![]() But remember on Manifest, just because somebody dies doesn't necessarily mean that's the end of the story. Minor spoiler alert, the Zeke/Michaela/Jared (J. R. Yeah, that was something that was always going to happen. Zeke! How dare you!? Was his sacrifice for Cal always a fait accompli? Hopefully, we've managed to keep the show feeling grounded, even though the stakes are that high. But we wanted to keep it on a more grounded terrain. That's not what the show is, even though the stakes, arguably, are at that level. This is not intended to be a Marvel movie. And that's so big, it's almost impossible to tell those stories. But, again, it's kind of hard to get your head around Ben and Michaela saving the world. Now, in a sense, metaphorically, the lifeboat is kind of about the lifeboat of humanity. And when we talk about the lifeboat, we've always talked about that in the context of the Flight 828 passengers. We've always talked about Ben and Michaela (Melissa Roxburgh) being the co-captains of the lifeboat. ![]() How do Ben and Michaela function in that scenario? The Stone family is among the community of them. For reasons that I'm not going to totally reveal right now, we shift in that final block so that we spend much more of our time with all of the passengers as a group. The final block is much more focused on the community of the 828ers. In block one, we're still very much focused on the family and spend our time at the Stone house when we're not out solving the case of the week. What you'll discover when you get to the final block is that we shift our storytelling. Will Part II of Season 4 continue following the 828ers or will it bloom into a global story? I think we've successfully threaded that needle. And so that was the happy medium that we always contemplated, to have global stakes and yet always tell the stories through the characters that we know and love. We always figured we could thread the needles by keeping the story focused on the family. It's just hard to swallow and digest making things so humongous. But we were always a little bit nervous about that idea: "save the passengers, save the world." Once the stakes become so vast and it becomes about the world itself, it can become so big that it becomes about nothing at all. It was in my pitch way back at the beginning when I pitched the series originally. It had been contemplated from the very beginning. Speaking of Episode 9, "Rendez-vous" reveals that the death date is no longer just an 828 harbinger but a problem for all of humanity. By the time we get to, you're caught up on everything. It was a bit of a gamble because you're kind of in the dark on certain characters for a number of episodes. And yet, not feel like we missed anything. The combination allowed us to jump a lot closer to the death date, which allowed us to build the stakes because we're getting a lot closer. We tried to build those flashbacks such that every major character kind of got their own. And almost in the next breath, we settled on the flashback format, so that in this block of 10 episodes, there'd be key flashbacks that catch us up on the story. How did that change your crafting of this block of episodes? Going back to the start of Part I, you open with a two-year time jump which is very out of the norm for this series. Everything else built around that, and you'll see what that means going forward. We thought that was most important to get out of with our mid-season out. ![]() Both of those are mythological and of course, Zeke and Cal are both deeply emotional. Ben (Josh Dallas) doesn't know and thinks she's gone. We ended up deciding that the most important things that we wanted to finish on was Zeke's (Matt Long) passing, Cal (Ty Doran) surviving, and, of course, Angelina (Holly Taylor) surviving but letting only the audience in on that. How much of this was planned from the start? Let's start with what you knew you were heading towards, story-wise, as you constructed the Season 4 midseason cliffhanger episode. ***Spoilers below for Manifest Season 4, Part I below***
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