Diksha Sundriyal
Apple TV+’s ‘The Last Frontier’ begins with a jailbreak that occurs 30,000 feet in the air. A plane carrying a group of criminals explodes midair, leading it to crash in the freezing Alaskan wilderness, at a short distance from the town of Fairbanks. While a lot of criminals die, some survive, and one of them is a high-priority prisoner known as Havlock. US Marshal and a native of Fairbanks, Frank Remnick, is put in charge of apprehending the escaped convicts, but for Havlock, he receives special help from the CIA in the form of Agent Sidney Scofield. To catch the criminal, Frank must know who he is, and that’s where the CIA’s Atwater Protocol comes into the picture. SPOILERS AHEAD.
The Fictional Atwater Protocol Catalyzes the Conflict in The Last Frontier
‘The Last Frontier’ is a fictional story that comes from the minds of Jon Bokenkamp and Richard D’Ovidio, with every character and plot line being made-up to serve a topsy-turvy ride to the viewers. The Atwater Protocol is mentioned in the first episode as a highly covert CIA black ops program, and much like everything else in the show, this, too, is a fabrication. There is no real-life Atwater Protocol. There is something called the Atwater System, but it is concerned with determining calories in a food item and has nothing to do with a top-secret spy mission. In the show, Atwater Protocol emerges as a critical point that sets the ball rolling for the events leading to the plane crash.
Talking about the origins of Havlock, Sidney Scofield tells Frank Remnick that it started with a rumor that swirled around in espionage agencies. It was discovered that someone within the CIA had been leaking classified information. This person was incredibly well-placed, and they did not seem to be motivated by any political or financial agenda. It appeared that their beef with the agency was purely ideological, and they, having lost their faith in the system, wanted to dismantle and destroy the system of American governance. Their extremely accurate intel created so much damage that the Department of Justice had to create a multiagency task force to figure out their identity. Or at least, that was the story on the surface. In reality, there was no such leak.
This mole was a story created by the CIA so that they could use it to track real moles within the agencies and locate and terminate their enemies. This project was called the Atwater Protocol. Under this program, the agency deployed its highly trained agents as supposed leaks, whose real job was to track down the real enemies and eliminate them. A man named Levi Taylor Hartman was recruited for this purpose. He was trained by Scofield herself and was given the codename Havlock. For a time, he served the agency exceptionally. But then, a month before the events of the show, he turned the ghost story real. He turned his back on the CIA, went AWOL with confidential information, and became the very threat that the CIA had concocted out of thin air, and now they must stop him at all costs or lose the very core of the agency.
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