Summary
The Last Frontier gets its act together in “Arnaq”, abandoning the procedural pretense and instead focusing on the core storylines and characters.
It took until Episode 5, but The Last Frontier has finally stopped cosplaying as a network procedural, and “Arnaq” is all the better for it. The previous episode, while fine on its own terms, couldn’t help but feel as if its wheels were spinning in the snow, with the case-of-the-week format keeping the overarching plot in stasis, and the overarching plot being less interesting than the local drama. It was all just a bit weird, but a cleaner, more coherent focus here gets everything moving again nicely.
The trick, I think, is promoting both Havlock’s gamesmanship and Luke’s kidnapping to the front and centre of the episode. Instead of chasing down a one-off escapee, Frank is forced to deal with a much more personal crisis that also interlocks with Sidney’s continuing pursuit of her “husband”. Both sides work; I was much more engaged with Havlock than usual, and Sidney’s travails with her ailing mother, whose recent vascular dementia diagnosis might have inadvertently stuck her in the middle of the whole thing, lend her the sympathetic contour she has been lacking all season.
The relationships are the key. Luke’s kidnapping isn’t new, but this is the first time that Sarah and Frank have been made aware of it, so it not only becomes an immediately pressing concern but also functions as an indictment of the state of their marriage. Sarah blames Frank, to a certain extent, if not for being directly responsible, then at least for being too preoccupied to notice in time, and this is obviously an outgrowth of a still-simmering resentment related to whatever happened in Chicago that cost the life of their daughter, which is still yet to be properly explained.
Luke has been taken by a guy named Issac Romero, whose claim to Federal fame is being a nutcase tinfoil-hat-wearing conspiracy theorist and domestic terrorist who is positively obsessed with the idea that the U.S. government is listening in on ordinary citizens’ everyday lives. The irony, of course, is that he’s right, which gives “Arnaq” a nice thematic texture. But it also provides dramatic impetus, since he’s taking Luke to sabotage a nearby HAARP facility, which will plunge Alaska, which is already dark most of the time anyway, into a total electronic blackout.
While Frank and Sarah go after Luke and Romero – Kira manages to be rescued, narrowly avoiding dying of hypothermia – Sidney leads the search for Havlock, which is primarily centred on a motel room he was using, which was paid for by the elusive courier. But her arc largely involves trying to take calls from her sister about their mother, which is difficult given Alaska’s spotty cell service. While coming face to face with Havlock – he spends most of the episode lurking, and eventually confronts her in a bar where she’s using the landline to call home, giving her some spiel about risking his capture just to see her – she’s also trying to deduce whether the CIA is listening in on her mother’s calls.
What’s happening here in The Last Frontier Episode 5 is that the CIA – glimpsed again in Langley through Bradford’s sudden reappearance – are being presented as the real bad guys. They bug phone lines. Almost everything that Romero says turns out to be accurate. And yes, sure, he’s a lunatic criminal, but that’s not entirely the point. Later, Frank theorises that the CIA might have brought down the plane deliberately to kill Havlock, and that the courier might be working for them. The hard drive he’s carrying might not contain Archive 6 at all, but the malware that they used to bring the plane down. Havlock might be a good guy after all.
But there are still plenty of obstacles in the way of unpacking this idea completely. For one thing, Sarah has reached the end of her tether and is adamant about demanding that Frank choose between his job and his family, which is quite the dilemma given that he’s heading up a state-wide manhunt for dangerous escaped Federal inmates. He’s also clearly going to choose the job, which the show has been reiterating in various ways since it began. This strikes me as a weirdly melodramatic subplot, ill-fitting for the story overall.
But Frank is also still hiding something, something that Havlock knows about, and whenever that comes out – which I’m sure it will soon – the whole case might be turned on its head again. And then there’s the small matter that Romero’s sabotage plan turned out to be successful. When the state tries to bring the HAARP facility back online, a fatal flaw overloads it, and suddenly, all of Alaska is plunged into complete darkness.
How can you find an elusive CIA agent in the pitch black? I suppose we’ll have to wait and see.
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