After the series got the cancel order from NBC back in June, Manifest fans have been on quite the roller coaster ride. The show’s future seemingly changed with the wind, and there was eery silence about it all for weeks on end. But all of that changed last week as Netflix swooped in at the last minute and saved the show from vanishing into the ether. Not only that, but the streaming service is giving Manifest a whopping 20 episodes to wrap up its fourth and final season.
With a large runway to finish his story, Manifest creator Jeff Rake couldn’t be happier, and he recently sat down for a lengthy interview with Entertainment Weekly where he assured fans that the show is getting the proper ending it deserves. “The endgame won’t change at all,” Rake said before laying out how he’s able to bring the story in for a landing despite initially hoping for six seasons. Via EW:
The good news is I am absolutely confident that 20 episodes gives me enough time to tell the entirety of the story as I always intended to. When I’ve talked in the past about having a roadmap all the way to the end of 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 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.
As Rake also notes, for quite a while, his best-case scenario was maybe a two-hour movie, and the chances of that happening were looking increasingly slim. But with 20 episodes to play with, he now has plenty of time to explain how airline passengers mysteriously disappeared for five years only to return and start growing superpowers. Just whatever you do, don’t say it had something to do with smoke monsters or a time-traveling island that might be Hell. People, apparently, hate that.
(Via Entertainment Weekly)