Manifest ending after explaining how passengers disappeared

Manifest has finally explained why the passengers on Flight 828 disappeared.

Warning, this article contains spoilers!

Netflix has now dropped the final batch of episodes for Manifest season four (and the series as a whole).

The supernatural drama chronicles the lives of aeroplane passengers whose flight mysteriously vanished. Flight 828 is declared missing for over five years before it suddenly reappears in the sky.

For the passengers, no time has passed and they have no idea where they’ve been for the last five years. As they attempt to reintegrate into society, some of them develop special abilities, as well as hearing guiding voices and visions of events yet to occur. The mystery of their disappearance and newfound abilities pushes them to investigate what happened to their flight and why they were chosen.

The passengers on the journey understood since the season four, part one, ending that their journey was directly linked to the apocalypse. However, why it was them in particular wasn’t clear.

Now, in part two of the season, it appears there were no divine plan behind the plans of those who disappear instead revealing they were random in nature with Michaela saying they were just a “bunch of random people, some good, some bad.” While Saanvi said they were a “statistical sample for a divine experiment.”

As noted on Screen Rant, a “statistical sample” that combined the good and the bad meant the passengers were the best hope of “determining the fate of humanity” because this was the best representation of the human race.

The official synopsis for season four part two reads: “In the aftermath of Angelina unleashing a devastating volcanic fissure, the passengers face severe scrutiny in a world fuelled by 828er hate, no longer free to solve their own Callings without constant supervision by the unscrupulous 828 Registry.”

Originally airing on NBC for three seasons, Manifest made the jump to Netflix for a fourth and final season, with the first part being released on the streamer back in November 2022.

Series creator and showrunner Jeff Rake initially planned to make six seasons of Manifest, and despite that expectation being cut short, he previously said that “the series’ endgame won’t change at all”.

Speaking to Entertainment Weekly after the series was saved by Netflix, he said: “When I’ve talked in the past about having a roadmap all the way to the end of the series, that didn’t mean that I had a roadmap for literally every single episode.

“I have a roadmap with a series of twists and turns and flags in the sand that we would ultimately hit in order to tell the core stories within our mythology and within our relationship drama. So it will not be a particularly difficult exercise to overlay that same exact roadmap onto 20 episodes. It will be quite organic.”