Editor's note: The below contains spoilers for Season 4 Part 1 of Manifest.
The Manifest passengers have been on one wild and miserable ride since flight 828 touched down after being missing for five and a half years, despite no time passing for them in the sky. When the series returns for the first half of the fourth and final season, set two years after Grace (Athena Karkanis) is murdered, things have never quite been so dire. Ben (Josh Dallas) is still enveloped by his grief and search for his kidnapped daughter Eden, whom Angelina (Holly Taylor) took after she stabbed Grace in the abdomen and left her for dead. Michaela (Melissa Roxburgh) is trying to captain the lifeboat and save the passengers, while Saanvi (Parveen Kaur) continues to use science to try to find an answer to beating the impending death date. From there, things fall apart.
Throughout the season, as Ben finds Eden and brings her home, complicated matters involving the passengers spread chaos. Zeke (Matt Long) uses his empathic ability too much, relapsing as he struggles to control the power and the emotions it brings. Cal (Ty Doran) discovers his cancer has come back and he’s on the verge of dying — much sooner than the death date — after a visit with another passenger leaves him with a dragon tattoo on his forearm and the knowledge that he’s meant for something much bigger. The invention of the 828 registry, meant to keep track of the passengers, has created issues for Michaela as her failed attempts to save the passengers keep causing her to be summoned. Saanvi has tried to replicate the Major’s (Elizabeth Marvel) experiments safely, leading her and the others to seek the omega sapphire to bring about unlimited Callings and save the lifeboat from sinking.
But, nothing has quite shaken the passengers quite like the reveal at the end of the ninth episode that their death date is bigger than the passengers. The entire world is at stake if they cannot manage to use their Callings to save it, and that means using the omega sapphire… only it was stolen from Eagan (Ali Sohaili) following him stealing it from Michaela and Saanvi in the boiler room. After that apocalyptic reveal, the finale is one explosive moment after another, filled with revelations and game-changing knowledge, especially as it begins with Angelina holding the omega sapphire in her bloody hand. Let’s break it down.
Grace’s Return From the Dead and Angelina’s Plan
Desperate to find a way to save Cal, Ben receives a Calling in his attic bedroom that takes him by surprise: Grace. Grace is speaking with him, gone for so long, and she says that she knows how to save Cal’s life. The catch? She needs Ben to bring Eden to him, and Ben knows just where to meet her. So, Ben brings Eden to Grace’s gravestone, where he tells her a little about her real mother as Grace reappears in front of them. Grace pleads with Ben that he needs to let Eden go back to Angelina, the only mother she knows. Ben is too smart to fall for the trick, especially as this version of Grace has different eyes than his late wife, turning around to find Eden running to Angelina. Angelina pulls a gun on Ben and demands that he let her leave with Eden, her guardian angel. However, she underestimates the bond that Ben and Eden have. So, when Ben tells her to let Eden choose who she wants to go with, she is stunned when Eden yells that she wants to leave with her daddy. As Ben runs away with Eden, Angelina takes a shot at him and just nearly misses, giving Ben the opportunity to escape.
However, with Angelina having the omega sapphire and being more unstable than ever, Michaela and Ben know they have to stop her and get it back. The Callings lead them to Angelina’s old school where they find her surrounded by pits of lava, praying with the omega sapphire in hand. Michaela finds Angelina’s gun and points it at her, demanding that Angelina stop and let the hostages in the building go, but Angelina has officially lost it. She yells that she is an archangel sent by God to deliver vengeance upon the world, and screams about how much she has gone through and how hard she has had it since the flight returned. This infuriates Michaela, but she’s caught off-guard and drops the gun into the lava when Angelina brings forth a vision of Michaela’s late friend Evie (Simoné Elizabeth Bart) to prey on Michaela’s guilt and heartbreak over her role in her best friend’s death. Shortly after, Angelina begins to have a Calling, Ben and Michaela take the chance to save the innocents trapped in the building and bring them outside. Unfortunately, things just get worse from here.
Olive and TJ’s Grand Discovery
While everyone else is busy with extreme circumstances, TJ (Garrett Wareing) and Olive (Luna Blaise) are cozying up in the attic while trying to find a way to save Cal. Given his connections at the university, TJ manages to bring home the papyrus that depicts the scales of judgment that helped Olive figure out that the Meth Heads and passengers would all be judged equally on their death date. Upon examining the ancient papyrus, Olive and TJ notice the spot where the omega sapphire should be but isn’t. However, TJ reveals that the pigment used for the color blue in ancient times faded over the centuries, so it’s possible that it is there, but they just can’t see it. To do so, they need an infrared lens to look at the papyrus… and it just so happens that Olive has a camera with one hidden away in her things. Once they have the photo, they notice that there are many areas with blue pigment. With Olive’s incredible knowledge of mythology, she notices a pattern and pieces the circles together, revealing the star constellation Draco, the dragon — which is the tattoo that Cal has.
The 828 Registry Changes Everything
With Angelina’s control of the omega sapphire, her connection to each of the other passengers grows. After Ben and Eden run away from her at the graveyard, Angelina screams out — as do the rest of the other passengers, including those at their regular check-in with the 828 registry. Despite Jared (J.R. Ramirez) and Drea (Ellen Tamaki) interfering, they are powerless when the registry takes all of the passengers into custody — a rule they have when a passenger exhibits strange behavior (from the Callings). When the passengers begin to be released, Jared and Drea are stunned once again when the registry quickly changes their mind, taking a passenger into custody indefinitely and leaving his young son with Child Protective Services. When Jared asks what’s happening, a fellow cop informs him that all passengers are to be brought into custody and held for as long as the government sees fit. Later, Drea and Jared watch helplessly as the passengers are herded into a jail cell, confirming Drea’s fear about the passengers being treated like her grandmother was during World War II.
Over at Vance’s secret lair, Saanvi and Vance are forced to destroy everything when they are invaded by the registry. All of their research, the samples that Saanvi has taken, are gone. Both are taken into custody as the culprit behind revealing their secret operation — and the reason for the immediate apprehension of all passengers — is revealed: Dr. Gupta (Mahira Kakkar). Upon earlier learning about the omega sapphire’s power over the passengers, Dr. Gupta felt she had no choice but to stop all of the passengers once Saanvi called her back in to help with their research due to Angelina being in possession of the mystical object.
A Death Date Just for Cal
With his cancer having spread and life on the verge of ending, Cal is hunkered down on a hospital bed in the living room of Zeke and Michaela’s home. Unable to do much of anything, Zeke begins to comfort Cal — just like Cal comforted Zeke back in the second season with Zeke’s death date on the horizon — and the others want nothing more than to do so as well. However, being as versed in the Callings as he is, Cal encourages them to follow them and get out into the world, springing forth the idea that following the Callings could lead to whatever they need to save Cal’s life.
Later, as Angelina faces off against Michaela and Ben with the omega sapphire, Cal’s dragon tattoo begins to move and start glowing, resembling Ben’s hand covered in sapphire after touching the tailfin from the early days of Season 3. Unknowingly, Cal manages to pull Angelina into a Calling of his own, where the two go head-to-head with their supercharged sapphire abilities. Angelina manages to get the upper hand, bringing her version of Grace forth once again to talk Cal down. He starts to fall for it as his beloved mother tells him to stop fighting the cancer, to give up, and to let Angelina continue forward. But, after years of going through the fight against cancer when he was younger, Cal recalls that his mother never once told him to stop fighting and she would never do so now. Cal breaks free of this hold Angelina has on him, grabbing the omega sapphire in their shared Calling, which shatters into pieces both in the Calling and in the real world.
Back in reality, Cal’s condition worsens and he asks Zeke to get everyone before it’s too late. Zeke goes upstairs to get Olive and TJ, but overhears the two talking about how Cal is the only person that can save the world from the foretold apocalypse following their discovery of the dragon connection. After considering for a moment, Zeke comes to a life-altering decision: He’s going to use his empathic abilities to absorb Cal’s cancer, saving Cal and effectively ending his own life. And, that’s what Zeke does, but not before an emotional phone call where he spills his love for Michaela and everything that the life they’ve built together over the last few years has meant to him. Fully believing they’ll be together again one day, Michaela and Ben return home to Zeke dying on the floor. Michaela sobs for her dying husband while Ben and Olive are filled with bittersweet joy at Cal’s miraculous survival.
Before the episode fades to black, Angelina — equipped with the shard of omega sapphire melted into her hand that she grabbed before it melted in the lava — rambles on with Bible verses after surviving certain death yet again, continuing to think she’s sent from God. As we zoom out, pockets of lava have opened all around the city, bringing forth the volcanic apocalypse that the passengers have been seeing through their Callings all season.
Every episode of Manifest is now streaming on Netflix, with Part 2 of Season 4 set to premiere at a date yet to be announced.