‘The Last Frontier’ Episode 1 Recap – Now That’s How You Do A Premiere

If nothing else, The Last Frontier is going to be another hit for Apple TV+. You can just smell it in the air — or is that jet fuel? — after a rip-roaring, crowd-pleasing premiere like “Blue Skies”. The Blacklist creator Jon Bokenkamp proudly evokes the bygone action thrillers of the ’90s in Episode 1, delivering heaps of fun fighting, tons of mystery, immediately engaging characters, and a compelling, frigid setting that is sure to host some major drama before this ten-episode season is finished.

Con Air is evoked immediately in a plane crash opening that looks like someone reached deep into Apple’s coffers to bring it to life. A prison transport full of federal bad guys crashes in remote Alaska, thanks to, it’s strongly implied, the machinations of a deeply secretive off-books prisoner who is wheeled on like Garland Greene and promptly breaks free along with several other unsavoury passengers. The escape becomes the problem of Frank Remnick, a U.S. Marshal on the cusp of retirement — oh, no — who takes his oath to the humble rural townsfolk incredibly seriously. As for just how seriously, well — we’re going to find out.

There’s barely time to catch your breath between this opening and the next big action set-piece, which is the clear stand-out of “Blue Skies”, a showy one-take tracking shot that plays out like something from a zombie movie as Frank and some of his colleagues are ambushed by the surviving prisoners when they check out the wreckage. This is as close to an overt “look at us” mission statement as it’s possible to get. If The Last Frontier is delivering action sequences like this so early in the season, goodness knows what it might have in store down the line. RIP Donnie, by the way. At least he got to enjoy a final donut.

The CIA, represented mainly through Alfre Woodard’s Bradford and Haley Bennett’s co-protagonist Sidney Scofield, is particularly interested in the crash since they illegally snuck a high-value prisoner aboard without telling the Marshals Service. This guy’s code name is Havlock, and you might as well get used to that since you’re going to be hearing it a lot. Scofield has been disgraced on account of Havlock’s shady actions, so she’s offered a shot at redemption by travelling to Alaska and bringing him in before his anti-Agency agenda ruffles too many feathers.

Scofield gives Frank a quick rundown of who Havlock is. As part of a CIA program dubbed the Atwater Protocol, the Agency created a bunch of fake ideological defectors to draw out potential targets and eliminate them. One of these was Havlock. Trained by Scofield — who, it’s worth mentioning, doesn’t look old or edgy enough to be doing this sort of thing — to be an elite operative, Havlock used intel to draw in and assassinate targets across Europe and the Far East until the myth became real and he genuinely defected, taking a bunch of classified intelligence with him. You can see why this might be a problem for the CIA.

The Last Frontier Episode 1 spends most of its runtime pretending that Havlock is a heavily bearded prisoner who is shown to be possessed of at least some wilderness survival skills. The Marshals are able to track him to an outpost where he’s hiding out with a wily older dude and a bunch of sled dogs, but it’s all a red herring. Scofield sics one of the dogs on the dude after he takes out several Marshals and takes his host hostage, and when she flips him over, she declares, pretty unhappily, that he’s not Havlock after all.

This is to facilitate the episode’s big twist, which is that Havlock is a guy Frank had spoken to earlier, who had disguised himself as a Marshal in the aftermath of the crash and pretended to have been blinded by the prisoners. Frank happens to figure this out right when his wife, Sarah, a nurse who works at the hospital, is in the room with Havlock. Just like that, he has a useful hostage. And when he hijacks the Marshals’ radio network, he explains that he plans to leverage her to make Frank do him a few favours. Should be fun.

Read More: The Last Frontier Episode 2 Recap