When Montego Air Flight 828 experiences a brief bout of severe turbulence, the crew and passengers are shaken by the experience, but not as shaken as when they land and are told they’ve been missing for over five years. Now they must try and piece their lives back together, but something other than their experience itself may now link them together.

Manifest has an intriguing premise – a passenger plane full of people simply vanishes, and turns up several years later, but to the people on the plane itself, no additional time has passed at all. Now they must deal with not only the attention they get as a result of their unique circumstances, but piece together lives that the rest of the world had assumed had ended. That means that those who were ‘left behind’ have often moved on, personally and professionally, and wisely, it’s this sort of thing that the show chooses to mostly dwell on.

Seen mainly through the eyes of two of the passengers – brother and sister Michaela and Ben – the show addresses the struggles of each in their reintegration to the world in terms of repairing their personal relationships, from Michaela’s fiancée to Ben’s daughter. There’s a lot to unpack just in that, but then the show decides to add an additional supernatural element – Ben and Michaela haven’t come back into the world unchanged, and what they’ve brought with them is not something that is easily explained or understood. Meanwhile, the authorities conduct predictably intense tests on the plane and everything that was on it, with no real results.

The mix of mundane domestic detail and odd fantastical elements works well – it feels at times like The X-Files at its prime on one of the ‘mystery of the week’ episodes. Melissa Roxburgh as Michaela and Josh Dallas as Ben play well off one another, in the kind of squabbling siblings fashion you’d expect. It also plays well with the conceit of investing us slowly in the characters, teasingly letting out little details that intrigue us to watch further. We know that Michaela is a cop who had some sort of incident just before the holiday she was returning from when she vanished, but we are not clear on what it was. We know that all was not necessarily domestically blissful for Ben and his wife (beyond the obvious of their son – also on the plane with Ben – was dying of cancer) but the show is going to make us wait. On and on, small breadcrumbs are laid, and these combine well with certain links we are beginning to see between the passengers beyond simply their shared plane journey.

The ending, when it comes, is abrupt and explosive, but it definitely invites the audience to watch further. What could have felt like a hackneyed attempt to stretch a concept which other genre shows might have dealt with in one episode into a whole show actually feels like something that could have weight and substance.

Verdict: A quirky idea executed with style and confidence. It’s early but for now, I’m hooked. 8/10

Greg D. Smith