The Last Frontier on Apple TV episode 4 review

SPOILER ALERT: The following contains spoilers for The Last Frontier Season 1, Episode 4.

Now that The Last Frontier is well into its mystery, the Apple TV show has to start putting pieces together. It’s laid out all its backstory and viewers want to understand what it all means. “American Dream,” however, results in more questions than answers. The story is still engaging — but it’s too splintered.

It’s become apparent that the individual fugitive stories that give the series a “case of the week” style backbone are the least interesting part of The Last Frontier. In “American Dream,” two mismatched fugitives team up just so one of them can deceive the other and steal her millions. The characters of Katherine Van Horn and Vivian Pike simply aren’t that compelling, and the twist that relatively harmless Vivian had a master plan all along has been done before.

This pales in comparison to the ongoing situation with Havlock, and the budding duo of Frank Remnick and Sidney Scofield. Episode 4 sets up at least some idea of what Havlock is doing — the cryptic but very valuable Archive 6 has been stolen and a courier is meeting him in Alaska — but there’s gotten to be a little too much vagueness around what his endgame actually is, most of that delivered by Sidney. It wouldn’t…