Michaela gets some devastating news. Ben teams up with a gifted but elusive 828 passenger to answer a calling. Olive and Angelina explore ancient mythology to try to find a clue to help the passengers.

It’s getting increasingly difficult to see what the writers of Manifest are up to with this season. There’s so much going on, and it feels so disparate and scattershot, that it’s difficult to escape the notion they’re just throwing everything at the wall in the hope something will stick.

This week, Ben has a vivid calling involving a young man and then through an extremely convoluted series of events ends up teaming up with a passenger he’s never spoken to before in order to save the day. There’s nothing wrong with this subplot per se, beyond it being not really all that much different to what we have seen a lot already in the show, and I get that the point of it is to highlight the new passenger but even his apparent trajectory doesn’t seem all that different to what we’ve already done with the show before.

Michaela’s pursuit of the Meth Heads is interrupted by a tragic bit of news delivered to her apparently via a calling. This subplot seems to be signalling all sorts of different potential things going forward, and doesn’t really give many hints as to which – if any – it might decide to settle upon. I will say that despite being now ‘Calling Free’, Zeke seems to have basically become a waking McGuffin, his only real purpose to try to advance bits of the plot where the writers seem out of other ideas of how to do so, and nowhere is that more evident than here.

Olive and Angelina find themselves sent to the university to investigate some artefacts sent back by AJ from Egypt which may hold clues to the whole mystery. Except they really don’t, other than the really obvious one, which doesn’t seem to be enough. Props to the poor actor left playing ‘Exposition Guy’ in these scenes – he does the best with what he’s given.

And then there’s Vance, whose extraction from Cuba gets entirely skipped over so we can concentrate on the far more interesting scenes of… him being interrogated in a dark room by his former employers. This might be a little more compelling if it was in any way clear what it is they want or expect to achieve from this.

Throw in Olive and her half brother having another bit of squabbling for the sake of it so they can make up again and it’s all just very dull and pedestrian. It feels listless, as if it’s run out of ideas but needs to keep soldiering on anyway, and that’s a shame, given what it’s done in the past.

Verdict: Still waiting for this one to take off. 4/10

Greg D. Smith