Thriller The Last Frontier is far more silly than chilly

Escapism is a tricky needle to thread. Viewers are willing to engage in incredible amounts of suspension of disbelief if a show is entertaining enough to allow for the leaps in logic to be ignored. There is an entire industry built around carefully calibrating how much people will accept when it comes to unbelievable behavior and ridiculous coincidences (looking at you, 9-1-1). But when a project isn’t doing the work to stay engaging enough for its stupid characters and nonsensical plotting to be overlooked, it can be downright draining. Welcome to Apple TV+’s The Last Frontier, a straight-to-series order that looked at the insane twists of its streamer partner Smoke and threw its beer at it.

Much like Smoke, The Last Frontier opens with a bang. Jason Clarke casts an imposing figure as U.S. Marshal Frank Remnick, who lives in a small town on the edge of Alaska, the kind of place where everyone knows your name and you can see Russia from your house. Creators Jon Bokenkamp and Richard D’Ovidio sketch Remnick as an old-fashioned Western guy, the protector of his small-town people against outside enemies from the big city and the evil powers that be. He’s a Southern archetype transported to the snow-covered north who mumbles things like “Every day is another day stolen from death. I learnt that the hard way.” 

Remnick has a wife, Sarah (a wasted Simone Kessell, whose character just disappears in the last few episodes), and a son, Luke (Tait Blum), who is still recovering from the death of his sister four years ago. Of course, the Remnicks have trauma related to gun violence, although the way this one is portrayed in a flashback late in the season is pretty gross, both in how it plays into the big-city fears of the day and how manipulatively it’s directed.

If the idea is that Remnick flees the dangerous metropolis that helped lead to his daughter’s death for the relative safety of the middle of nowhere, everything changes when violence drops into his backyard in the form of a plane crash. The flight that pulls a Lost in this snowy land—and, to be fair, the sequence in which the plane goes down is pretty impressively staged, as is the subsequent fight and shoot-out—happened to be carrying a cargo of some of the most violent criminals in the world like a sort of Con Air: Northern Edition. Dozens of orange-wearing bad guys escape into the wild, giving The Last Frontier something to play with episodically as Remnick and his team chase them down. This lets the writers basically make two shows for a while: the episode-of-the-week hunt for escaped prisoners and one about the larger picture concerning the plane and its precious cargo that Remnick will undoubtedly uncover. The setup allows for a good amount of guest stars, like the always-excellent Clifton Collins Jr., who gets a couple chapters as a conspiracy nut hoping to take down an Alaskan research facility, as well as Rusty Schwimmer and Johnny Knoxville.