Saanvi struggles with her own issues going back to the day she was abandoned on the flight out to Hawaii, and an unwelcome revelation makes things worse. Grace has a strong calling that leads her to believe a local mother is in danger. Michaela desperately tries to find a way to reach out to Zeke.

Building on the work of the previous two episodes, this instalment of Manifest flips a lot of scripts in a lot of ways for several characters, while still leaving us plenty more new mystery to speculate about as we wait with bated breath for the next instalment.

Poor old Saanvi – as if she doesn’t have enough to cope with, suffering from anxiety and still feeling a keen sense of hurt that she was abandoned by her lover before she even got to Hawaii, she’s also unwittingly feeding information to the Major who is masquerading as her therapist. No wonder Ben feels so guilty at Vance’s new plan of feeding her false information about a new passenger having callings to try to smoke out whoever the leak/mole is that they suspect is grabbing information from her. Parveen Kaur has been one of the underrated stars of the show, quietly trudging away in B-plot material and acting as the science explainer when required by the script, but here she really gets some big material to get her teeth into and oh boy does she and the writers’ room go for it. This is tense, terrifying stuff from moment to moment, crescendoing in a way that you will scarcely credit when you see it.

Elsewhere, Grace meets a fellow expectant mother at yoga class and is struck by a strong calling which suggests to her that the woman may be in danger. Cal and Ben encourage her to listen to the calling and do whatever she can – but their chummy detective work as part of the Calling Club isn’t best calculated to make Olive happy. Making that worse is the fact that Olive is getting ever deeper into the Church of the Returned – I can only imagine bad stuff for all concerned lies down this path.

And there’s Michaela, desperately trying to get in touch with Zeke any way she can, convinced of the vital importance of their latest calling and of them being together. Jared of course isn’t too happy, and the confrontations between the two on the subject take on a new, sharper edge. This isn’t going to end well for their friendship, that much is clear, but even I wasn’t prepared for the conclusion the show gave us, and it leaves open a whole new world of troubling possibilities for all concerned.

On every plot strand, the show keeps delivering shock after shock, and by the time it’s all resolved (or so we think) it delivers up one final massive twist at a point where everything seems calm and sorted and you just know that things are going to get an awful lot uglier before they get better for the passengers of 828.

Verdict: I’m struggling to remember the last time a show did this much sterling, surprising work with its characters all in one episode. This is one show in no danger of running out of steam anytime soon. 9/10

Greg D. Smith