‘The Last Frontier’ review: The Arctic setting is part of the show’s appeal

In The Last Frontier, which premieres Friday on Apple TV+, a plane carrying federal prisoners lands in the Alaskan wilderness outside a town where Frank Remnick (Jason Clarke) is a U.S. marshal. Eighteen passengers survive, including a super-soldier we’ll come to know as Havelock (Dominic Cooper). Grieving intelligence agent Sydney Scofield (Haley Bennett) is sent to the scene by her devious boss (American Treasure Alfre Woodard).

I won’t go into it too deeply, especially given the sheer number of revelations and reversals that make up the plot; Pretty much everything not written here constitutes a spoiler. The production is excellent, with well-executed set pieces – the plane crash, a tug of war between a helicopter and a giant bus, a fight on a train, a fight on a dam. (I have problems with the songs on the soundtrack, which tend to kill rather than lift the mood.) The large cast, which includes Simone Kessel as Frank’s wife, Sarah — they’ve put a family trauma behind them when opportunities for new trauma arise — and Dallas Goldtooth, William Naifman’s “Reservation Dogs,” as Hutch, Frank’s right-hand man, is good. very.

It’s as violent as you’d expect from a series that unleashes 18 desperate criminals on the wild, which you might consider a draw or a deadly deal. (I don’t know you.) At 10 episodes, with so much plot to maintain, it can get confusing — even characters will say, “It’s complicated” or “It’s not that simple,” when asked to explain something — and some of the emotional arcs feel awkward, especially when the characters turn out not to be what they seem. Things get pretty weird towards the end, but overall it’s an interesting ride.

But that’s not what I came here to discuss. I’d like to talk about snow.

There’s a lot of snow in “The Last Frontier.” The climate of the Far North brings weather into the picture, literally. Snow can be beautiful, or a hindrance. It can be a blanket, as in Eliot’s “Winter Keeps Us Warm, and Covers the Earth with Forgotten Snows,” or a straitjacket, as in 2023’s “Murder at World’s End,” a Christie-style murder mystery that drops off the suspects in a luxury Icelandic hotel. It’s part of the aesthetic and part of the movement, and it can be slowed down or stopped. It can be deadly and disorienting, as when a blizzard wipes out the landscape (see Season 1 of “Fargo”). It requires appropriate clothing—mufflers, fur collars, wool hats, large boots, and gloves—that conveys comfort even while emphasizing the cold.

Even when it doesn’t directly affect the plot, it’s the canvas on which the story is painted, its whiteness with an intensity that can’t otherwise be seen on screen, except in the hallways of a spacecraft. (The color turns a moody blue after dark, adding to the sense of mystery.) I grew up in Southern California—didn’t see real snow until I was 10? — I’ve been trained through movies and television, where all Christmases are white if the budget allows, to understand their meaning.

That The Last Frontier was set in Alaska (it was filmed in Quebec and Alberta) was enough to pique my interest, as was Alaska Daily, an unfortunately short-lived 2022 series on ABC with Hilary Swank and Secwépemc actress Grace Dove as reporters investigating overlooked cases of women from Indigenous people killed and missing. This may be due to my love of “Northern Exposure” (set in Alaska, filmed in Washington state), with its storybook town and colorful characters, most of whom came from elsewhere, with Rob Morrow’s New York doctor pulling the fish out of water; “Men in Trees” (filmed in British Columbia and set in Alaska) sent New York relationship coach Anne Heche down a similar path. “Lilyhammer,” another favorite and the first “exclusive” series on Netflix, finds Steven Van Zandt as an American gangster in witness protection in a small Norwegian town; There was a ton of snow at this show.

It caters to the fantastic and the supernatural as well. The arctic episodes of His Dark Materials and Monarch: Legacy of the Monsters, and the ice-covered sailing ships of Terror live heavily in my mind; And there’s no denying the eerie, suffocating power of Night Country, the fourth season of True Detective, which begins on the night of the last sunset for six months, its fictional city an oasis of light in a black desert. In another key, North of the North, another remote small-town comedy set in the far north of Canada among the indigenous Inuit people, is one of my favorite shows of 2025.

But the attraction of the North is not new. Jack London’s Yukon-produced “White Fang” and “The Call of the Wild” — which became an Animal Planet series for the 2000 season — fascinated readers at the turn of the 19th century and are still read today.

Of course, any place can be strange if it is unfamiliar. (And invisible if it isn’t, or annoying—if snow is something you have to shovel from your walk, its magic evaporates.) Each environment suggests or shapes the stories set there; Even if the plots are identical, a mystery set in Amarillo, for example, will play out differently than one set in Duluth or Lafayette.

I’ll take Alaska.