Squawk
Episode 5 of Manifest Season 4 starts with Vance showing up at the Stone residence, desperate to find Ben. It’s been 2 hours since they last spoke and he’s gone radio silent. The group work together and manage to hack into Ben’s laptop, using Eden’s birthday as a password, naturally. They quickly realize that Eagan is the key to all of this, so Michaela decides to try and rustle the information out of him. When she arrives at the prison, he has a note for Michaela, telling her he’s not about to play ball. Meanwhile, Jared follows up his investigation into the fertilizer that started last episode, where he stumbles upon Erika and Adrian’s compound. Unbeknownst to him, Ben is actually being kept captive there. He doesn’t find much, but Eden heads down to the basement where she finds Ben tied up. He tries to call out for Eden, but Angelina shows and immediately calls out Ben as a bad man, hugging the little girl in front of him and referring to herself as “mummy.” Understandably, Ben is not happy and remembers Grace’s words never to give up, which echo through him. Thankfully, he’s dropped off a sandwich by one of Adrian’s comrades and with the plate left behind, he smashes it up and uses the pieces to cut his binds. Saanvi deduces whether this ULF is actually a frequency being used by a higher power, linking it into this whole Divine Consciousness concept. While it’s not working for her per-se, upon learning that Cal had a Calling about bright lights, she believes that they need to put him in the MRI machine instead as he could be the key. Meanwhile, Michaela has a Calling of her own involving honeybees and realizes that this is linked to where Ben is being held. Jared was right there and failed to find anything earlier in the episode, but he returns with Zeke and Michaela to scout the place out. Inside, it’s anything but paradise as Adrian is under pressure to get rid of Angelina. The latter overhears this of course, and decides to take action. In fact, she sets up a bomb to blow the place up, and with a detonator in her hand, she intends to hold all of them to account. She claims it’s their “judgment day”. With the whole group on the floor, Angelina calls out Adrian for promising to protect her and failing to do so. She calls Eden her guardian angel, typified by how she almost jumped off that bridge in the past but Eden called out “mama” and stopped her. Erika stands by Angelina’s side through all of this, silently watching while gripping her gun, while Cal decides to head in alone and talk Angelina out of detonating the bomb. While they’re distracted, they manage to reconvene with Ben, who confirms Eden is in a room upstairs. As for Cal, he manages to wrestle with Angelina inside, giving everyone enough time to escape – including Ben with Eden. The explosion rocks the building but Cal is absolutely fine and completely unharmed (hey, its the nightclub fire all over again!) but it seems like Angelina was not so lucky. Erika survives too and heads out with her gun, pointing it at Michaela. Zeke suddenly turns and shoots her dead, while the group head back home again, having finally got Eden back. To the surprise of very few, it turns out Angelina did not die after all. She inexplicably shows up on the road, and Adrian scoops her up, deciding to help her in the car, telling her that she was right all along.
The Episode Review
So the midway point of Manifest sees the whole Eden saga come to a close, with Angelina’s threat thwarted but Adrian deciding to stick around and help her after all, now believing in her Calling. At the same time, we have a big explosion and it was obvious that no one would die, wasn’t it? We’ve had that exact same trick thrown at us in earlier seasons and everyone survived, so obviously no one was going to bite the bullet here. Although we do get a bit more of an update surrounding what al these clues mean, it seems like the later episodes are the ones that are really going to dive into this.
