REVIEW: ‘The Last Frontier’ — Episode 8 “L’air Perdu”

This review features spoilers for The Last Frontier Episode 8, “L’air Perdu”.

Death to flashback episodes. Here we were, hot off probably the best episode yet of The Last Frontier in “Change of Time,” and what happens? How do we build upon that narrative momentum? With a flashback episode.

The Last Frontier Episode 8, titled “L’air Perdu,” is about how we got here, when what I mostly wanted to see was what happened next. The result is an episode I can’t really write about in any way without spoiling all of the events that the show seems to think are A Big Reveal ™ . The issue is that many of them aren’t, really. I’m not sure I needed to know everything that got us here.

Does it help us understand the characters better? Yeah, sure, I suppose. Do I need a massive Lore Dump as we’re rounding into the final stretch? No. It doesn’t fundamentally change my perspective on much. It’s weird. And we don’t really end in a much different place than where we started, except maybe with Sidney Schofield (Haley Bennett), who, as it turns out, is actually our main character.

The Last Frontier Episode 8 is all about the past and not in a good way.

Because it is a flashback, this episode focuses almost exclusively on Sidney and Levi/Havlock (Dominic Cooper), their relationship, and Sidney’s complex relationships with Vincent Thiago (Anthony Skordi) and Jacqueline Bradford (Alfre Woodard).  As it turns out, everything in The Last Frontier is about Sidney, actually, and not Havlock.

That’s an interesting revelation, and one we kind of got at the end of Episode 7, but The Last Frontier Episode 8 lays it all out really clearly. It’s about Sidney, and her father, and the CIA, and Levi, and what happens to assets that have outlived their usefulness, and what that has driven her to do. It’s compelling and tragic, and Bennett does admirable work as Sidney is forced to make some absolutely horrifying choices based on what she comes to learn.

Some of these choices make her much less sympathetic. Others make her more sympathetic in certain ways. But all of them reframe every single choice we’ve seen her make, and her relationship with everyone, including Frank (Jason Clarke), who is barely in this episode, and Levi.

The real beneficiary of this episode, however, might be Thiago. Skordi turns in a great performance despite often being forced to deliver exposition so the audience can follow along, but I understood him far better than I expected to. When he said he was doing this to save his soul in Episode 7, he wasn’t kidding.

The problem with episodes like this is that a lot of it could have been a conversation or two. We don’t need these extended flashbacks that halt narrative momentum, so we can understand everything about what has led us to this point.

It turns the story from the one we’ve been experiencing throughout this season of TV into another, secret story that has been simmering beneath the surface the whole time. I’m not against this in theory; there’s a reason so many television shows use this storytelling technique in the second-to-last episode of a season.

To its credit, The Last Frontier deploys it in Episode 8, and not Episode 9, the penultimate of the series. Still, the result is frustrating. Here, it just means that Frank, his family and friends, the town of Fairbanks, and even the convicts on that plane were essentially side characters.

The Last Frontier Episode 8 exacerbates a modern TV problem. 

The Last Frontier Episode 8 changes this show. Before, it was something they were a part of; now, it is something that happened to them. I’m not sure that’s better, and it is frustrating to see this technique deployed so much that it becomes this predictable.

This is not necessarily a problem with The Last Frontier Episode 8; it is a problem with modern television. If this episode had started with the way Episode 7 had ended, with the reveal that this was all about Sidney, I think this might work better. As is, we spend most of this episode in the past, re-living events we’ve already seen with additional context. It’s not bad, to be clear. It just drags the show to a stop after an action-packed opening that promises something more.

And yet, we do end the episode in an interesting place, and I’d be lying if I told you I wasn’t interested to see where we might end up. I don’t think The Last Frontier Episode 8 is great television.

To be honest, I’m not sure I think The Last Frontier Episode 8 is good. It’s fine. But it does set up greater possibilities that… the previous episode also already set up. Now we just have more context, at the cost of one of our ten episodes. I don’t think it was a good trade. Hopefully, next week we’ll finally see where things are going.

The Last Frontier Episode 8 is streaming now on Apple TV with new episodes every Friday.

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