Many of us had been sticking around till the end of Manifest to find a concrete resolution for all the scientific questions, but alas, there was none. The characters get the much-needed closure, but the creators resolved the disappearance of Flight No. 828 quite conveniently. Or maybe it was never meant to happen the way we all had imagined. After watching four seasons, we can definitely say that Manifest has never been a sci-fi thriller but, more appropriately, a family melodrama. It was a long and overstretched journey for the characters to learn their lessons and relieve some of their burdens. Those who were able to accept those virtues gracefully survived in the end, and those who didn’t, met their eventual fate. So, let’s look into the important events of Part 2 of Manifest Season 4 and find out how most of the 828ers survived the Death Date.
Spoilers Alert
What Happens in Part 2 of Manifest Season 4?
Some eighteen months have passed since the events of Manifest Season 4, Part 1. Previously, Angelina Meyer had caused a tristate fissure event using the Omega Sapphire that led to the deaths of seven hundred innocent souls. The general public blamed the 828ers for the loss and destruction, and the government was forced to take action against them. The NSA locked them in an 828 Detention Center in the middle of New York City, where they were constantly monitored for their callings. Angelina, on the other hand, is still on the run, along with a few other 828ers who don’t want to give away their freedom.
A majority of the events take place inside the detention center, where Ben, Mick, and Saanvi try to help the passengers solve their callings. Mick is still struggling with her relationship with Jared after Zeke’s death. She keeps getting visions of Zeke communicating with her from the realm of divine consciousness, trying to help her move on with her life on Earth. Meanwhile, Ben struggles to be a good parent, as always. We also witness his romantic inclination towards Saanvi, who likes him too, as she had already confessed the same during her therapy sessions with the Major.
In the meantime, Olive and Cal are living in their family house, where they try to solve the mystery of the dragon scar, which starts glowing again as the second part begins. There’s an ongoing conflict between Cal and Angelina: one being the foretold savior and another, the foe. We also saw the return of Captain Daly and Fiona Clark, along with the restructured 828 flight. As we already know, Manifest has been borrowing a lot of its narrative from religious texts and mythologies; in Part 2, it depicted Daly and Fiona as agents of doom sent by God to bring on the end of times. With such biblical references, Angelina’s religious instincts kicked in, and as delusional as she had been, she started believing that she had to kill these two witnesses to assist God’s work. She used the powers of the Omega Sapphire to project herself as a different individual and manipulate people around her to kill Daly and Fiona.
Fortunately, Jared arrested Angelina and brought her back to the detention facility. Ben, who was hell-bent on taking his revenge on Angelina for killing Grace, tried to inject Angelina with Saanvi’s formula that would stop her callings. However, Angelina used the powers of Omega Sapphire to transfer the serum to all the passengers, after which each one of them stopped having any callings except for Cal. From hereon, Manifest took some major time jumps while Cal used his dragon power to get back the callings of the other passengers, which they kept solving until the Death Date arrived.
What Was The Significance Of The Symbols?
Throughout these four seasons, Ben Stone had been telling us that the mistake of one person would sink the entire lifeboat, yet he was so consumed by vengeance that he injected Angelina with an artificial serum to get rid of her powers. His plan of action backfired, and more fissures appeared in New York City, after which Director Zimmer initiated the isolation protocol and locked the 828 passengers in there to die.
Conveniently, Drea Mikami, who was pregnant with Jared’s daughter, owned a block near the isolation facility and had been drilling a hole to help the passengers. The tunnel helped Ben and others roam freely, and even Cal was able to team up with Olive and others to solve the mysteries. As the twins reunited, they started investigating all the mythological symbols that they had gathered so far. The important symbols among the lot were the peacock with the sapphire, the Gemini Twins, and the dragon. Earlier, these symbols had helped them ascertain the Death Date; however, upon further scrutiny, they found out that these symbols were telling them the location of another lost Omega sapphire, the piece of Noah’s arc that Saanvi had thrown in the fissure in the previous season. Without further delay, they packed their bags and went to set up camp near Storm King Mountain, where the driftwood was buried. An important point to note here is that Cal only had to find the second lost sapphire because Angelina refused to team up with him, and Cal needed two Omega sapphires to fulfill the calling.
How Did Most Of The Passengers Survive In The End?
The fissure near the campsite coincidentally looked similar to Cal’s dragon scar, and as soon as he saw it, he knew that he had to do his part. Zeke had sacrificed himself to give Cal a third life, and it was Cal’s turn to sacrifice himself to save the lives of 191 passengers. At night, Cal established a connection with the sapphire on the driftwood that emitted a long, delirious, burning blue into the sky, visible to all the 828ers. The following day, all the passengers arrived at the campsite for the final judgment.
As the Death Date was about to end, Montego Air 828 erupted from the ground below, and Ben Stone knew that it was time for them to board the flight one last time. The flight was symbolic of Ma’at’s Scales of Judgment, where the hearts of the passengers are weighed against Ma’at’s feather to ascertain whether they deserve a second chance or not. All the callings that took place in the Manifest Universe were a test of a person’s heart to see whether they were able to shed their burden of guilt or not. Any kind of evil or malice against any person or creature burdened one’s heart, while the act of sacrifice or forgiveness helped them get rid of it. Let’s look at a few passengers and understand why and how they survived the Death Date.
- Ben Stone: As mentioned previously, Ben was so consumed by revenge that he forgot that, deep down, he wasn’t a person who could hurt anyone. He had been carrying that burden in his heart throughout Manifest Season 4, and his ultimate act of redemption was to forgive Angelina. At the end of Part 2, Ben was again given the choice to do the right thing. Every passenger had boarded the flight except for Angelina, who was wounded and was unable to move herself. Ben finally made the right decision and carried Angelina in his arms, exactly the way it was depicted in Al-Zuras’s journal. Ben learned an important lesson: forgiveness lightens the heart, and it was the same moral path that every other passenger had to follow.
- Paul Santino: Inside the airplane, the passengers witnessed an erupting volcano, which, in my opinion, was a symbol of Hell. Again, as per the mythologies, the souls of dead people are judged as to whether they deserve Hell or Heaven. Here, the flight no. 828 could also be depicted as Charon’s boat carrying the souls of passengers. There are many such instances in different mythological scriptures, but in the Manifest Universe, the judgment was all about whether a person deserved to get a second chance or not. As far as I remember, passenger Paul Santino had been assaulting his wife before flight no. 828 disappeared, which is why his wife begged Mick not to reveal her location to her husband after the plane returned. Paul, like all other passengers, had some 5 years to make amends for the previous actions, but even so, Paul chose to team up with the likes of Angelina, and hence, in the end, his body was burned into ashes.
- Autumn Cox: Like Paul, Autumn, too, had a pretty shady life before the plane disappeared, and after its return, Ben tried to help Autumn start over, but in the end, she made the decision to stay with Angelina. She even tried to poison a fellow passenger, and the guilt burdened her heart further. She was burned into ashes because she didn’t deserve a second chance.
- Eagan Tehrani and Adrian: Both of these men had committed a bunch of crimes throughout the four seasons but ultimately understood the path of redemption and tried to unburden themselves as much as they could. Adrian disappeared for a major part of season 4, as he told Eagan that he was seeking forgiveness from people that he had wronged. Inside the plane, Eagan, like a true friend, decided to give his life to save Adrian, and his act of selflessness saved his soul too.
- Saanvi Bahl: She had accidentally poisoned Kathryn Fitz while trying to get some secret intel from her and later blamed herself for Kathryn’s murder. She had been carrying the guilt all along and had spent a lot of sleepless nights thinking about it. Saanvi believed that she deserved to die, but Ben helped her realize that it wasn’t her fault as she was just trying to help the passengers while the Major, on the other hand, had been experimenting on them inhumanely. Ben also reminded her of how she had saved so many lives, including his son, Cal. Finally, Saanvi was able to forgive herself for Kathryn’s murder, which perhaps saved her from the ultimate judgment.
- Angelina Meyer: Well, she deserved to die. I mean, even in the end, she called herself an archangel and wasn’t ready to give in or seek forgiveness. So, no one could have saved her. Not even Ma’at or God.
In the end, the souls of these dead passengers collectively formed a dark, grim reaper kind of shadow that came for the surviving passengers, resembling the fate of the meth-head brothers. Ben Stone had earlier concluded that their lives were interconnected, which meant that the death or judgment of one would lead to the death of everyone else. But the passengers appealed to the grim reaper with a chant of their good deeds, which probably made it realize that it had been coming after the wrong people, and hence, the shadow disappeared into thin air. It was not a very satisfying ending, but the creators tried their best to tie up all the loose ends. The grim reaper part wasn’t needed, but because they had earlier established the fact that all lives were connected, they might have felt it necessary to give it an appropriate closure.
Manifest Season 4 Ending
As the process of judgment ended and the apocalypse was evaded, Amuta saw a Glowing portal in the sky, just like the one he had witnessed on the day of the plane’s disappearance. Mick asked him to fly straight into the Glow, and in the blink of an eye, they were back at JFK airport. However, the most interesting aspect of the comeback was that they arrived in the 2013 timeline. All the passengers were young again, but the memories of the last five and a half years stayed with them, which suggests that they retained the emotional maturity but avoided the physical one. Quite a treat. The passengers who were killed unnaturally in these five years also got their lives back and walked safely and soundly out of the flight. The only people who didn’t return were those 11 souls who were judged for their actions and found guilty. They just disappeared from the flight, and Vance will probably scratch his head trying to find out what exactly happened to them.
Meaning Of Manifest Season 4 Ending
The entire journey could be called a lot of things: a mass delusion, a simulation of reality, or an act of God, but if we look at it from a very layman’s perspective, then none of these technical terms really matter. Manifest was never about these scientific discoveries. They tried to call the disappearance of 828 a scientific phenomenon and explored it extensively through that lens. But ended up calling it a miracle to wrap up things in a convenient manner. However, from a philosophical perspective, the entire narrative could be seen as a journey to redeem oneself. Nothing more, nothing less. All the passengers learned some really heavy life lessons that are going to change their present and future. These lessons are going to help them make better decisions in life so that they can keep their close ones closer. Many of them have taken their spouses, relatives, and families for granted, but after such an adventurous and tragic journey, they are surely going to become a better version of themselves. Also, if it was really the possible future that they had experienced, then in the present timeline, they could accurately predict the upcoming events and become fortune tellers or gamblers, whatever suits their ecstasy.
As for Ben Stone, he is able to bridge the gap between him and his wife, Grace, because he has once experienced the pain of losing her and, therefore, will do anything in his power to not lose her again. Most passengers have lived five years into the future and seen how their actions ruined their relationships. Such “divine” knowledge will help them make amends and avoid mistakes. Ben, for example, can help Grace mend her relationship with her younger brother (whom we had seen in the previous season). Additionally, before the plane disappeared, Ben and Grace were struggling to find a cure for Cal’s cancer, but through this journey, Ben met Saanvi, whose cell-regeneration model is going to do wonders for pediatric cancer treatment. So yes, Cal’s leukemia will be back again, but this time, Ben will have Saanvi to help his family out, and maybe she will even do it for free. I mean, he took a second flight to save $400 for the therapy, so yes, money is an important factor here. Also, a pre-teen Cal doesn’t have any memories of the entire journey, the reason for which hasn’t been explained at the end of the series. It is important to note that Cal was the only kid on the airplane, so maybe the divine consciousness wanted to return his childhood to him, and that gave him a chance to grow up without such a burden. Well, that’s the most logical explanation we can come up with right now.
Another important redemption arc is that of Mick, who finally gets enough time to scrutinize her relationship with Jared. Mick realized that Jared had been a loyal boyfriend, but he had proposed to her just to ease her pain of losing her best friend, Evie, who had died in a car crash when Mick was behind the wheel. Mick had blamed herself for Evie’s death, but these five years helped her overcome the guilt. A hero back from the journey, Mick was certain that she didn’t want to start a relationship that was based on pity. Mick finally returned Jared’s ring and hinted that Jared was soon going to find the right person for him. Yes, it’s Drea Mikami, not the rookie cop anymore. They finally meet near the airport entrance, and their conversation hints at a possible love story between them. We are certain that in the present timeline, Drea will give birth to Jared’s daughter, Hope.
As for Mick, well, Zeke Landon had already told her from the Glow (divine consciousness) that, in real life, there had been multiple “almost” run-ins between them. Zeke had told her that he was at JFK waiting for the passengers in his taxi when 828 disappeared. During Manifest’s ending, Mick remembered this conversation with him and went straight to the airport pickup lane where Zeke, young and alive, was sitting in his taxi. And yes, this time, she didn’t waste a moment calling her “husband” because that’s how love stories start. So, the love wagon disappeared into the night sky, and everything will be happy ever after. The real world has already forgotten about the disappearance of Flight No. 828, and the passengers will cherish the memories as long as they live. We can also speculate on an 828-reunion film soon enough because why not? Anything is possible in the Manifest Universe. But for now, this is how their story ends.
