What happened to the plane in Tulsa King? Everyone aboard blacked out mid-air — and the show won't confirm who survived

"W.W.D.D.," the first episode of the new season, landed on Paramount+ on October 16. On board the plane are two characters who arrived in season 2 and quickly became central to the show: Margaret Devereaux, the rancher and political operator played by Dana Delany, who became Dwight Manfredi's girlfriend, and Cal Thresher, Neal McDonough's governor of Oklahoma, who spent two seasons as Dwight's rival before becoming something close to an ally.

What the episode actually shows

The sequence is short and built almost entirely out of what nobody does:

• The invitation — Thresher asks Margaret to come with him to a governors' conference in the Mariana Islands, and she reluctantly agrees. Dwight, played by Sylvester Stallone, stays in Tulsa.
• The goodbye — the two of them have a romantic dinner at a new Italian restaurant before she leaves.
• The cabin — late in the episode, Margaret and Thresher are slumped in their seats on the private jet. In the cockpit, the pilots are out too.
• The radio — air traffic control keeps calling the plane. Nobody picks up.
• The news — Joanne, played by Annabella Sciorra, wakes Dwight in the middle of the night. She couldn't sleep, she was watching the news, and the plane "went down somewhere over the Pacific."

That's where the episode ends. There's no impact, no wreckage, no search and no bodies.

Why everyone passed out

The premiere doesn't say. It never names a mechanical failure, a poison or a person, and it gives no reason why the pilots and the passengers lost consciousness at the same time.

What it stages, though, has a real-world template. Aviation calls it a ghost flight: a plane that keeps flying on autopilot after everyone aboard has been incapacitated, usually by a loss of cabin pressure. The best-known case is the Learjet carrying golfer Payne Stewart in October 1999, which flew for hours with no one conscious aboard until it ran out of fuel and came down in a South Dakota field.

A cabin that goes quiet all at once, pilots included, is what loss of pressure looks like. A single poisoned meal usually doesn't take out the people flying the plane.

That leaves the show's real question open. Whatever put everyone to sleep, Dwight doesn't believe it happened by itself.

The suspects the premiere lines up

The episode plants several possible motives without committing to any of them:

• The wine — after the dinner, a case of wine arrives from the sommelier, Leonardo Timpone, and Bodhi finds the delivery suspicious. The episode never connects it to the plane.
• The land deal — Thresher has been refusing a tech company that wants Oklahoma farmland. "I'm not taking land from farmers and giving it to some tech bro," he says.
• The successor — Lieutenant Governor Amanda Clark, played by Gretchen Mol, inherits the governorship if Thresher is gone, and she makes it clear Dwight won't get the access he had.
• Dwight's own enemies — the premiere also restarts his war with the mob, but nothing ties Ray Renzetti or Bill Bevilaqua to the jet.

Stallone, at least, has already settled the question for his character. He told USA Today that Dwight will be emotionally traumatized by the loss.

"He knows this wasn't an accident," Stallone said of Dwight.

Whether anyone was still alive when the plane went down is a different question, and nobody is answering it directly.

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So did anyone survive?

Officially, nobody has said. Unofficially, nobody involved is talking as if anyone did.

Terence Winter, who runs the show, explained the plane to TV Insider in terms of what it does to Dwight, not what happened to the people on it: "We wanted to put Dwight in the most vulnerable position he could be in." McDonough's verdict on the storyline, given to the same outlet, was "I thought it was a great idea," which is not the usual reaction of an actor expecting to be rescued. And Stallone described losing Margaret as a deliberate shake-up, and Thresher as "another great loss."

The show itself is holding the line. Episode 2 arrives on October 23, and until a body or a survivor turns up on screen, both characters are technically missing.

Stallone compared Margaret's exit to the one he's been through before: "I had to go through this before with Adrian." Rocky's wife died off-screen too, between Rocky V and Rocky Balboa, and the audience found out from what was left behind.

Previously we wrote: Why did The Diplomat kill Dennison? David Gyasi's exit was kept secret right up until the episode aired