My initial gripes with The Last Frontier (series)

I have started to raise my standards as far as series are concerned and this does seem to be cyclical in nature. At the moment we have quite a few good series available and therefore I am less likely to "suffer fools" like I would normally be forced to in other times of the year.

The Last Frontier looked to me as though it may have some potential but after just 1.5 episodes I can see that this is simply not going to be good and even after just this short 90 minutes or so, I can already tell that they have filled this up with a ton of "fluff" in order to get a full 10 episodes in the season. Episode 1 moved rather rapidly and almost all the parts of it were relevant, but that starts to vanish as early as 20 minutes into episode 2.

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I can sometimes deal with a certain amount of silly filler slop but in the case of The Last Frontier this is just the tip of the iceberg. Not only is a great deal of what we are presented with rather uneventful and skips all over the place and not in a cohesive central story, but a great many of the subplots that they introduce are completely nonsensical and implausible in nature.

I am going to go into detail about this so just know that there are definitely spoilers ahead.

I don't think this show is worth watching

I think they actually do a pretty good job early on in episode 1 where they are able to introduce us the real city of Fairbanks, Alaska mostly by "showing, not telling." We are able to tell that this is a rather remote city of very few inhabitants, but enough inhabitants that they have things like modern schools, hospitals, store, restaurants, infrastructure and what not.

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Congratulations on that guys. The first episode at least does a good job of establishing exactly where we are and who the main characters are going to be. Then things get wonky really fast.

The main thing that happens and the whole reason why there is a show here is because a plane carrying prisoners is taking off from somewhere in Alaska nearby Fairbanks and it is no small plane. It is something big and this is the first problem that I have with the overall plot. There is a relatively large plane filled with passengers that is taking off from a remote airstrip in Alaska. Well, where were they going, where did they come from, it's not like there is a huge prison population in sparsely populated Alaska. Were they going to drop everyone off in Russia or something? It doesn't make any sense right from the get go.

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Things get a lot more nonsensical though because after the plane crashes, apparently nobody gets alerted about it. The only reason that US Marshals find out that a plane crashed there is because someone out in the woods saw smoke in the distance and contacted the police to go check it out.

Now I would understand if this was some sort of rogue Russian plane in US territory in the 60's, but this flight is meant to happen in modern times where the alerts would have gone out to everyone before the plane even crashed. Yet, by the time it the plane is discovered, a full night has passed and nobody has so much as received a phone call about it.

Some apologists might chalk this up to it being some sort of super-secret government mission and that's fine and all, but the government would have had their own response team then and it wouldn't just sit in the wood slowly burning (because that's totally how commercial airline crashes work) while nobody even knows it is there.

This brings me to my next point about everyone on board surviving the night. The people on the plane are mostly dressed in prison fatigues or uniforms. The temperature in most of Alaska is "kill you cold" especially at night. Yet nobody seems to take issue with this aboard the plane even though as we later find out, most of the passengers have wandered off in various directions.

When the Marshals first arrive on the scene, they are ambushed by orange jump-suit convicts and one of the Marshals, that we will just call "fat cop" get the stabby stabby treatment from one of the prisoners and is airlifted out of there. Fat cop is fine... he smiling, he's talking, he's confirming that he is in pain but will be fine. Ok, all good. Nope! now he's dead.

Why? Because they needed to advance the plot and put a revenge sort of spin on things at the last minute I guess. Despite the fact that they were just ambushed and one of their officers was killed, they decide to sit on their hands and wait until the next friggin day before they so much as go back there.

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Now they have a big team of soldier-types including a CIA operative that starts to spill the beans on the main baddy that was on board this plane. She (of course it is a she) explains that this fugitive is a very high profile prisoner so well, of course it makes sense that he would be on a plane with a ton of other prisoners rather than on his own transport. You remember how when the real life Russian "Lord of War" was transported back to Russia in a prisoner swap and they put him on a plane with a ton of other people? Of course you don't, because that isn't how the world works.

Later we are informed that the local school has been put into lockdown with nobody allowed in or out... so obviously a couple of teens who just happen to be related to major characters immediately escape in broad daylight completely undetected.

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This is the sort of lazy and completely improbably plot contrivance that really annoys me about films or series but there is another one coming that annoys me even more.

Our super-baddy needs to cover his tracks so he goes and blows up a telecom tower that he just happens to know exactly where it is and is capable of getting there, breaking in, blowing it up, and nobody so much as says "hey! what are you doing?"

This wipes out all telecom for the region because that is totally how telecom works. Just one tower for the entire region. There's no redundancies, no governmental backup system, no Starlink, nothing. The entire region just no longer has the ability to communicate inside the region or to the outside world.

This is the action series / film equivalent of teenagers at a cabin in the woods that conveniently doesn't have any mobile service. Why? Because the bullshit plot-armor needs it to be that way.

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I haven't watched it enough to know for sure and likely wont do so, but I would imagine that they are going to continue doing what they have already done once in the little bit of show that I have seen and that is they are going to chase down a few of the minor escapees thinking they are on the trail of the main baddy who is known as "Havlock."

At least you will get to see Johnny Knoxville, who I genuinely appreciate as an actor, if you bother to carry on that long.

I simply cannot do so though until I completely run out of anything else to watch because if they have already introduced so many convenient and impossible aspects to the plot already, you can be assured they are going to continue doing so. This sort of story-telling isn't predictable, but for all the wrong reasons. This is just a long string of "somehow Palpatine returned!" occurrences, one after the next. There is no cohesive storyline to follow because the writers apparently are not at all concerned with plausibility or having any sort of coherent timeline. They just want to keep you on the edge of your seats I guess.

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_{i wasn't on the edge of my seat, i was off my seat going to do something other than watch this crap}

Well I'm afraid that this sort of thing doesn't work on me. I like surprises sure, but I also want them to be things that actually could fit in with what I have seen up to that point. I don't want magical fast-travel or very convenient things thrown in that are necessary for the story to move forward.

This is an Alaskan "Prison Break" where a new main character is going to be introduced and eliminated each episode until we finally get to Havlock by episode 10.

I'm not going to stick around that long because although I wouldn't say I exactly use my time wisely in life, I use it too well to waste it on 10 hours of this crap.

_{if you insist on torturing yourself instead of watching Pluribus or Land Man (both great shows) it is only legally available on AppleTV+}