Summary
The Last Frontier delivers its dullest chapter yet in “L’air Perdu”, which is a shame so close to the end, though there’s still time for it to stick the landing.
“L’air Perdu” is the last thing that The Last Frontier needed so close to its finale. After making the predictable, overdue revelation that Sidney was really the bad guy, Episode 8 tries to walk the twist back by claiming that she’s not that bad after all, or at least that her personal revenge quest is vindicated. It isn’t the worst idea in theory, but it falls down in execution because it means a chapter comprising almost entirely flashbacks, and focusing exclusively on the least interesting and convincing character.
As a result of all this, “L’air Perdu” contains some of the worst writing and line readings of the show’s entire run. It’s emotionally vacuous, with supposedly intimate scenes between Sidney and Havlock resembling two slot machines trying to ring cherries. And it’s also telling us things we already know, or at least could have guessed, bringing us full circle to arrive where the show began, with barely anything changed as a result of the additional context. It’s hard to fathom a more wasteful hour.
Things at least start promisingly enough. Since Havlock overheard Sidney conspiring with Thiago, he has figured out it was she, not the CIA, who brought down the plane. They’re a little antagonistic to each other, then, and Sid proves the point by immediately trying to shoot him. It’s a half-decent opening action sequence undercut by some ropey CGI and the general stupidity of Sid straddling Havlock in the aftermath and claiming she never wanted to hurt him — right after repeatedly trying to shoot him. But this is a more complicated statement than it first appears, and requires a run of flashbacks to properly explain.
These flashbacks are exceedingly tedious. We get to see Sid being tipped off about the death of her father being an inside job by a double-agent named Viktor Voss, who is on the run from the Russian FSB. Thanks to Sid’s ingenuity in improvising an explosive to fight off some Russkie goons who arrive to take him out, Voss is able to stay alive just long enough to tell her that it was he who killed her father. But on whose orders? You won’t be surprised to learn it was Bradford, since you don’t just cast Alfre Woodard in something like this for no reason.
It takes Sid and Havlock roughly five minutes of investigating to realise that Bradford was killing agents in the field, and that Havlock will be next on her agenda. The ping-ponging structure makes this “reveal” much more complicated-seeming than it really is. But just in case we don’t get it, Sid’s mother tells her the truth about her father, which leads her to Thiago, who had met him as a lowly translator and remained by his side throughout many dangerous missions in many unsavoury places. He’s on-hand to explain outright why Bradford’s really a villain.
In short, Sid’s dad established the Atwater Protocol as a last-resort initiative to get rid of truly bothersome individuals, but Bradford co-opted it as a way to eradicate all of her perceived enemies without any oversight — all while lining her own pockets, of course. She was eliminating the assets to keep the program secret, and when Sid’s dad discovered this, he began collecting enough intelligence to expose her. That’s a surefire way to get killed in the intelligence community, and so it was.
The key dilemma for Sid in The Last Frontier Episode 8 is whether she’ll decide to side with Havlock, who wants the pair of them to go on the run together and use the threat of releasing Archive 6 to keep the CIA off their backs, or whether she’ll go completely rogue to try and take Bradford down. This isn’t an especially compelling dilemma, though, since we already know what she chooses. There’s a ridiculous faux-emotional moment when she calls Havlock right before his capture to reveal she isn’t coming to meet him, and it feels like it’d play relatively well in a completely different show which perhaps told this story in a completely opposite way.
From there, we key a cliff’s notes version of Sid and Thiago planning to bring down the plane, which they assumed would be a cargo plane and not a Federal prison transport, and then pulling the job off, with a bit more of Havlock heroically taking control of the aircraft and helping to land it (which, again, we already knew happened.) So, Sid was trying to kill Havlock, believing his death would help in the mission of exposing Bradford and the CIA. Needless to say, he’s not exactly thrilled about this, but to keep himself alive, in the present day, he gives Sid a hard copy of Archive 6. She even has a climactic to-do with Bradford over the phone, who promises her that the CIA is coming for her. At this point, I don’t even know who we’re supposed to be rooting for.
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