In The Last Stand, premiering Friday on Apple TV+, a plane carrying federal prisoners crashes in the Alaskan wilderness near the town where Frank Remnick (Jason Clarke) is a U.S. Marshal. Eighteen passengers survive, including a supersoldier we come to know as Havelock (Dominic Cooper). Sad intelligence agent Sidney Scofield (Haley Bennett) is sent to the scene by his cunning boss (American treasure Alfre Woodard).
I won't go into too much detail about this, especially given the sheer number of reveals and reversals that make up the plot; Almost everything not written here is a spoiler. The production is excellent, with well-executed set pieces – a 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 a problem with the songs on the soundtrack, which kill rather than lift the mood.) The large cast, which includes Simone Kessel as Frank's wife, Sarah, has nearly put family trauma behind them when opportunities for more trauma arise – and Dallas GoldtoothWilliam Knifeman from “Reservation Dog” as Frank's right-hand man, Hutch, is very good.
It's as brutal as you'd expect from a series that sees 18 desperate criminals go free, which you might consider cute or killer. (I don't know you.) At 10 episodes, with a lot of plot to keep in order, 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 odd, especially when characters turn out to be not who they seem. Things get pretty crazy towards the end, but overall it's an interesting ride.
But I didn't come here to discuss this. I'd like to talk about snow.
There's a lot of snow in The Last Frontier. The climate of the far north literally adds to the weather. Snow can be beautiful or an obstacle. It could be a blanket, as in Eliot's “Winter kept us warm, covering the Earth with forgetful snow,” or a straitjacket, as in 2023. “Murder at the End of the World” a Christie-style murder mystery that leaves the suspects trapped in an Icelandic luxury hotel. It's part of the aesthetic and part of the action it can slow or stop. It can be deadly, disorienting, like when a snowstorm obliterates the landscape (see the first season of Fargo). And for this you need the right clothes – scarves, fur collars, woolen hats, big boots, gloves – that create coziness, even emphasizing the cold.
The snowy landscape in shows like The Last Frontier is part of the aesthetic and the action.
(Apple)
Even when it doesn't directly impact the plot, it's the canvas on which the story is written, its whiteness with an intensity not otherwise seen on screen except in the corridors of a starship. (After dark it turns a moody blue, adding to the sense of mystery.) I grew up in Southern California—I didn't see real snow until I was 10 years old? “I was taught by cinema and television, where Christmas is all white, if the budget allows, to understand its meaning.
The fact that The Last Frontier was set in Alaska (filmed in Quebec and Alberta) was enough to pique my interest, as was the case with “Alaska Daily” The sadly short-lived 2022 ABC series stars Hilary Swank and Secwepem actress Grace Dove as reporters investigating overlooked cases of murder and missing Indigenous women. This may have something to do with 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 fish-out-of-water New York doctor; “People in the Trees” (filmed in British Columbia and set in Alaska) sent New York relationship coach Anne Heche down a similar path. “Lilyhammer”, “ another beloved and first Netflix “exclusive” series, starring Steven Van Zandt as an American gangster in witness protection in a small Norwegian town; there was a ton of snow on this show.
It also serves the fantastic and supernatural. The polar episodes of His Dark Materials and Monarch: Legacy of Monsters, the ice-bound sailing ships of the Terror are vivid in my memory; and there's no denying the eerie, claustrophobic power of “Nightland,” the fourth season of True Detective, which begins on the night of the last sunset in six months, its fictional town an oasis of light in a black desert. In a different vein, North of North, another remote small-town comedy set in Canada's northernmost indigenous Inuit territory, is one of my favorite series of 2025.
But the appeal of the north is nothing new. Jack London's Yukon-set White Fang and The Call of the Wild – which became Animal Planet for the 2000 season – captivated readers at the turn of the 19th century and are still being read today.
Of course, any setting can be exotic if it is unfamiliar. (And invisible if it's not, or annoying if snow is the thing you have to shovel off your walk, its charm evaporates.) Every environment suggests or shapes the stories that happen there; even if the plots were identical, for example, a mystery set in Amarillo would play out differently than a mystery set in Duluth or Lafayette.
I'll take Alaska.
