Jacque Dies, Havlock Escapes, Season 2

SPOILER ALERT: This post contains spoilers from “Everything Trying,” the Season 1 finale “The Last Frontier, now streaming on Apple TV.

The season finale of Apple TV+’s “The Last Frontier” would have looked a lot different if its creators had stuck to their original plan.

In the final hour, CIA agent Sidney (Haley Bennett) and Havlock (Dominic Cooper) corner their former boss Jacque (Alfre Woodard) at a conspicuously vacant but operational dam, pressuring her to fess up to a career of burning agents and feeding them to the wolves –– some of whom had showed up to back the married couple’s coup. But in the chaos of a gunfight, Jacque breaks free and fights Sidney with a literal axe before being sent over the dam to her watery and chilly grave. While fending off Jacque, Sidney is stabbed, leaving U.S. marshal Frank (Jason Clarke) to use a dog sled to transport her to the hospital for a life-saving blood transfusion. Does it get any more Alaskan than that? Then, Havlock fakes his own death while Sidney recovers and faces prosecution, giving the appearance that everything from the season premiere’s plane crash (remember when this was a prisoner-of-the-week show?) is finally cleaned up.

But Frank isn’t buying it. In the end, his plans to open a bed and breakfast with his wife Sarah (Simone Kessell) in their once-quiet corner of the world are immediately jeopardized when Havlock calls his former sparring partner with a warning –– ”Your corner of the world is now the center of everything,” Havlock professes, as he gets ready to stage a prison break for his incarcerated wife, Sidney.

But none of that was supposed to happen, at least not yet, because creators Jon Bokenkamp and Richard D’Ovidio originally discussed leaving the audience with the bombshell that Sidney was behind the plane crash orchestrated to expose the agency’s secrets. Instead, that revelation came in Episode 7 of the 10-episode first season.

“Richard and I had talked for a long time about how the reveal that Sidney was behind the plane crash felt like a great gut punch to take you out at the end of the season, in a Keyser Söze sort of way,” Bokenkamp tells Variety. “But in a time where there are so many cliffhangers on so many shows that stop and come back two years later to pick up the story, we felt like the most fair thing to do for the audience was to have that reveal a little bit earlier. It’s the end of our second act, and then you live with it and let it unfold and see the ramifications of that through the finale.”

With big reveal about Sidney out of the way, the series was able to bring its real villain to the forefront –– Woodard’s cold, calculated bureaucrat Jacque. Originally, the role was written for a “crusty, old white man,” Bokenkamp says. But when Woodard expressed interest, she asked they change only one thing: the character’s name went from Jack to Jacque. Otherwise, Woodard was on board for the incredibly physical finale set piece that begins with a declaration fit for a battlefield  –– “If I must be painted the villain, please, please paint my colors bright,” Jacque screams into the universe as she jams a knife into a guy’s neck.

“She was all in,” Bokenkamp says of the Oscar nominee. “She was on those wires clear up in the sky, hanging off sets. She was carrying that axe. It was very physical. She didn’t want to take the edges off, and that got us excited.”

Speaking of the axe, Jacque is out for blood, and she wields an axe to get it from Sidney, who is trying to upload Archive 6 to expose Jacque’s misdeeds. “That axe fight was Daniel Hargrave, our stunt coordinator, and his team,” Bokenkamp adds. “We can script that there are axes in the scene, but it’s not until Daniel and his team get in there that it’s like the crazy cousins at Christmas who go nuts trying to figure out how to make it bigger and crazier.”

Ultimately, Jacque’s desperate measures end with her and Sidney dangling from the dam wall, and Jacque has the unfortunate fate of joining the fishes at the bottom. Even with a game Woodard in their arsenal, the creators never second guessed killing her off. They only doubted whether or not they should prove it to the audience.

“We needed the satisfaction of somebody going into the drink and knowing that they’re not coming back,” Bokenkamp says. “We had scripted that we found bits of Jacque down the river, but we didn’t quite go that far.”

While it takes Frank’s sled-dog skills and a tremendous amount of blood, Sidney survives her encounter with Jacque, only to awaken to the crushing reality check of what she has done. In order to avenge her father, she downed a plane with her husband on it, lied to Frank and jeopardized the safety of his entire town. In front of her may be jail time, but she is far more concerned with the personal reckoning that awaits her, even if Frank tries to soothe her guilt with kind words –– “Your father would agree that you’ve spent yourself on a worthy cause.”

“She certainly regrets what happened,” D’Ovidio says. “When she found out that the plane was full of inmates and innocent people, that’s where we meet her in the opening scene when she starts drinking in the car. We come back around to that moment to show why she was in so much pain before she goes into that party. She has to put on this face where she pretends she doesn’t know anything about the disaster in front of her. So when you watch it again, I think you will see she was changed all the way back in the beginning.”

For now, Frank is also a changed man. After he confessed to his wife and son about really happened in Chicago –– that he planted evidence to get the wrong man convicted of his daughter’s murder –– they come home to the cabin with one request: He must bury the remaining evidence so they can move on (we would have chosen to dispose of it in a river that isn’t a popular fishing hole, but that’s just us). In a flashforward, the family is all smiles as they give the cabin a face lift ahead of the bed and breakfast’s opening. But that’s when Havlock calls, cautioning Frank to not get too comfortable in his quiet life.

“I hope what’s relatable about Frank is that he will always answer that call,” Bokenkamp says. “He doesn’t have to, but it’s who he is. It is his self-concept, you know? I relate to that. We invest so much of ourselves in our work, and it’s not just a job. Frank very much feels that way, perhaps in a little bit of a romanticized way. But that’s a difficult thing to switch off. Whatever the case of the season or week, or who the bad guy is, he’d answer that call if it was a cat in the tree. That’s the impulse Frank has to fight.”

Bokenkamp and D’Ovidio have already pondered possible Season 2 stories off Havlock’s call, although the series is still awaiting a greenlight from Apple.

“I think that we’ve discussed many avenues to take with the second season, but we’ve pretty much exhausted a lot of stories in Alaska,” D’Ovidio says, acknowledging the show changed drastically from the plane crash premiere to the government espionage finale.

With Havlock poised to spring Sidney from jail, a Bonnie and Clyde-style vigilante duo could be one possibility for the future. “We’ve certainly talked a lot about where they end up, maybe a beach somewhere.” Bokenkamp says. “But it also occurs to me that the U.S. Marshals hunt bad guys around the world. Sidney and Havlock represent a problem to Frank, but that doesn’t mean they are his only problem.”

So fans probably shouldn’t bother booking time in the quaint bed and breakfast the Remnicks are building, huh?

“Season 2 could certainly involve a bed and breakfast, but it probably won’t be quite like ‘Newhart,” Bokenkamp says with a laugh. “Frank might have to let that one go.”