As the first half of the final season of Manifest comes to a close, it’s the end of the world as we know it.
🤐 SPOILER ALERT 🤐
With Angelina (Holly Taylor) in possession of the omega sapphire (a gem that can allow the 828ers to receive callings on demand), Ben (Josh Dallas) and Michaela (Melissa Roxburgh) set out to find her… while Cal (Ty Doran) fights to stay alive amid his battle with cancer.
After spending so much time as a surrogate member of the Stone family, Angelina devised the perfect way to hurt them and get baby Eden back. Using the Sapphire, she created a “calling” of deceased Stone matriarch Grace (Athena Karkanis) to manipulate the family.
But even Angelina wasn’t cognizant of how much destruction the sapphire could cause, and her final calling attempt led to fissures all over the ground… and the remaining piece of the jewel embedded in her hand.
Here’s what else you missed in the Manifest midseason finale — and what’s still to come.
More than two years after her death, Ben is shocked to discover Grace in their home. She has a simple request: to bring Eden to her.
Ben brings their daughter to Grace’s gravesite, where he sees his late wife again… only to discover it was a ploy by Angelina, who manipulated his calling via the Sapphire.
The Manifest writers had been plotting how to bring back Grace since they made the hard decision to kill her off in Season 3. Pairing it with Angelina’s new abilities ended up being a natural marriage, given that Angelina was responsible for her death to begin with. “We had been brainstorming increasingly subversive and perverse ways that Angelina might use her abilities to gain advantage over the Stone family and how we might dramatize that in compelling, shocking ways,” Manifest creator Jeff Rake tells Tudum. “It made a lot of sense for us to use the Grace storyline in an Angelina arc.”
After grieving Grace for years, the quasi-reunion is bittersweet for Ben. “It’s wonderful and devastating, all at the same time,” Dallas notes. “She’s there, but she’s not really there. So that was a super emotional day and an emotional scene.” Off-screen, however, it was all positive: “It was amazing having Athena back… I’d missed her so much.”
For Karkanis, she knew she’d enjoy returning to the show she spent three seasons on, but the Season 4 experience “really exceeded my expectations.”
Getting to play Grace through the prism of Angelina’s calling was “fun, because I obviously never played Angelina, so I did have that in the back of my mind,” Karkanis says. “I was trying to play Grace, because Angelina would be playing Grace as best she could, but it was just having that as a layer underneath my performance.”
Angelina’s not-quite-perfect recollection of Grace ended up being her downfall — with Ben realizing her eye color was wrong and, later, Cal realizing his mother would never tell him to give up. But as overt as those changes were, the crew also made a tweak to Karkanis’ costume.
“Grace always wore this sapphire necklace that was like a big square [jewel],” Karkanis shares. “At some point in the story, Olive ends up with it, because her mother’s dead. The wardrobe department had to have another one made [as a backup], and it came back rectangular instead of square. But then they thought, ‘Wouldn’t that be cool if we actually used it, because it is this calling of Grace? It’s just a little bit skewed? I thought it was really cool — and I wonder how many people are going to notice that.”
Karkanis also has praise for Doran, who now plays an older Cal. The duo shared a brief scene together in Season 3 before their reunion in Season 4, but she gushes that he did “an amazing job.” “He’s a lovely, very talented actor,” she says. “It was cool [filming the calling sequence on the plane]. There were effects and the wind machine was going. And despite being on the show for three years, I didn’t really get to play on the plane that much.”
The well-rounded experience is something she treasures now that the show has wrapped for good. “It was really nice to be able to work with Josh and to see Holly [again],” she says. “I also had that flashback scene with Matt [Long’s Zeke]. And to work with Ty — it was a lot of flavor, a lot of different things. I might have been a little disappointed if I just came back for one little quick thing. But I got to actually do some work, which was nice.”
With Cal’s cancer progressing, and it increasingly looking like humanity’s survival depends on him staying alive, Zeke opts to take his young friend’s pain away. He calls Michaela to bid her farewell, keeps Cal alive and perishes in his place.
“Zeke has also been a character, maybe more than any [other] character, that has had complete and utter faith in the callings,” Long previously told Tudum. “He never questioned them when he started getting them, and was always game, had ultimate faith. So it made sense he would not question this new information.”
But for a family that has already been through so much, this is just another loss to absorb. “There’s a lot of grief this entire season,” laments Luna Blaise, who plays Olive. “Zeke dying is something that everyone knows is for a good reason. It’s a humongous loss, but it’s a connection between Zeke and Cal, who have this understanding… [He’s] doing this because ultimately [Cal] knows what [he] needs to do.”
In the aftermath of the sacrifice, “if anything, [Cal]’s even more committed to figuring out why all of this is happening and what’s going on,” Doran says. “It’s survivor’s guilt — why me? Why am I worth it? I don’t think [Cal] would have made that decision if it had been up to him, because that’s a lot to bear. But it was a decision that was made for him, and then he deals with the ramifications of that by just trying to be the best person and help as many people as he possibly can in order to make that ultimate sacrifice worth it, in some way.”
Cal is joined by Zeke’s widow, Michaela, as they “feel they have to carry on Zeke’s journey of empathy so that he didn’t die in vain,” Rake previews. And though Michaela married Zeke thinking their time together was limited — only for him to survive years beyond his death date — the loss will continue to haunt her.
“She really only has Zeke as her main source of home,” Roxburgh says. “When she loses that, it’s not like a ‘death’ and then he comes back again; this time he’s gone. And she knows that. She knows she’s really, truly, on her own, and she’s not prepared for it. She’s okay, but it’s not at all what she wants. You see her really, really missing him for a while.”
And while this fundamentally changes the love triangle, don’t expect Jared and Michaela to instantly reconnect. “He never wished any harm towards Zeke,” J.R. Ramirez notes. “And now that he’s gone, more than anything, he’s just wanting to be there for her. At the end of the day, this man is always going to love this woman. This man, always, at the core, has always wished that him and her would have an easier ride, would have ended up together and happy. But you know, that’s how the story goes. He’s gonna tread cautiously and, more importantly, make sure that [the family] understands that his main focus is to help them figure out what is happening with the death date.”
But because this is Manifest — a show that has frequently shown flashbacks and the inexplicable — Rake teases that fans haven’t seen the last of Zeke on the show: “Anything can happen.”
After losing the omega sapphire, Saanvi and Vance are backstabbed by Dr. Gupta (Mahira Kakkar), who blames them for the catastrophe they find themselves in. Gupta shuts down their research — taking everything the duo wasn’t able to destroy, and leading Saanvi to attempt to attack her former friend.
“I really pushed for that, because I was like, she’s been betrayed twice now,” Kaur says of Saanvi’s raw reaction. “She’s not this person to put herself in these situations where this is happening — this is not her. She is very aware; this is why she is where she got to in her career, being very mindful of who is around her and also being very guarded.”
“So for this to happen to her a second time, I just was like, ‘No, she’s about to risk it all if Vance was not there to hold her back,’” she continues. “That was her intention. That’s how she’s feeling.”
Edwards praises his co-star for setting the tone during the scene. “On that day we shot that scene, [she was] so visceral,” he says. “[She was] very quiet, [saying to herself], ‘I’m gonna go for her. I’m gonna go for her. I’m gonna go for her.’ And I physically restrained [her]… It was wonderful, because it gave me impetus to try to keep [Saanvi] alive.”
Angelina’s quest for power leads to a horrifying reveal: In addition to the world essentially crumbling at her feet, she grabs a shard of the sapphire and it melds to her hand. “I’m really utilizing it and it’s such a point of power and strength for Angelina, because that sapphire is all that she has left,” Taylor previously told Tudum. “It’s always being referenced; it’s always being used.”
In the aftermath of the midseason finale, Angelina is “walking off into the night with trails of volcanic fissures escorting her into the darkness, and it’s terrifying,” Rake admits. “And, somehow, you get the sense that she’s gonna be okay, which is terrifying. Without spoiling the back half, she’s gonna have a good run at maintaining her anonymity, finding allies and followers who believe in her singularity, who believe in her power, especially with her brand-new gain of power… She and [the] sapphire are married to each other, if you will. That’s only going to increase her ability to convince others that she has been chosen and she’s gonna have some pretty good party tricks going forward with what she can do with this hand.”
Which means the days of trying to keep some of the more out-there side effects of the callings, etc., are in the past. “They’re at a point where there’s no way to keep things under wraps,” Edwards says. “Just trying to ward off the pending doom is a monumental task that this handful of people are trying to accomplish for the entire world.”
For the 828ers, “it’s David and Goliath,” Roxburgh says. “Angelina becomes this mightier figure where she’s kind of undefeated. With her new powers [come] really sneaky, horrible traits and abilities. The Stones don’t have an answer as to how to defeat that.”
This means things will get sticky for some familiar faces. “To say that they end up in some close calls — there’s some situations where she wins because she has that ability,” Kaur teases. “It starts ping-ponging [in terms of wins].”
Rake, however, has some sympathy for Angelina. “We can never forget that we found Angelina in a box,” he says. “She was a victim in a very real sense, and as dark a character as she has become, and as she will continue to become, she was a victim of terrible abuse.”
But “she is far from a headspace where she is going to recant or stand down or rethink her actions,” he warns. “If this show is a journey of redemption, she is far from a place of seeking redemption for her actions. She believes what she has done is justified and necessary.”
