REVIEW: ‘The Last Frontier’ Episode 7 — “Change of Time”

This review features spoilers for The Last Frontier Episode 7, “Change of Time.” 

You can’t run from yourself. Last week, I wrote that one of The Last Frontier’s biggest strengths was that it’s always About Something ™. Each episode has a theme, a dramatic throughline, and while plot threads can take a while to come together, they ultimately do, usually in a satisfying way.

The Last Frontier Episode 7 is about the sins of the past catching up with you. You can run, you can hide, you can escape for a little while. But nobody ever gets away with anything. Ever. The truth always comes out. The birds always come home to roost. We reap what we sow. And you can’t escape yourself.

The Last Frontier Episode 7 continues to capitalize on its dramatic throughlines.

For Frank Remnick (Jason Clarke), that means dealing with the fallout from the discovery of the game he’s been hiding, and finally coming to terms with his role in what happened to his daughter, Ruby (Mia SwamiNathan), and the aftermath that revelation has on his relationships with Sarah (Simone Kessell) and Luke (Tait Blum).

For Sidney (Haley Bennett), that means realizing that the CIA is trying to pin all of this on her, and her life might functionally be over. For Havlock (Dominic Cooper), it’s realizing that he might not be as in control of this as he thought. All of these realizations come with fallout, but perhaps none are as they appear at first. After all, this is a story about coverups and undercover agents. How many of these people do you really trust?

All of this comes as Frank and Sidney try to round up the last of the escaped convicts and figure out what the deal is with Thiago (Anthony Skordi), a man they have in custody and whose identity seems to have been erased by the CIA. Who is he? Why was he trying to kill Havlock? And where is Havlock anyway?

“Change of Time” recontextualizes many of its core characters.

All of this comes to a head in The Last Frontier Episode 7, and we end the episode with a substantially different view of many of these characters than we started with. Suddenly, so many of their decisions make so much more sense and are recontextualized.

The Last Frontier Episode 7 has humor (there is a particularly funny sequence in which Frank and company have to take down a very large inmate who looks vaguely like Bill Goldberg, is high on bath salts, and is wearing nothing but his tighty whities).

Still, it’s largely an episode of silence, of shots lingering on actors as they show a grief their characters can’t voice, read letters we either see or don’t, deal with what’s just happened around them. Many of The Last Frontier Episode 7’s best moments are done quietly or in quick juxtapositions. Pick up your phone at the wrong moment and you’ll miss them, but that doesn’t make them any less compelling.

The Last Frontier Episode 7 uses music exceptionally well. 

This episode also builds a sense of tone from its three needle drops. All three are effective, but the one that stuck out to me was its use of Fever Ray’s “If I Had a Heart.”

Licensed music is always hit or miss, but it works well here as a way to communicate mood, and if I’m going to call out The Last Frontier Episode 3’s use of “Country as F**k,” I have to give credit where it’s due here. There is some melodrama here, but none of it feels out of place, especially once the credits roll.

Everything has a price. Everyone has a secret. Everyone has regrets that define who they are. And everyone puts on a face for the rest of the world. Sometimes, many faces. You never really know someone else, no matter how you’d like to. Or what is running to catch up with them.

The Last Frontier Episode 7 plays with that idea, and it makes for a good (and blessedly, again, not overly long at only 53 minutes) episode of TV, one that leaves us in a very different place than we started in, wondering what comes next and recontextualizing what we’ve seen. I’m very excited to see what happens next.

The Last Frontier Episode 7 is streaming now on Apple TV with new episodes every Friday. 

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