(Some spoilers for Manifest).
When MANIFEST launched in 2018 it looked promising. Five years after Flight 828 vanished on its return from the Caribbean, it arrives in New York with nobody on board aware how long they’ve been gone. What happened? Why do they have these mysterious impulses that steer them to help people in need? 
While the cast was good, the show lost me as it went through the next two seasons (as I discussed in my review of S2). Apparently I wasn’t alone as NBC axed the show after S3. Netflix picked it up and I slowly worked my way through the final season.
Certainly I can’t fault their ambition. Having established in S3 that flight 828 is somehow connected with Noah’s ark, they go full-on cosmic/religious in S4: the passengers time is running out and when they die it will bring on an apocalypse. The murderous Angelina (Holly Taylor) believes she’s been chosen as a messiah who will save a small, elect crew; others hope that working together they can save the world entire. Volcanoes erupt under New York. In the final episode one of them coughs up the supposedly destroyed plane the passengers vanished on, everyone boards and while some (most notably Angelina) die, the rest survive to land … five years earlier, exactly when they were supposed to. God has tested them and now they get their lives back as a reward for …. well, I’ve no idea. As with Doonby, I have no idea why God’s supposed to have done this shit; the ending narration specifically says they’ll never understand it themselves. I could rationalize something if I cared but I don’t care that much. “There is no point trying to stop a volcano if the divine doesn’t want it stopped.” 
My friend Ross sent me the second season of THE TICK a while back but I only just finished it up. If anything, loonier than the first season, a complete loonie fest in which the Tick battles alongside Leonardo da Vinci, faces the world’s comfiest chair, deals with supervillain family dynamics and helps save Christmas. As with S1 this set misses one episode and S3 is nowhere to be found. But I’m grateful for what I do have because this is some gloriously funny stuff. “He’s acknowledged the decoration committee — and now he’s thanking his parents!”
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