Manifest Review: Unclaimed Baggage (Season 1 Episode 4)
Manifest Season 1 Episode 4, “Unclaimed Baggage,” continues the series’ unimpressive streak of episodes with a pretty uneventful narrative, which begs the question: Will the show be able to retain its audience?
The story doesn’t really press forward in any engaging way this time around, even though we’re already four episodes in. It keeps going at its old tricks: the voices in the characters’ heads, the same old worries on the line.
Even so, the special abilities plot (which, admittedly, seems to be the entire story at the moment) is starting to wear itself out. We’re getting no hints at what’s to come other than these mysterious occurrences — and we get it! They have strange abilities!
It’s also running counter to the subplots of Ben’s attempts at settling back in with his family. His more personal, family-oriented story is intriguing, but it’s also providing us with little to no insight into how it fits in with the main story.
Ultimately, I believe the personal stories are the more interesting ones, and the show is leaning into that. However, it remains counterproductive when the show continues to place a bizarre emphasis on the characters’ abilities, even when it’s just episode after episode of it.
For me, episodic shows of this form are most effective when each episode has a small mystery or mission of its own in the beginning episodes, but they have to also contribute to the main question at hand.
Right now, Manifest has the first qualification, but it has yet to actually reveal each episodic connection to the main mystery: What really happened to MA828?
I’m just asking for any tidbit at all — any. I’m begging for it, actually, because it’s getting tiring to see each episode progress without any series-geared motivation.
The show also isn’t leaving that many plants to pay off in the future. The statue might be one clue, but each episodic mystery has essentially been solved within each contained story, so there’s nothing left for us to speculate about.
At this point, I would expect myself to have some sort of guess about what happened, but we’ve gotten barely any background into how much this show is rooted in reality or how much the abilities are playing into supernatural contexts.
I haven’t been able to define the world of the series well enough to even make a remotely educated guess about the larger mystery at hand, which is extremely off-putting.
The family drama is what’s actually keeping me into the show, even if it carries little weight overall.
As an aside, each episode title grows increasingly ironic. I appreciate the plane and aviation puns — “Turbulence” was ultimately a particularly, well, turbulent episode, and not in a good way — but this episode is perhaps the most ironic thus far.
The show certainly does have some “unclaimed baggage” that it needs to take care of — it dropped the mystery of MA828 at our feet and never picked it up again.
What did you think of this episode of Manifest? Share your thoughts in the comments below!
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Manifest airs Mondays at 10/9c on NBC.
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Olivia Popp
Olivia Popp is a freelance writer, artist, and entertainment fanatic who started living and breathing television ever since her parents told her in elementary school that it would rot her brain. Now, she's a film student and TV apologist with a penchant for providing forceful and unsolicited series recommendations to anyone within earshot. Ask her about science fiction, comedy, nature photography, filmmaking, tasty cheese, or even more television.