The Last Frontier

The Weight of the Cold

Snow first. Endless snow. A wall of white that seems ready to swallow everybody in it.

And right after that, Jason Clarke’s shoulders. In *The Last Frontier*, Apple TV's latest swing at the neo-Western thriller, Clarke plays U.S. Marshal Frank Remnick like a man lugging around invisible scrap metal. After years of watching him weaponize slipperiness in things like *Oppenheimer* and *Zero Dark Thirty*, there’s something oddly compelling about seeing him settle into worn-out hero mode. His whole body sags. He squints at the ice as if the landscape itself is an accusation. Mostly he looks like he’d love five quiet minutes and knows he isn’t getting them.



The show makes sure of that quickly. A prison transport plane goes down in the wilderness, releasing a crowd of violent inmates along with a prized CIA black-ops prisoner named Havlock (Dominic Cooper), and Frank gets shoved into a long, freezing manhunt. Normally I’m a little resistant to these "competent man pushed past the limit" stories because there are already too many of them. But Sam Hargrave directs the crash in the pilot with a nasty kind of focus. He ditches the heroic score, lets us hear the tearing metal and the terrible pocket of silence before impact, then slams us into the snow. The camera stays close on the passengers’ faces instead of pulling back for spectacle. There’s nowhere comfortable to stand in the scene. You feel pinned inside that fuselage.



I’m less convinced by what comes after. Jon Bokenkamp and Richard D'Ovidio eventually settle the series into a strange back-and-forth rhythm: part stripped-down survival thriller, part conspiracy machine with too many moving pieces. Sometimes those halves talk to each other. Sometimes they just rub raw. Clint Worthington at *RogerEbert.com* was dead on when he said the show "flits between two distinct modes, one entertaining and one frustrating." The conspiracy plotting asks for a lot of exposition, and you can sense the actors itching to stop explaining things and start doing them.



Then Haley Bennett arrives as Sidney Scofield, a CIA agent sent in to manage the fallout, and the show regains some of its center. Bennett plays her with a brittle, permanently braced kind of tension. Even indoors, she keeps her arms tucked in close, like she never really believes she’s warm. Her scenes with Clarke help tether the series whenever the larger plot starts floating off into nonsense. Dallas Goldtooth helps too, sliding in with just enough dry humor to puncture the gloom. A quick aside, but he may have the cleanest comic timing on television right now.

When *The Last Frontier* ignores the louder conspiracy machinery and just watches two people stalk each other through lethal cold, it gets under the skin. It leaves you tired, chilled, and newly aware of how flimsy the human body looks against that much landscape. The show isn’t seamless. But the parts that bite do not let go easily.