‘The Last Frontier’ Episode 6 Recap – Something Still Feels Off, Right?

The Last Frontier is unashamedly a throwback to uncomplicated, slightly conspiratorial action thrillers of the ’90s, and I love that about it. Or, at least, I’d love that if it were true, but increasingly it really doesn’t seem to be. This is an odd show, all told, one part procedural mixed with one part family drama and shaken up with a lot of the hallmarks of a conspiracy thriller. It can’t seem to decide on what it really is from one episode to the next, and even though Episode 6, “The Devil Wears a Suit and Tie”, is perfectly enjoyable on its own terms and even lends a little bit more clarity to what might actually be going on, something still feels off to me.

And I didn’t expect to feel like that, obviously, since the whole point was dad-movie nostalgia. That’s supposed to be uncomplicated! But it’s all over the place, and thus so am I, trying to figure out which characters and elements I genuinely like, which are red herrings pulling the wool over my eyes, and which are entirely superfluous because the show isn’t particularly interested in them. Thus far, the jury’s still out. At least it remains interesting to talk about.

For instance, after abandoning the quasi-procedural format last week, The Last Frontier returns to it with a vengeance in Episode 6. There are only six or so inmates still on the loose, and one of them is Dr. William Wigg, aka the Angel of Death, a brilliant — intellectually speaking — serial killer who poisoned 36 of his own patients and staff members and was being transported for execution after exhausting all of his appeals. In a pretty smart play, he kidnaps a woman and keeps her drugged to allow him access to the hospital disguised as an EMT, where he plans to use a medical helicopter arriving to transport his “patient” as a means of escape. Unluckily for him, Sarah is there tending to Luke, and immediately recognises him from one of Frank’s photos.

Sarah sounds the alarm, and Wigg is caught pretty much immediately, but that’s only the start of his story since Wigg has a pretty significant trump card — the pilot from the flight, Tim O’Bannon, who is still alive but is rapidly expiring thanks to his brain swelling up. Wigg is keeping him in a storage container and dosing him with life-saving medication every eight hours. If the authorities want to find O’Bannon alive, they’re going to need to give in to Wigg’s demands, which include having a safe deposit box flown in from out of state by the manager of the bank where it’s currently being stored.

This shouldn’t prove too difficult — moral implications of doing favours for a serial killer notwithstanding — under normal circumstances, but following Romero’s domestic terror attack, these aren’t normal circumstances. Alaska currently has no power, and with people burning wood for light and warmth, the atmosphere is soon going to be too smoggy to see in. This is a nice detail, though admittedly little is made of it. But it means Frank has to really justify allocating the resources to land the plane, which means figuring out if the pilot is really alive — through Havlock — and weighing up the cost of giving Wigg what he wants against the potential value of whatever information O’Bannon has about the crash.

And the nature of the crash is a big deal in “The Devil Wears a Suit and Tie”. Sidney is exceedingly worried about the FBI decrypting and keeping the drive that was secured from the motel, and she eventually reveals why — it does, as Frank and Hutch suspected, contain malware that was used to bring down the plane in a targeted assassination attempt. The CIA was trying to kill Havlock, and everyone on board was deemed expendable. The reason Sid’s worried is that she came up with the idea of cloning the circumstances of a random air disaster to carry out an untraceable hit, so the whole thing is likely to be laid at her feet.

Damian Young in The Last Frontier | Image via Apple TV+

This is a little weird to me, since Sidney’s concern is being blamed for using the strategy in this particular attack, but she’s totally unbothered about the moral implications of having devised it in the first place, and Frank doesn’t seem to mind either. I have no clue what we’re supposed to feel about Sidney, honestly. The obligatory flashbacks in The Last Frontier Episode 6 recall a mission she and Havlock carried out in Ukraine, which required the takedown of a General named Volkov. Part of the assignment was deflecting suspicion away from Havlock by killing a local aid worker he had been working with, staging her death as a suicide, and framing her up as a CIA mole. Naturally, Havlock refused. Sidney later claims to have been equally appalled by this, but there’s zero evidence to support that claim. She doesn’t seem remotely bothered.

The point is positioning Havlock as the good guy, I think. He was the one who didn’t want to kill an innocent to save himself. He was the intended victim of what has been revealed to be an assassination attempt by the CIA. Later, O’Bannon, the pilot, reveals that Havlock intervened in the crash and was the sole reason that anyone survived. The implication is pretty clear. As Sid claims, he’s putting the evidence together for himself, letting Frank discover the pieces for himself, and trying to determine how much Sidney knew about the operation in advance. She claims nothing at all, but I’m not so sure.

Either way, it’s all going to come out eventually. The FBI decrypts and secures the drive before Frank can intervene, since he’s too busy dealing with Dr. Wigg, who meets his end unexpectedly when the bank manager delivering the safe deposit box turns out to be the mother of his first victim. He was trying to torment her, but she came prepared and shoots him dead on the makeshift runway formed by the headlights of parked cars. But the fact that Wigg gave up O’Bannon before he died means that there is now not only proof that the CIA sabotaged the plane, but a witness who can testify to it first-hand.

And then there’s whatever Frank is hiding, which relates to a handgun hidden in a copy of Walter Coates’s Alaska. This is all still to come out, and the way it’s being dragged along isn’t especially satisfying, so the sooner that happens, the better. Maybe then we’ll know where we stand.

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