Summary
A major set-piece is the standout of The Last Frontier Episode 3, but it’s the teasing of wider, character-driven mysteries that’ll keep the audience coming back.
Alaska is full of amazing sights. Caribou roaming the tundra. The northern lights! In Episode 3 of The Last Frontier, those sights also include a gaggle of dangerous Federal inmates, a vengeful CIA spy, a helicopter, and a funny-looking wheeled snow train dangling from the edge of a cliff. But such is the way of things when you overpay for sightseeing expeditions.
The Last Frontier loves that snow train, which is officially known as a tundra buggy. It’s a reinforced wheeled monstrosity designed to shelter rich folk from the elements in plush train-like carriages while they marvel at the wintry landscape. In “Country as F**k”, it becomes the scene of a hostage situation and then a big action sequence. It rules, and is very emblematic of the kind of evocatively nostalgic show this wants to be. But it has the DNA of a proper mystery, and it’s the character-driven subplots — whatever Frank and Sidney are both hiding from each other, and maybe even themselves — that’ll keep the audience coming back.
As a consequence of the buggy thing, the major problem stemming from Havlock’s escape at the end of the previous episode kind of sorts itself out. And a big deal is made of it beforehand, with Frank really dramatically laying out how they’re facing 16 hours of darkness and only eight hours of daylight in which to conduct a manhunt. It’s a bit of a shame that none of this ends up mattering, but what can you do? We also get a culmination to the subplot involving the little boy, Caleb, and his dad, Sam, who were captured by Johnny Knoxville in the two-part premiere.
You’ll recall that Sam urged Caleb to flee in the previous episode, and he eventually finds his way to Frank. I found Luca Thunberg — no relation to Greta — who plays Caleb to be eerily convincing in this role. I was rooting for him to be okay just as much as Frank was. But Frank seems particularly susceptible to children since, as we learn later, he and Sarah lost a daughter two weeks before her ninth birthday. Frank blames himself, or at least the job, and has a bunch of scars and lingering injuries that seemingly prove his culpability. I’m sure there’s more to come about this in subsequent episodes.
Speaking of Sarah, she’s found where Havlock left her, safe and sound. That brief hostage stint seems to have been important in more ways than one. While he was there, Havlock printed something, which could be a major clue about his endgame. And in the basement, Frank has a secret. We don’t know what it is, but it comes up again later. Sidney’s assurances that Havlock will use his magical spy charisma to infiltrate Frank’s life and leverage him in his favour will come true, just not in the manner that anyone thought.
At one point in The Last Frontier Episode 3, Sid describes herself as Havlock’s first victim, and we get a couple more flashbacks showing the origins of what ultimately turned into a romantic relationship. In the present day, she’s on the hook for having assisted Havlock in his initial escape from the CIA’s shackles by feeding him classified intelligence. She claims not to have done so, but even Bradford, seemingly her only ally in the Agency, is starting to believe otherwise. But this only reinforces the legend. It makes it easier to buy into the way Sidney talks about him in almost mythical terms. Her potential complicity is beside the point.
Either way, Havlock knows that Frank is hiding something, and he uses it to force a stalemate when Frank eventually manages to corner him on the tundra buggy. In a great, albeit ridiculous scene involving the buggy being tethered to a helicopter and tipped upside-down before being driven off a cliff, neither Sid nor Frank can bring themselves to shoot Havlock, who jumps through the bottom of the buggy and falls down a ravine. In reality, he’d definitely be dead from this, but nobody suspects for even a second that he might be. How very 90s.
These are the big, lingering mysteries, then. We don’t know what Havlock is up to. We don’t know whether Sidney helped him in the first place, is helping him now, or is being genuine in her claims that she’s trying to defend her father’s legacy by preventing the program that he designed from being leveraged against her. We don’t know what Frank is hiding in the basement, or what happened to his daughter, or whether those two things are connected. It’s plenty to be going on with. And at the end of this episode, Sidney drops another bombshell — she’s Havlock’s wife!
I haven’t mentioned Luke and Kira, either, but mostly because nothing has happened there yet that wasn’t obviously going to happen. The convict they have been nursing back to health wakes up, kills the Marshal that Frank sent to collect them, and then takes Luke and Kira hostage. It’s clearly going to amount to a pretty major deal in an episode or two. By that point, who knows if Frank will even have time to deal with it.
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