Narrowly saved by Netflix for a season 4, which will be the last, Manifest turns out to be a simple, old-school, yet gripping supernatural series.
buffy, Kyle XY, Charmed, The 4400 and so many other series between SF and fantasy marked the Saturday trilogy, a cult show on M6 in the early 2000s. Manifest has been a hit for several weeks on Netflix, we can’t help but feel a hint of nostalgia: it’s a series built in the old fashioned way and, if that brings some flaws, that also gives it all its charm.
Manifest is based on the strange flight 828. When it left Jamaica in 2013 (remember this detail), in the direction of New York, the plane experienced brief, but brutal, turbulence. But in the end, everything recovers quickly to the destination. Upon landing, however, passengers are greeted by the NSA. And for good reason: we are then… in 2019. For five years, flight 828 was missing, the passengers presumed dead, their families in mourning.
They will have to reintegrate into society, under the spotlight and not without some human complications: what to do when your boyfriend is in a relationship with your best friend, because they thought you were dead? But there is worse. The passengers have hallucinations and hear voices, which tell them to go to certain places, to perform certain actions.
A mysterious investigation that never ends and it’s great
The success of Manifest is easily explained: an immense mystery, which seems almost insoluble, has upset the lives of the characters. They don’t have the faintest idea what’s going on, and neither do we – a context that echoes Lost but in an urban configuration. Added to this are supernatural manifestations, which our passengers must follow, again, blindly.
The first two seasons thus work at full speed by plunging us into the midst of total uncertainty, which is therefore captivating. Especially since Manifest resumes the narration of serial : a little like Smallville Where A.k.ashe drops a potential revelation at the end of each episode.
Whether Manifest only held on to that, it could perhaps prove to be boring. Fortunately, there is a second reading track to the story: the adaptation of the characters to a world that has advanced for 5 years without them. These human issues, intertwined with supernatural issues, are the icing on the cake to make us devour the adventures of the characters. The series also has the good taste not to leave us eternally in the dark, since season 3 provides real answers.
Manifest finally benefits from an “old-fashioned” structure, stretched over numerous episodes of 40 minutes, procedural – each episode an investigation related to strange phenomena or the mystery of the plane. This configuration, simple and captivating at the same time, the omnipresence of the supernatural, readily reminds us of the pleasure of leafing through the Saturday trilogy. Even if the 3 seasons are already viewable, we want to make it last, to grab one episode per evening.
Moreover, Netflix understood it well: after the cancellation of the series by NBC, the SVOD service bought the rights and ordered a season 4 of a number that has become unusual: 20 episodes. So there will be a real end to Manifest and until then, we will have all the time not to sulk our pleasure in this series which does not look like much, but proves to be extremely effective. The kind of candy to look at on long warm summer evenings or under a throw in the dead of winter.