Tuesday 7 May 2024

Manifest

 
Manifest is described as a "supernatural TV drama"; that sounds right up my street, and it is. It is about a group of people who are passengers on an airliner that disappears in mid-flight... sound familiar? Then it suddenly reappears five and a half years later for reasons not explained up to the point I've been watching it. No time at all has passed for the passengers and crew except the normal duration of the flight. They've effectively gone through a time slip. As a result they have to face numerous problems. During their absence they were presumed dead, and their friends and family have moved on without them. Partners have found new spouses; siblings are much older or younger than each other. Life insurance has to be paid back. The passengers and the people around them have to rebuild their lives. They suffer a lot of media attention and public infamy; not to mention harassment and kidnapping from an intelligence agency and secret government scientists. Some people worship them as deities. However, there is even more; they all find they have extrasensory perception, what they nickname "the callings". These can be useful. One of the characters is a policewoman and she solves several crimes by using her callings. Another is a doctor and her callings give her insight into curing her patients. There are four seasons so far, but I stopped watching it a few episodes into season two because it had lost a lot of the energy that made the first season very good. Source: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt8421350/. The series is clearly inspired by the disappearance of MH370. How close is it to the truth? Do I think MH370 will somehow just reappear in the sky? No. I don't know where the Malaysian Airlines plane is; one day it might be found. Probably in the meantime it will inspire more works of fiction.
See here for background: https://hpanwo.blogspot.com/2024/05/mh370-portal.html.

2 comments:

Gavin said...

Hi Ben. You did well to bail out at this point. It starts off as a great concept and a good watch but it becomes more and more ridiculous as time goes on. Not as bad as 'Lost' but along the same lines. ;)

Gav

PS I watched 'The Man in the High Castle' and 'Utopia' (C4 Original) on your recommendation and thoroughly enjoyed both. ;)

Ben Emlyn-Jones said...

Hi Gav. Those two are both really good, Utopia in particular is packed full of conspiratorial fodder. I must finish Stranger Things at some point. Cheers. Ben