When Manifest wrapped its third season, the cast — including series leads Melissa Roxburgh and Josh Dallas — gathered for a group pic. A general feeling of finality hung in the air, as most of the team suspected NBC would not renew the show. But Roxburgh — not unlike her on-screen character, Montego Air Flight 828 passenger Michaela Stone — had an intuition (or perhaps a “calling”) that this wasn’t the end. “For some strange reason, I just didn’t feel like it was done,” the actor tells Tudum between snaps at our fall preview photoshoot. “I like to think I’m an intuitive person...”
A few months later, in June 2021, Roxburgh sat down to watch Netflix and was surprised to see the first two seasons of her show (which is produced by Warner Bros. Television) streaming on the platform. Having learned that the supernatural drama had indeed been canceled by NBC days earlier, she was intrigued and called the show’s creator, Jeff Rake, to see if he knew more. “I’m like, ‘Turn on your Netflix. We’re on Netflix!’” recalls Roxburgh.
That initial shock soon turned into genuine disbelief as Roxburgh, Rake and the rest of the Manifest gang watched the show’s viewing numbers hit record highs. Seasons 1 and 2 of the drama stayed on Netflix's Top 10 English language TV list for multiple weeks throughout the summer and attracted more than 100 million hours of views globally in July 2021.
“We found this entire new audience,” says Dallas, who plays Ben Stone, Michaela’s brother and one of the passengers who mysteriously disappears (or perhaps dies) for five and a half years only to return unaged and experiencing “callings” from a higher power. “It just started to surge and surge over the days and weeks and the coming months. It just got bigger and bigger. It was a very validating feeling.”
Even though millions of viewers worldwide were devouring the series, its future was still waiting to be claimed — like a suitcase circling on the baggage carousel. Over the summer of 2021, rumors swirled of a possible movie that would tie up the show; fans waged war on Twitter, brandishing the #SaveManifest hashtag; and celebrities — from Kourtney Kardashian to Stephen King — declared their support on social media. Rake did everything he could from joining fan viewing parties and engaging endlessly with Manifesters online to negotiating pickup deals — all to ensure he got to tell the end of his story. “Man, I really went to town because I was hanging on for dear life,” he says. “Twitter was my best friend.” It was a turbulent journey he won’t forget any time soon. “It was an incredible summer,” he says. “It was filled with hope and optimism, but also trepidation.”
When Netflix announced it picked up the show for a fourth and final season on Aug. 28 — 8/28 being a significant number for Manifesters — “it was just euphoric,” says Rake, who also enjoys the parallel between the show’s resurrection and that of its characters. “It’s hard to deny that there’s something kind of divinely inspired about this pickup and that the universe has been looking out for us,” he says. “I’m a man of faith, and I like to believe that what you put out in the world comes back to reward you.”
Though the cast and crew were ecstatic to see the show take flight once more, the on-screen mood isn’t quite as joyous when we pick back up for the 10-episode first half of Season 4, which premieres on Nov. 4. (The final 10 episodes will launch on a later date.) In the Season 3 finale, troubled passenger Angelina (Holly Taylor) murders Ben’s wife, Grace (Athena Karkanis), and kidnaps Ben and Grace’s baby, Eden. “It’s just total devastation for Ben,” says Dallas. Despite a two-year time jump between seasons, Ben’s healing process has made little progress. (He’s also had time to grow what’s known on set as "Ben’s grief beard.”) “He’s left with a profound anger, a void where he’s lost himself,” explains Dallas. “And the thing about anger is that it begs to stick around. It robs you of your beauty, and you end up hurting the people that love you. He really checks out from the people that are still around him — and from the ‘callings.’ He’s done with them. In his mind, they’ve not given him anything.”
But as we know, ignoring the “callings” isn’t really an option. Not only do they physically affect those experiencing them, but not following them can lead to far-reaching and catastrophic consequences. With Ben solely focused on finding his missing daughter and “wandering his own prison of grief,” as Dallas puts it, Michaela finds herself shouldering the responsibility of both passenger and aunt — not to mention still holding down one point of an agonizing love triangle. “She steps in as the parent to everyone,” says Roxburgh. “Because Ben is so zoned in on his own stuff, she takes over that role; her whole thing is making sure that the passengers are safe now.”
Ben isn’t the only one feeling up in the air. After disappearing and reappearing five years older, in the space of one day during the Season 3 finale, Ben’s son, Cal (now played by Ty Doran), is trying to piece together where he went, why he’s aged physically but not psychologically and how he fits into the passengers’ ongoing journey. “He knows where he’s been — fundamentally, he understands,” says Rake. “But the why of it, the details of it, he’s going to have to put that together piecemeal.” And that’s just on the mythological side. “From a psychological place, he blames himself for so much of what happened at the end of last season — and problematically and painfully, his dad sort of blames him as well,” says the creator. Since Cal was the one to let Angelina back into the family home after Grace kicked her out, his return trip comes with some pretty heavy baggage. “Ben can’t help but have this complicated feeling of ‘you did it’ toward his son,” says Dallas. “And that’s really, really rough.”
As always, Manifest will continue to balance the emotional with the mythological, so those who tune in for the supernatural and science-y elements can be sure to see their theories unpacked and questions answered — at a somewhat faster pace than usual. Rake had originally planned for the series to play out over six seasons, but now he has 20 episodes at Netflix to wrap up the storyline. That has presented both a challenge and an opportunity. Going into each season, Rake and his team had “flags in the sand” for what each finale would be, as well as knowing the series’ final destination. “The only real major challenge was figuring out how to take what we thought the fourth and fifth finales would be and combine that into one. But once we got past that, it made the season more event-filled than otherwise,” says the creator. “Sometimes when you have fewer episodes than you thought you would’ve had, the result can be a somewhat less indulgent, less meandering story, and the writers’ room is forced to be a little bit more efficient.”
So will we finally find out where the airplane went when it disappeared? Or if the passengers died and have been resurrected? And whether the actions of one passenger can ruin everything for everyone? “It’s a freight train moving toward that answer,” says Dallas, introducing a different mode of transport metaphor, while Rake promises answers to the overarching, tangled threads. “The underlying thematic message of the show has always surrounded the interconnectedness of all of us, and how small actions of a group of people can have implications that cascade outward and touch the whole world,” he adds. “That’s the story that I set out to tell, and we’re going to continue telling exactly that story.” (Albeit with some “light language” now that the show’s no longer on network TV.)
But fans should buckle up come Nov. 4, because the stakes are about to get even higher. “It’s going to become increasingly clear to the passengers that the ‘callings’ are somehow divinely sourced and this is not just about them,” says Rake. “This is either a gift or a burden — an opportunity to wake up the world and realize that it is all connected and that we all need to be better if we want to keep living in this world.”
Sounds like a good message to take on board.
Season 4, Part 1 of Manifest premieres on Nov. 4.
