Summary
The Last Frontier adds a bit of clarity to Havlock’s endgame in “American Dream”, but the immediate drama remains more compelling.
The Last Frontier isn’t a procedural, but it feels like one in Episode 4, which isn’t intended as a criticism. Much like how the previous episode focused on Johnny Knoxville and his gang of buggy-hijacking prisoners to tease out a bit more of the main plot, “American Dream” uses the same trick. The focus this time, though, is on two women who murder a State Trooper, and who may have had a brief brush with Havlock since the prison transport crash-landed in the premiere. And it occurred to me during this episode that Havlock is the least interesting thing about the whole show.
It’s a weird point to make, I’ll grant you, since the hunt for Havlock and all the mystery around his endgame and his relationship with Sidney continue to keep the whole thing ticking dramatically. But the moment-to-moment local stuff is so much more interesting that I wish we didn’t have to keep breaking off for more of Sidney’s long-winded flashbacks or Havlock’s mysterious video calls. I find myself caring about these characters, or at least Frank and his family, and I’m much more interested in their well-being and what they’re up to at any given moment than I am in Sidney’s love life and career.
Anyway, “American Dream”. The two female fugitives are Katherine Van Horn, aka “Kitty”, a black widow killer who murdered her three husbands and pocketed a fortune of over $4 million, and Vivian Pike, a supposedly harmless grifter and conwoman who nonetheless fails to hide a smile when Kitty suffocates State Trooper Ruth Reed to death. (Immediately unpleasant flashbacks to that episode of Task here.) Kitty and Vivian change their clothes in Reed’s house and leave behind their prison jumpsuits and Havlock’s sweater, which makes apprehending them a bit more important.
These two are great characters, Vivian especially, since she’s clearly way smarter than she lets on, and it isn’t immediately clear what the dynamic between them is really about. Kitty is the “leader” insofar as she’s making the decisions about where to go next, which include trying to track down a pilot to fly them out of the country and battering him into playing along with a meat tenderizer, but it’s clear that Vivian is up to something of her own. Kitty is worth a fortune and keeps a micro SD card that unlocks her hidden funds in the frame of her glasses, so it isn’t totally mysterious how everything might come together, but it’s still executed really well.
The hunt for these two is the most compelling part of The Last Frontier Episode 4, though. It’s full of nice little details — the guy who handles the tourist charters keeping the computer password (which is “PASSWORD”, naturally) on a Post-It attached to the computer, since why not in the middle of nowhere, is a personal favourite — and helps to dig into Frank as a character. Despite his own family having been personally targeted, and Havlock definitely being alive despite having suffered an impossible-to-survive fall, he still prioritises protecting the local community and doing things the right way. Even when he eventually corners Kitty on a dirt run, he refuses to allow his men to gun her down or honor her request to be left to die out there. She dies anyway, to be fair, since she tries to stab Frank in the back and Sid shoots her for it, but you can’t blame Frank for that.
However much I like Frank, I’m still not entirely buying his relationship with Sid. She opens up a little bit more in “American Dream” about her marriage to Havlock, which started out as a convenient cover to survive a mission and ended up becoming more serious, but I wouldn’t trust her as far as I can throw her, and all that leading dialogue about how people like her and Havlock are trained to lie and manipulate everyone seems to be foreshadowing a betrayal to me.
Dominic Cooper in The Last Frontier | Image via Apple TV+
In the meantime, we at least get a slightly clearer picture of what Havlock is doing. While he was holding Sarah, he made a few bank transactions, including four to an account in St. Petersburg. A guy named Mark at the CIA eventually calls Sid to tip her off that these payments probably went to a guy named Armen Zhdanko, a black hat informant specialising in malware and security protocols who might have been paid to help steal Archive 6. Havlock used Sid’s XenoGate credentials, which he forced her to give up in the previous episode, to get a message to Zhdanko, who met with a courier who is taking a copy of Archive 6 on an external drive all the way to Alaska. Sidney needs to intercept the courier before he gets to Havlock, who not only managed to survive the fall but also ingratiate himself with some armed civilians who had taken up the search for him, before Havlock gets the drive.
Towards the end of The Last Frontier Episode 4, it’s revealed that the courier arrived in Fairbanks 24 hours before the plane crash. But we’ll have to deal with him next week.
In the meantime, that only leaves us with the rest of Frank’s family. Sarah is back at work but can’t officially be accepted back until she speaks with a trauma counselor, who just so happens to be her high school sweetheart, Todd Logan. But Sarah has other things on her mind. She’s still in possession of a memory card that Havlock gave her, which she was supposed to pass on to Frank, but never did out of fear of getting him drawn in further and risking “another Chicago”, which neither she nor their marriage could endure. She’s also rightly worried about Luke and Kira, and decides to remedy that situation by driving out to the cabin herself.
She’s too late, though. Luke and Kira remain captives of their enigmatic inmate friend, who turns out to be a bit of a self-aggrandizing conspiracist. By the end of “American Dream”, Luke has caused a car crash to facilitate their escape, leaving Kira alone, fleeing for the highway, and the inmate hot on his tail. It’s all engaging enough, but is it possible for a show to have slightly too many ongoing mysteries to be trying to keep track of?
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