Manifest - Contrails - Review: "Wings"

It's a bird, it's a plane, it's ... Captain Daly kidnapping a woman and stealing a plane to look for lightning to time travel through. Oh, boy. In my favorite episode of the season, we found our Flight 828 passengers (and captain) facing all kinds of turbulence, both simulated and real.

Lightning Storms

For the first time, we get the incident as it happened through the eyes of Captain Daly. We see a sudden lightning strike hit the plane. Trying to get through the storm, he made some shady maneuvers to get through it. His co-pilot Captain Vance tells federal agents afterward that the way he flew the plane is the only odd thing they noticed during this storm, and think he's to blame for whatever happened. Everyone else falls in line with that blame and all eyes are on Daly.

Because of that, Daly reaches out to Ben for his help. Daly is all kinds of a mess. Everybody blames him for what happened and his wife and son want nothing to do with him. He's got nothing to do but prove his innocence. He takes Ben to an airport hanger and gives him official documents on everything about Flight 828, documents that implicate him. But, they are all lies, he claims. They get on a flight simulator and input the calculations from the document that detail the exact weather patterns. They find that these calculations are not from Flight 828 but are from a flight simulator report done in 2013. The government is hiding something.

Looking through the documents, Ben finds out a meteorologist saw what happened that night and was supposed to talk about it in court and instead dropped out and retired before just before he was set to speak out. Ben and Daly find him, but his lips are sealed, until they beg him for help to clear an innocent man's name.

The meteorologist reveals he saw a totally abnormal dark lightning storm. He gives them the actual flight simulator data and they test it out. It's real. Daly repeats the same maneuvers he performed on the original flight, but this time the flight ends in a crash. Interesting.

Daly has his own suspicions about who exactly is involved in what happened and who is really to blame. He thinks it is all Fiona's doing because she just happened to be on a flight where everybody ended up developing the very same thing she studied. Ben talks to her about it, but Fiona says she's innocent. But is she telling the truth? Daly doesn't think so.

Daly goes totally off the deep end and kidnaps her. He's discovered there is going to be some dark lightning somewhere and wants to find it and time travel through it to prove his innocence. He somehow manages to get away with sneaking her into the hanger and stealing an entire plane. When Ben and Mick discover what he's up to, they follow him to the hanger but are unable to stop him. The only thing that can stop him are fighter jets that are sent to shoot him down if he doesn't land back at the airport. But Daly is blindly determined. He refuses to comply despite Fiona's pleading of her innocence and to, you know, not kill them both. But he finds the dark lightning storm and disappears through it. But the fighter jets shoot at them at the same time, so we don't know exactly what happened. The fighter pilots say the target was neutralized, but as we see on a news report later, the remains of the plane have not been found. We know what happened last time there was a report like that.

Autumn Falls

The other development in the story is Autumn. Autumn has gone back into full spy mode and uses Mick as her next target. Autumn visits Mick on a day when she's babysitting Cal and tells her about her criminal past that her friends framed her for fraud recently. She wants Mick's help to prove her innocence by finding her real criminal friend. Whatever Autumn was planning here, that plan changes when Ben calls to tell Mick about the meteorologist. Mick rather openly discusses this in front of Autumn, and you'd better believe Autumn takes note.

She tells her boss about the meteorologist spilling the beans and then comes back later and breaks into Mick's apartment to find Ben's blue binder of Flight 828 notes and take pictures of everything in it. She also finds Cal's notebook which is filled with "calling" drawings and rips out one, but we don't see what she rips out. Hmm.

Later, that meteorologist is found dead. Ben and Mick at first think it was Fiona because Ben told Fiona about him, but Mick later realizes she also talked about him in front of Autumn. They think about all the other super shady stuff she's done and realize she's a mole.

In other news:

-After their hookup, Mick is avoiding Jared. Jared wants to be with her and he's willing to dump his wife for her (nice), but Mick is prolonging the drama and telling him to stay with his wife because reasons.

-Grace is still conflicted about Ben and Danny. That's about it on that end.

-The last thing, but possibly most important thing, is Cal. Out of everyone, Cal has been the most in tune with this calling. He's got some sort of future-seeing ability. He knew Captain Daly was going to call Ben before he did, and he's drawing some very accurate drawings about people and situations he shouldn't know about. Now that Autumn knows he's got this ability, or that at least there's something very holy grail-y about him, it looks like he's in danger. Especially since he goes missing at the very end of the episode.