Josh Dallas leaves Prince Charming behind and is turning to MANIFEST, a new NBC mystery series also starring Melissa Roxburgh. The series, created by Jeff Rake, revolves around Montego Air Flight 828. On board the plane are Ben Stone (Dallas), his sister Michaela Stone (Roxburgh), and his son Cal Stone. The three of them caught the flight after their other family members headed home on an earlier flight from their family vacation. But somehow, while in the sky, the plane “disappeared” for more than five years and all of the passengers aboard the plane were presumed dead. No time at all had passed for the people aboard the plane, so when they touch down they find out that their family members mourned them and moved on. Now the Stones aboard the plane have to deal with reuniting with the people who moved on from them, as well as deal with the mystery of what happened to them in the air — and why they can sudden hear voices.
“One of the interesting things about the premise of this show is that we tear a couple of relationships apart and then bring them back together in a way that is incredibly complicated, but without moral culpability,” Rake said. “There are two relationships triangles at the center of the show. There is a marriage in which a wife has understandably moved on. There is a broken engagement in which the fiance has understandably moved on. And now everybody comes back together again. No one is to blame and yet it’s incredibly complicated and affections are torn and the heart is pulled in all of these different directions. And as we launch into series, those who had been left behind are dealing with the consequences of a passage of time — having mourned the loss of lovers, of children, [and then] heeled. [They] moved on with their lives, only to have the past come back in their faces. So that’s half the equation. On the other hand those who were on the plane have had no passage of time. For them it’s been a day and so they come home to this incredible shock to the system where the rest of the world has moved on, loved ones had moved on, but their heart and head are in the same place that they were yesterday.”
As we get deeper into the mystery of the show we’ll learn more about the voices that Ben and Michaela hear. Rake exaplained that what these voices are is “at the heart of the mythology of the show. Has what happened to these people stemmed from something supernatural or has it stemmed from something scientific? Has it stemmed from something divine? And the two heroes of the show — Michaela and Ben, brother and sister — represent the two competing points of view: science versus faith. Josh Dallas’s character, Ben, he’s kind of my Richard Dreyfuss from CLOSE ENCOUNTERS — kind of a scientific mind, digging for answers, tenacious, certain that something earth-bound can explain what happened. On the other hand his sister, Mikayla, she’s kind of a lapsed person of faith. Her mother was incredibly religious, her mother has passed away during the interim when she was on the plane. And so she’s grappling with the loss of her mom, and yet can’t help feeling the spirituality that her mother had tried to infuse in her throughout her life. This science versus faith conversation will play out in the series as they try to search for answers. By the end of our first order, halfway through through hopefully season 1, there will be data points that have come forward that seem to support both schools of thought. And that will be an ever-evolving question in the series.”
In general, the mystery of what happened to the plane and the side-effects for the passengers is part of a show with “one ultimate mystery with an end game that will carry us through the seasons,” Rake hinted. “We are not resetting season to season. The show is not an anthology. This will be one series long novelistic event mystery for the audience to follow. But I think of it as having chapters. There’s an endpoint in chapter 1. In fact there’s an endpoint halfway through season 1 around episode 13 that’s going to give us a significant pivot in our mythology. And then by the time we get to the end of season 1 there will be another pivot point, and then by the time we get into season 2 will have blown open our mythology in a significant way. Another interesting component about the show, which I think will be satisfying for viewers, is that even while the show is a serialized mystery and the relationship drama that obviously inches a long week to week, there will be closed-ended missions, if you will, on a week-to-week basis. So the audience will have an opportunity to kind of enjoy a satisfying closed-ended be story if you will each week even while we are following serialized stories elsewhere in the episodes.”
Ben is a “man of science, he’s a mathematician, so he thinks in concrete answers and he wants the truth,” Dallas says about his character. “This is not a perfect family. This is not a perfect marriage. It’s complex like any kind of family dynamic. Families are complex and there’s always things to navigate. Ben is an obsessive mind, he can get very obsessive and forget about everything else that’s around him and that can cause problems, that can cause friction, that can cause resentment and all those kind of things, [but] there’s still love there.”
One of the things that Ben was very obsessive about before the “accident” was his son’s illness. Ben was obsessed with trying to cure his son, even though his diagnosis was terminal. “When they lands there is a cure for his son that was also developed by another passenger that was on the plane so that’s another mystery that we’re going to have to try to figure out — what is that connection? ”
Dallas explained that “this is a story about very ordinary people in very extraordinary circumstances. It’s about hope, it’s about second shances. [Ben] also has a twin daughter who is now 16 years old, [and] he’s missed out on five and a half years of her life. He’s going to have to try to rediscover her. Try to rediscover his wife and try to figure out what his life is now and try to get it back…if he can ever get it back.”
Roxburgh describes her character as “very strong-willed before and after the [plane ride]. She kind of goes to the beat of her own brum. So she’s Ben’s younger sister and she’s kind of always grown up in the shadow of him, so I think because of that she’s learned to just do things herself and be a bit of a rebel that way.” The clip above shows us Michaela reuniting with her former fiancé, Jared. Roxburgh said that “they did work together in the police force. So obviously that will kind of come together again of them interacting at work. It’s really tragic because I think the two characters really love each other a lot. You don’t expect someone to wait around for 5 years so obviously things have moved on but no love is lost between them, which makes it even harder.” And it complicates things that Jared went on to marry Michaela’s best friend, Lourdes, during the five years that he thought Michaela was missing. “It’s going to be the difficult. I mean as one does when your best friend marries your fiancé. But we’ll see. There might be some redemption there,” Roxburgh hinted.
Expect to see flashbacks for all of the characters — “You’re going to see family life before. You’re going to see family life in the middle. You’re just going to get more of the history, more of the story about who these people are and what makes them so emotionally rich,” Dallas said. Roxburgh also hinted that “we get to meet Lourdes and Mikaela in their happier days.”
Finally, both the government and the noterity of what happened on the plane will continue to “haunt” these characters. “There’s a lot of eyes on this family. There’s a lot of eyes on the passengers that were on the plane. There’s an intrigue. This is an extraordinary thing. Are these people somehow ordained? Are they the chosen ones? Is this some sort of Wormhole? Is this spiritual?There’s a lot of eyes on this family from onlookers, from government entities, there’s a lot of stuff going on and Ben’s going to do his best to try to keep his family as safe as possible, which is going to become very difficult,” Dallas said.
MANIFEST premieres on Monday, September 24 at 10/9c on NBC.