the entire episode leaves us with quite confused messages as to the Callings in general to be honest, and there is one aspect to its resolution which comes from nowhere in terms of what the show has given us to date, while being unfortunately a little predictable and a lot on the nose.

As a finale, it works inasmuch as certain threads do get resolved, others are set in motion. But genuinely, if NBC chooses to renew Manifest for a third season, I can’t help but feel like they’ve written themselves into a corner they’ll find tricky to escape.

Verdict: Considering the strength of the show as a whole, a bit of a mixed bag of a finale. Here’s hoping the show gets that renewal and the writers can pull it put of the bag. 7/10

Greg D. Smith