SERIES REVIEW – After the haunting chill of True Detective: Night Country, Apple TV+’s The Last Frontier dives headfirst into chaos. Where the former whispered, this one shouts; where mystery once lingered in the dark, now explosions light up the snow. The result is a series that’s equal parts ridiculous, entertaining, and strangely self-aware — a blizzard of action and absurdity that never quite melts away.

True Detective: Night Country proved that Alaska’s darkness could be hauntingly beautiful — a perfect backdrop for human frailty, myth, and moral rot. Issa López and Jodie Foster crafted a world that was cold yet magnetic, terrifying yet intimate. The Last Frontier uses the same frozen wilderness but takes it in the exact opposite direction: instead of psychological tension, we get cinematic mayhem and high-octane nonsense. Imagine Fargo colliding with The Blacklist while a Michael Bay movie rages in the background — that’s the tone here, and the show knows it.

Created by The Blacklist’s Jon Bokenkamp and writer Richard D’Ovidio, The Last Frontier declares its intentions early with a fiery, over-the-top plane crash that scatters dozens of convicts across the Alaskan tundra. Enter Frank Remnick (Jason Clarke), a weary U.S. Marshal who’s just returned to Fairbanks after a rough patch in Chicago. The show works best when it embraces its network-TV DNA — one man, one town, one lunatic at a time. It’s structured like a throwback procedural dressed up with Apple’s glossy production, and somehow that mix of nostalgia and lunacy keeps it watchable.

Spy Games in the Snow

The story stumbles once Frank is paired with CIA agent Sidney Scofield (Haley Bennett), dragging the show into an overcomplicated espionage subplot that nobody asked for. Among the escaped prisoners is a rogue operative known as Havlock — a man so dangerous he’s introduced chained and hooded on the plane. Stunt veteran Sam Hargrave, who also directs the pilot, plays a deranged inmate who seems to be Havlock, until the twist reveals the real traitor: Levi Hartman (Dominic Cooper), a former recruit of Sidney’s who now takes Frank’s wife, Sarah (Simone Kessell), hostage. On paper, this sounds thrilling. In execution, it’s a swamp of jargon about stolen data, Russian hackers, and the deep state — a PowerPoint presentation disguised as a thriller.

Sidney’s character gets far too much focus, and rather than serving as a sharp contrast to Frank’s grounded lawman persona, she hijacks the spotlight. Haley Bennett’s wide-eyed portrayal doesn’t sell the “seasoned spy” image, and her chemistry with Cooper could freeze solid. Even powerhouses Alfre Woodard and John Slattery, playing her superiors, are stranded behind desks in Langley — strong actors wasted on video calls. The midseason stretch drowns in bureaucratic babble, trading tension for exposition until the show feels like it’s chasing its own tail through the snow.

Snowmobiles, Mayhem, and Unintentional Comedy

Whenever the plot starts to drag, The Last Frontier compensates with gloriously overblown action. Snowmobile chases, helicopter shootouts, and trucks dangling off cliffs — each set piece is more delirious than the last, as if the writers are daring Apple to cancel them mid-explosion. Frank and his small-town deputies face off against femme fatales, deranged doctors, and half-naked criminals rampaging through the storm. It’s pure pulp, and it works. The show’s melodramatic backstories — Frank’s trauma, his failing marriage — don’t weigh it down; they add to its campy charm. Even the jaunty opening credits seem to wink at the audience, fully aware that this is Apple’s least “Apple-like” series to date.

By the final episodes, The Last Frontier has buried its best ideas under layers of CIA conspiracies and nepotism. Sidney’s daddy issues as the daughter of a legendary agent do little to justify her presence, and the spy thriller elements never mesh with the pulpy survival tone. You can feel the show losing its grip on what made it fun — the snow, the chaos, the unfiltered madness of Alaska. By the end, you’re not watching for the mystery or the drama. You just want another snowstorm, another ridiculous explosion, another excuse for the show to stop pretending and start entertaining again.

-Gergely Herpai “BadSector”-