Warning: Spoilers ahead for ‘Manifest’ on Netflix.
Jeff Rake, the creator of Netflix’s Manifest, has given fans a taste of what to expect from the first half of season 4, which is set to premiere on Netflix on November 4th. News of the series’ renewal for its final seasons comes after its apparent cancellation by NBC last year, followed by Netflix picking up the show for a 20-episode season.
First premiering on NBC in 2018, Manifest is a supernatural drama series that centers around the passengers of Montego Flight 828, a seemingly normal flight between Jamaica and New York piloted by Captain Bill Daly (Frank Deal). After they disembark in New York, the plane’s passengers expect to be welcomed home with open arms, but they find that time has progressed five years while they were in the air, with their loved ones thinking their flight had gone missing and the passengers were all dead.
Now on the ground and in a world that’s moved five years beyond anything they knew, Flight 828’s passengers, which include detective Michaela Stone (Melissa Roxburgh), her brother Ben Stone (Josh Dallas), Angelina Meyer (Holly Taylor), and Dr. Saanvi Bahl (Parveen Kaur) struggle to deal with their loved ones having moved on from their “deaths,” the NSA investigation into their disappearances, and the strange voices and visions that some passengers are receiving.
Manifest was canceled on NBC after three seasons in June 2021, but show creator Jeff Rake – who had initially pitched the show with a six-season layout – and the show’s cast held out hope that the show would be moved to another platform. The first two seasons of Manifest had reached Netflix’s #3 spot, leading to the show being picked up for a final season by the streaming service in August 2021, just two months after the cancellation.
Regarding the renewal, Josh Dallas told ABC News that “It would have been cruel to leave these characters hanging the way they were at the end of season three and cruel for the fans of the show. It’s enormously satisfying to be able to complete their journeys.”
‘Manifest’ Creator Jeff Rake Hints at Netflix’s Season 4
With the first ten episodes of Manifest set to release on Netflix on November 4th, Jeff Rake sat down in an interview with Deadline to give fans a taste of what to expect from the last season. One of the biggest things fans can know to expect from Manifest season 4 is that the show’s plot will take a two-year time jump to the passenger’s “death date” in 2024, which Rake explains was chosen because initially, it would have been six years after the start of the show.
“The hardest thing to do that we discovered from season one was to move the story calendar forward,” he told Deadline. “We forever wanted to create these big cliffhangers at the end of a season. And then it turned out that these cliffhangers almost always wanted to be answered with immediacy. And so the problem was you’d want to answer the cliffhanger, like the next day. So it proved really challenging to move the ball closer and closer to the death date six years later.”
In discussing the plot of season 4, Jeff Rake has answered questions about how the season 3 cliffhanger, with Angelina killing Ben’s wife Grace (Athena Karkaris) and kidnapping Eden, Ben and Grace’s infant daughter, will be resolved in season 4. Rake has also confirmed that fans will not find out where the plane disappeared to at the end of season 3, but “that won’t be the last we see the plane.” Rake has also confirmed that fans will find out where Cal (Ty Doran), Ben and Grace’s son and another passenger on Flight 828, disappeared to, as well as where Captain Daly, the flight’s pilot, has been.
When asked whether or not Manifest season 4 on Netflix would mean a happy ending for the show’s cast and creators, Rake told Deadline the following:
“It’s like a happy ending. Twenty episodes turned out to be plenty for us to tell our complete story. We’re telling the same story we were always planning to tell. It’s just a little more concise, a little more packed. Each episode is a little bit more packed with information, which I think is a win for the audience. It just makes each episode more dense with excitement and action and relationship stories and mythology. It’s been incredibly exciting and gratifying.”
Season 4 of Manifest will premiere with ten episodes on November 4th, 2022. Seasons 1-3 are currently available for streaming on Netflix.