Last year, HBO’s “True Detective: Night Country” embraced the eerie potential of the Alaskan wilderness as the backdrop of an absorbing mystery. Drawing on Native folklore, rural isolation and all-consuming Arctic darkness, director Issa López created a sense of place that was just as fundamental to the anthology series’ season as Jodie Foster’s star power.

The Apple TV+ thriller “ The Last Frontier ” takes the same setting in a much goofier direction, if knowingly so. Where “Night Country” was all moody prestige, “The Last Frontier” is borderline camp, starting with the fiery CGI plane crash that unleashes dozens of convicts on the snowy jurisdiction of U.S. Marshal Frank Remnick ( Jason Clarke ), who’s returned to his hometown of Fairbanks after a traumatizing few years in Chicago.

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