Bill Daly

Captain **William "Bill" Daly**, also known as Captain Future, is a character in *Manifest*. He debuts in the first episode of the first season and is portrayed by guest star Frank Deal.

He was ultimately driven insane in part due to the media villainizing him and blaming him for the disappearance.

## Biography

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### Before Flight 828

At some point, Bill Daly became a pilot, working for Montego Air. He was the captain of Flight 828. ("Pilot")

He was previously married and had a son who he was estranged from prior to Flight 828.

### During Flight 828

Bill Daly was on board the plane during its disappearance. When a storm appeared right in front of the plane, Daly was forced to go right through it in order to survive, likely sending them to the future. ("Contrails")

### After Flight 828

Bill Daly landed the plane in New York and is among the passengers when NSA Director Vance explains that they have been missing for five and a half years.

Later, he is one of the people interrogated by Vance about the plane's disappearance. When asked where the plane landed after he left Jamaica, Daly answered that the plane hadn't landed anywhere before they got to New York. He also said that the air was clear, a turbulence occurred, but the instruments never detected anything. ("Pilot")

Later, when he reappears in “Contrails”, it is revealed that he had been investigating and trying to clear his tarnished name. He acquired a blue binder that included NTSB reports, Congressional testimony, and other documents relating to flight 828. He asks Ben Stone for help. Daly explains how Fiona is behind all of this and how he plans to prove it. Together, they go to a flight simulator where he shows Ben that the weather info he received and what the government is saying happened while the plane was out there is the wrong data. The stimulator shows a regular storm (what Daly says "hardly qualifies as 'weather'") and not anything like the actual event. He explains the maneuvers he undertook and calls out inconsistencies with the government report, particularly that the report is dated April 8, 2013 – one day after flight 828 went missing.

With the help of Ben and his sister, Michaela (aka Mick), the two men are able to find a meteorologist who was actually tracking the weather that night. He states how he was basically ordered to resign and swear under oath never to talk about what he knew. He discovered dark lightning and the government shut him down. With the new weather information, Bill and Ben return to the flight simulator with the new data. As soon as they enter it into the system, the simulator starts up and the result is exactly like the night they went missing; Daly crashes several times in the simulator, provin the government’s report is falsified. The meteorologist is later killed in a boating accident staged by The Major.

At this point in time, Daly goes missing and Ben and Mick check out his apartment, where they find Daly has been waiting around for another dark lightning storm, and he found one. Still blaming Fiona and sure she’s the missing piece to his puzzle, Daly kidnaps her. He arrives at the airport, loads Fiona on the plane, and prepares for take off. Ben tries talking him out of doing this, but Daly says it has to be done. Near the end of the episode, Fiona wakes up and tells him she had nothing to do with what happened, and that the government is using the research they took from her, giving her no credit for It. Fiona also says she is not part of the shared mind-melding pot. Eventually, he accepts that she is telling the truth, and then says, “I will see you in the future in 2024.” While flying in their final moments, the same glare of light appears that he saw the first time the plane went missing for 5-½ years. There’s a loud explosion and then the plane falls off the radar. The Air Force pilots who came to escort him and the plane back to land say over their radios that the threat has been neutralized.

The salvaged cockpit section of Flight 828 is being housed in the secret government lab. After the tailfin section is returned to the ocean, Daly suddenly appears inside the cockpit for just a moment before it vanishes once again along with Daly. (Mayday (Part 2))

Somehow, Daly returns again and was captured by Director Zimmer, who ordered he remain restrained to a bed and under constant sedation. She keeps him isolated from other 828ers, so they had no idea he was even alive. Ben Stone received a calling to 'wake him up' with directions of how to find him, not knowing at first that Bill Daly was the subject of his calling. Ben and Saanvi manage to locate Daly and lighten his sedation so they could communicate with him. Being conscious causes him to later release a plague of locusts through his mouth, which spreads throughout the DC (detention center). (Final Descent, Bug Out)

Eventually, Angelina and Olive & Cal separately figure out that Daly and Fiona were brought back as the two witnesses mentioned in the book of Revelation, chapter 11. The prophecy says the witnesses will be able to curse the world with plagues as they see fit. While Fiona never brought any plagues (before Angelina murdered her by manipulating little Eden), Daly continued to release plagues into the DC, albeit passively because they were contained within his body; he had no control over releasing them. First were the locusts, then contagious boils which killed two guards, and finally turning all water in the DC into blood.

Determined to kill the two witnesses – Daly and Fiona – because she believes it is God’s will for her, Angelina fakes a calling, appearing to Daly as a vision of his son. Speaking as his son, she harps on Daly’s past sins against his family to make him feel guilty, upsetting him so much he escapes from his bed. She convinces him to disobey the guards in the hallway, leading the guards to shoot him to death. (Ghost Plane, Fata Morgana)

Right after his death, Daly’s body is left alone in a morgue room. With no one watching, the blood from his bullet wounds pours off the gurney and runs into a floor drain. The drain leads to a pipe that empties into the ocean, allowing the blood plague that was previously confined to the DC to spread to the outside world. As soon as his blood hits the ocean, the water rapidly changes to red, but tests soon prove the color is not from blood; it was actually caused by a red algae bloom that proliferated so quickly due to an underground volcano. Later, while guards are transporting Daly’s body through a hallway in the DC, a fissure opens in the floor beneath them, causing Daly’s body and two guards to fall into a pit of molten lava. (Fata Morgana, Throttle, Furball)

Following the Death Date, the passengers are sent back to the date they were originally supposed to land, April 7, 2013. This creates a new timeline where the passengers get a second chance. It was initially revealed that eleven of the passengers – the ones who failed their judgement – had gone missing, and all of the passengers who had died prior to the Death Date were brought back to life again. (Final Boarding) However, while Daly was brought back, he wasn't deemed worthy to be given a second chance due to his kidnapping of Fiona and as a result, he burned up and exploded in the cockpit just as Vance was entering it to investigate the disappearance of the eleven missing passengers.

## Trivia

* Harris refers to Daly as Captain Future whenever he sees him. Captain Future is a fictional character from pulp stories who travels throughout the universe and occasionally through time.
* Daly's voice can be heard in Saanvi's recordings in the episode "All Call".
* Daly's corpse appears wrapped in a body bag in the episode "Furball".
* While Daly doesn't appear in the series finale in the final cut, he does appear in a deleted scene from the end of the episode, in which Vance and his team board the plane and open the cockpit and witness him fail his judgement and turn to ash.