The Last Frontier on Apple TV+ is a cross between Con Air and The Fugitive
The Last Frontier producer Jon Bokenkamp and actors Jason Clarke and Simone Kessell talk about the new series and filming in Alaska
The new Apple TV+ series The Last Frontier begins with a plane crash in remote Alaska and a scramble for survivors. We learn that the plane was carrying a nasty bunch of federal inmates. Then we find out that the nastiest of them is part of a vast CIA conspiracy.
The action hardly lets up in what is being called a cross between Con Air and The Fugitive. Producer Jon Bokenkamp piles crisis after crisis in a nifty bit of hyper-aggressive storytelling.
“I am just super self-conscious about not wanting to bore the audience,” he says. “I really like something that has a kinetic energy. Sometimes I have to remind myself to slow down.”
The series stars Jason Clarke as the US Marshal in charge when the inmates stage an escape at 30,000 feet, littering his region with desperate criminals. Of 52 inmates on the flight, 23 die, 11 are captured, but 18 are missing. Asked by the feds if he has secured the perimeter, he responds: “This is Alaska. There is no perimeter.”
One of those missing inmates is a lethal, intelligent, CIA-trained killer who has a secret so dangerous that the agency sends one of their best to Alaska to help manage the situation, even if her allegiances are cloudy at best.
Bokenkamp, who created The Blacklist, has a cinematic scope and a twisted sense of humour – like when the prisoner plane goes down after a mysterious explosion, the inmates float in zero-G as if in a mid-air ballet as Elvis’ “Unchained Melody” plays.