The Last Frontier Originally Had A Very Different Finale [Exclusive]

This article contains major spoilers for the season 1 finale of "The Last Frontier."

I guess you could say that the frigid, Alaska-set action of "The Last Frontier" finally heated up during the events of the finale. (Sorry, sorry, we're trying to delete it.) The Apple TV series came to an appropriately explosive end after 10 episodes of twists and turns. Not only did our main trio of characters help blow the whistle on a government conspiracy, but they ended up having to reckon with the tough, personal choices they made along the way ... supposedly for the greater good.

One of those choices was the premiere-opening plane crash that unleashed all those convicts into the wild, which we learn rogue CIA operative Sidney Scofield (Haley Bennett) was responsible for causing. This was revealed during a nearly hour-long flashback in episode 8, but that wasn't always the plan. In an interview with /Film, showrunner Jon Bokenkamp explained how he and his writing team initially had a different ending in mind — one that would've saved this shocker for last. Here's why they changed course, according to Bokenkamp:

"I love a good twist at the end. I love a good Keyser Soze or 'I see dead people,' you name it. I love those hooks. But because it's a series, it felt like — we originally were thinking that might be the end of the season. 'Oh my God,' [Sydney] walks out and we realize, 'She's behind all this?' But then, as a TV show, that felt like it would be gimmicky [or] like a hook, 'come back next season,' as opposed to giving the audience full resolution, ending this story, living with the fallout of that reveal for two, three more episodes. And that's why we decided to move [the episode] up."

Of course, any good espionage story lives or dies by its biggest reveals ... but the truly great ones are able to stand up to scrutiny after the fact, without ever feeling like a cheat. "The Last Frontier" packs a whopper of a twist with the Sydney Scofield revelation, slowly explaining to audiences why she took it upon herself to doom her own lover (Dominic Cooper's Havlock) to certain death along with the rest of the inmates transported on the military plane. By necessity, she withholds that key detail from both characters and viewers alike for almost the entirety of the season, even as she's sent by her CIA superior Jacqueline Bradford (Alfre Woodard) to investigate the snowbound crash site and keep Jason Clarke's US Marshal Frank Remnick in the dark.

As Jon Bokenkamp discussed elsewhere in our conversation, that structuring process was both "painstaking" and "difficult," but totally worth the trouble. Even as this constant attempt to hold things back from viewers caused headaches in the writers' room at times, the creative team made sure that they were "playing fair" right alongside Sydney herself — mainly to reward anyone who decides to revisit the season with that reveal in mind. As Bokenkamp explained:

"I think everything we were doing all season long is building toward that [reveal]. And if you watch it again, I do think you re-contextualize and do see things that they're saying, things that [Sydney's] talking about that all — she's playing fair the whole time, she's just withholding information like a good spy."

"The Last Frontier" can be both thrilling and somewhat frustrating in equal measure, but it always stays true to the characters involved. All 10 episodes are now streaming on Apple TV.