OK, finished Manifest. Let's get back to AGameAWeek, shall we?

-=-=-

The ending was enjoyable, mostly because it didn't go in the direction I was expecting.
I mean.. The "END" ending did. That was kinda obvious. But the lead up to the ending wasn't.
You know how at the end of DS9, a sci-fi show about spaceships and wars and sci-fi, and then all of a sudden it became what felt like "the good character and the bad character in a cave, shouting at each other for 6 hours"..
(I watched this a long time ago, but that's still the single point of that finale that sticks in my mind)

Manifest didn't do that, thank god.
It very much feels like it's going to do that, and about 5 episodes before the ending, the show's become "The goody" and "The baddy", and my head was preparing for the worst possible ending.
It didn't do that.
\o/yeay\o/

After watching the finale, I headed straight to Wiki (and Michael's comment, yesterday! Thanks, Michael!) to find out exactly what happened.

The show was cancelled by NBC
...Oh, I see now. It was on NBC. Of course. That makes sense.
It got canned, just like every other good sci-fi that NBC's had over the years. Heck, they cancelled Quantum Leap half-a-dozen times in its original run, and then again in the new version. And Journeyman in-between.

I reckon there's 2 very disjointed halves at work at NBC. One that happily commissions time-travel sci-fi shows, and the other that goes "NO, NO, NO!!!" and destroys it all.

Anyhoo, Season 3 was the Covid year, and I did mention that as Season 3 kicked off, the impact of Covid was kinda obvious. I can imagine that something like that, given the whole premise of the show is about coming together, being a group, but suddenly everyone's split up and you can't do in-airplane flashbacks anymore, was likely the cause for a drop-off in viewership.
Binge-Watching it all in one go, made it feel like just another twist in the tale, but coming back to that week after week likely would've made the whole transition much worse.

So, OK, NBC. I kinda get where you're coming from with that.
Fair play.

Thankfully, Netflix picked it up, eventually, and the writers were given one final 20-episode season to wrap up what they initially envisaged as a six season story arc.

I mentioned that the pacing felt a little off in that last season, and I think that was likely the writers squeezing those final 3 seasons of storylines into a single one, to reach a satisfying conclusion. Padding out bits here and there to help condense things, to flow a little smoother, was likely a necessity.
It's like they originally planned to have point a lead to point b "eventually", but now they're having to cram it all together with giant plot points being skipped in-between, so any padding is simply to hold it all together.
It does it well enough, I reckon.

Throughout Season 4 there are very apparent season blocks. Like the writers had already planned "This is season 4, this is season 5, this is season 6". It very much follows things in a methodical style.
Season 4 was apparently broadcast as two halves, and there's a very specific point where those two halves fall, which I think would've been the Season 4/5 joint.
The Season 5/6 joint comes about halfway through that second half... Lots of halves!!

As Michael said in yesterday's comments, it might be tough to pick it back up after such a gap.
If you reached the end of Season 3, I imagine that rewatching the last couple of episodes of Season 3 might be enough to jog your memory before heading into Season 4.
But I can't vouch for that, since I watched the entire show in the past month or so.

There's plenty of recaps!

...
But, yeah, it ended well. I do like when shows close things off, properly.
I can't think of any obvious dangling threads that were left untouched, all except for one "quirk" which remained right at the end. I expect that that was left solely for the possibility of future plot lines, should it get renewed by Netflix. But it didn't, and that single little oddity will remain a mystery.

Good stuff.
And kept my mind off all the horrific building/plastering that's been going on, of late.

Now, back to coding!!

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