‘Blindspot’ and ‘Manifest’ NYCC Panel

NBC brought its hit series Blindspot to New York Comic-Con 2018 to promote the upcoming season 4 – and started off by letting fans watch the season 4 premiere in full!

The season 4 premiere picks up with the shifting lines of power in Sandstorm, The FBI, and the evil corporation left without a leader following Hank Crawford’s death. Jane, now Remi again, is trying to maintain her cover and hide her hatred of Weller – which gets complicated when she learns a deadly secret about her own life – and an old colleague pops up on the FBI’s radar.

After the screening, series stars Jaimie Alexander and Sullivan Stapleton hit the stage, to talk about the season. They detailed the fun and intrigue of this cat-and-mouse married couple game, while Alexander revealed her own work building up that character in her head. They both tease some of the action and twists that season 4 will bring, praising the writing team for finding their way out of potential plateaus and keeping things fun for the cast. Alexander teases that we’ll see Remi and Jane going up against one another, and “duke it out”. She promises it will be much crazier than a similar sequence in season 2.

Manifest

Up next was the new hit NBC series Manifest, which opened with a sizzle reel teasing some dark turns the deepening mystery of flight 828.

Creator Jeff Rake, and stars Melissa Roxburgh and Josh Dallas were brought on stage. Roxburgh and Dallas praised the excellent character arcs that drew them in. Rake is asked about the constant Lost comparisons and describes how much that honors him. He talks a bit about the writers trying to plot out the mystery and balance it – i.e., avoiding some of those epic Lost pitfalls (which he didn’t mention by name).

When asked when fans will get the meaty answers, Rake says their just trying to get over the initial episode order from NBC, to get to a larger storyline. He teases that episodes 12-13 will be a “major car turn” where we begin to get some first real answers.

Rake also teases that “Shadow Man,” or “The Smudge” from the kid’s drawing in episode 2 will get some more explanation in the very next episode. Roxburgh and Dallas tease that the big death that just went down will push Michaela and Ben into a stressed place. Ben will spiral into paranoia that there’s a conspiracy and they’re being watched; Michaela doesn’t want him playing cop, and has to try to keep him calmed down so Ben doesn’t actually become a target. Ben will have to meet his wife’s new man, and try to reconnect with his teen daughter.

Roxburgh teases that Michaela will have to deal with her own traumas, the betrayal in her romantic life – and teases that there more deaths coming up in the next batch of episodes. Her traumatic car accident will get more explanation soon, Flake says. We’ll also see Michaela’s world expand, with more characters, like Lourdes’ parents.

Dallas and Roxburgh taked about how their characters will struggle between faith and science as more details come to light – and apparently at least Roxburgh is a bit more informed about SPOILERS now, following her total lack of info during San Diego Comic-Con.

Flake teases some new characters that will appear in the season’s upcoming episodes – including a major game-changer character in episode 12. Roxburgh and Flake say episode 9 will bring the main relationship conflicts to a head. We’ll get a mystery of a small group of passengers that can’t be accounted for. Episode 5 will cover the backstory of what the non-passenger characters did for those 5.5 years.

Catch Blindspot and Manifest every week on NBC. Blindspot returns for season 4 on October 12.