There have been a few notable yet not earth-shaking character deaths, a storyline where the secret to finding an illegal stowaway from the flight lies in Tony Kushner’s “Angels in America,” and plenty of attempts to try to explain what happened to the passengers using science. And they’re just one random element in play here.

The “callings” occasionally advance both character-related stories as well as the plot, but drive a lot more of the storytelling than they probably ought to. 'My Best Friend's Exorcism' Review: Self-Possessed Elsie Fisher Is Best Part of Uneven '80s Horror-ComedyĮarly Best Picture Prospects Include 'Top Gun: Maverick' and 'The Fabelmans'Ĥ2 Great Films That Failed at the Box Office 'Till' Review: An American Horror Story, Told Too Cautiously “It’s our own shorthand,” as one of them explains the term. And it’s interesting to see the nascent beginnings of a show trying to define its own unique mythology on the ground, most notably with the introduction of evil corporation Unified Dynamic Systems (gotta have an evil corporation) and the concept of “the callings” - otherwise known as the voices heard by Flight 828 passengers, pushing them to do strange but narratively important coincidences. It’s not that nothing has happened on “Manifest” over the past few weeks - sister and brother Michaela (Melissa Roxburgh) and Ben (Josh Dallas) have worked steadily to try to figure out not just what caused their disappearance, but what the consequences of that disappearance mean for their return to the modern world.

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