Warning: Spoilers for Manifest Season 4, Part 1
Even after the release of Manifest season 4, part 1, the Flight 828 tailfin doesn’t make sense. After three full seasons, the series has finally explained what happened to Flight 828 and where the Callings come from. However, the show stopped short of completing the puzzle, as some unanswered questions still linger.
The tailfin continues to be a subject of great mystery in Manifest. Despite Flight 828 being destroyed on land in season 1, the tailfin of the plane was recovered from the ocean at the end of season 2. This prompted a wild theory from Ben, who speculated that a higher power restored the entire plane. Since then, the passengers have uncovered some startling realizations about what really happened that day in 2013. Now, they know that the plane flew into the divine consciousness, where it stayed for five years. While this development makes sense of their disappearance and why they didn’t age, it doesn’t account for the existence of the tailfin, which is still an enigma on Manifest.
Manifest Debunked The Biggest Tailfin Theory
The tailfin has long been the strongest piece of evidence for one of the biggest theories about Flight 828’s disappearance. The reveal that the airplane was destroyed not once, but twice made it seem plausible that Manifest was secretly a story about parallel universes. For a long time, there was this idea that the Flight 828 that landed on the runway in 2018 was actually from an alternate reality. The tailfin supported this theory, as it served as a hint that there really were two different versions of Flight 828. That being said, the parallel universe concept doesn’t mesh with Manifest’s latest reveals.
These theories hinged on this belief that the plane entered a parallel universe and that the Callings are related to the lives of their alternate reality counterparts. Because of the discovery that the plane was inside a divine consciousness and that the Callings came directly from this experience, both of these scenarios have turned out to be false. While some believed that Manifest would use parallel universes to explain its mysteries, the show is evidently leaning heavily on religious themes, as opposed to ideas that stem from science fiction.
Was Ben Actually Right About The Tailfin?
Unless Manifest is gearing up for another game-changing reveal, it’s worth wondering if Ben really was right about his divine resurrection theory. While all the time travel hints provided good reasons to doubt that God or some other divine entity “resurrected” an airplane, that may indeed be the explanation the series has settled on. But if that is what happened, that would open up more questions about what really transpired both in 2013 and in 2018. If that’s correct, then the passengers must have died in order to enter the divine consciousness, even though the same wasn’t necessary for Cal when he went back in the season 3 finale.