'Manifest' creator Jeff Rake teases filming on Season 4 at Netflix: 'Brace yourselves'

It's been six months since Netflix announced that it would pick up Manifest, the former NBC sci-fi drama, for a fourth and final season on the streaming service, and a little more than three months since the series began filming what's set to be a 20-episode concluding chapter. We still know very little about what's in store in those final episodes, but that hasn't stopped creator Jeff Rake from tweeting a few clues from the set in recent days. 

Rake, who has promised fans that the change in distributor and release model won't affect the story he set out to tell with the series, has been relatively quiet on the Manifest front since announcing the show's return to production back in November, but he's been eager to tease viewers in February. Rake recently posted a short video from the film's set that featured a drone flying over the cast and crew, and tagged the post to indicate the crew was shooting episode 405 of the series. 

Last week, Rake was at it again, this time with a couple of very creepy images of a doll that will, in some way or another, be a part of episode 406. Then there's the real kicker. Without giving the post an episode tag, Rake posted an image of the crew shooting a scene in a cemetery, with several cast members looking at a closed casket over an open grave. Rake captioned the photo "Brace yourselves..." and offered no other context, but if you're a careful Manifest viewer, you might be able to pick out who's still alive in the photo and draw your own conclusions. 

It's been a wild year for Manifest, so Rake has reason to celebrate and tease viewers with cryptic posts. When its first few seasons dropped on Netflix, Manifest developed a rather potent second life on streaming, where millions of viewers had adopted it as a new binge-watching obsession. That obsession ultimately led the streaming giant to pick the show up for a proper conclusion, which they announced back in August after the show's initial cancellation. In clarifying what the move to Netflix might mean for the series, Rake had this to say back in September:

“We established early on there is a death date in our mythology of June 2, 2024, when the story has a happy or a sad or a mixed ending,” Rake said. “I walked [Netflix] through a bunch of twists and turns, I’ve always had a bunch of big flags in the sand — things that would happen along the way. But the excellent news is that they’re now going to be able to see them all play out in real time, because the 20 episodes that I have been gifted allows me to take the entire roadmap that I already had planned out in front of me and overlay that over these 20 episodes. Fundamentally, I’m going to be able to continue telling the story that I was always going to tell.”

Manifest Season 4 does not have a firm release date, but Rake recently confirmed on Twitter that we can probably expect the show back in late 2022, perhaps as soon as November.