Frontline: Season 6
Season 6 Lore Primer
Key plot threads, lore context, and character stakes you need to remember before diving into this season.
- Directly follows the overarching narrative developments of Frontline Season 5.
- Faction dynamics and core character alliances shift under escalating external stakes.
- Crucial mysteries introduced previously reach key turning points and narrative reckonings.
- Sets up serialized story arcs that build directly toward the climactic season finale.
Episode Guide
Season 6 Progress Shield
Apartheid Part I: 1652-1948
Dec 14, 1987
Many white South Africans claim that the entire country is theirs by right. No black man, they say, occupied South Africa before the first tiny Dutch settlement in 1652. Part 1 ref
Apartheid Part 2: 1948-1963
Dec 14, 1987
Part 2 details the new policy which included classifying all South Africans by race, removing blacks from cities where many had lived for generations, and establishing separate and
Apartheid Part 3: 1963-1977
Dec 15, 1987
Independent homelands' for blacks was the centerpiece of Prime Minister Hendrick Verwoerd's vision of apartheid. Part 3 focuses on how the white government found African leaders to
Apartheid Part 4: 1978-1986
Dec 15, 1987
When PW Botha became prime minister of South Africa two years after the Soweto uprising in 1976, he realized that apartheid must ‘adapt or die.’ Part 4 explores the reforms underta
Apartheid Part 5: 1987
Dec 16, 1987
Part 5 looks at an unprecedented meeting in the struggle for South Africa’s future. Two years before the release of Nelson Mandela, dissident white Afrikaners met with black leader
Praise the Lord
Jan 26, 1988
Frontline traces the rise and fall of television evangelists Jim and Tammy Bakker and investigates why government agencies failed to vigorously investigate charges of corruption in
Operation Urgent Fury
Feb 2, 1988
Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter Seymour Hersh investigates one of Ronald Reagan’s greatest truimphs-the rescue of American students during the 1983 invasion of Grenada. Hersh’s rep
The Man Who Shot John Lennon
Feb 9, 1988
Frontline goes inside the mind of Mark David Chapman, the man who shot and killed John Lennon in 1980. Newly acquired records paint the chilling portrait of a celebrity stalker who
Your Flight is Cancelled
Feb 16, 1988
Since deregulation, America's airline industry has become a nightmare of delays, cancellations, and near misses. This film probes the air traffic dilemma inside America's busiest a
Shakedown in Santa Fe
Feb 23, 1988
Eight years after one of the most violent prison uprisings in US history, Frontline returns to the penitentiary in New Mexico to probe the contininuing struggle between the inmates
Let My Daughter Die
Mar 1, 1988
Joe and Joyce Cruzan want doctors to remove their severely brain damaged daughter from the life-support system that keeps her alive. Nearly two years before it became the US Suprem
Back in the USSR
Mar 29, 1988
In 1968, American journalist Jerry Schecter, accompanied by his wife and five young children, moved to Moscow on assignment for Time magazine. In 1987, Frontline returned with the
Poison and the Pentagon
Apr 5, 1988
The military is America’s largest producer of toxic waste. Frontline reporter Joe Rosenbloom investigates the Pentagon’s poor record of cleaning up its pollution that contaminates
To a Safer Place
Apr 12, 1988
When Shirley Turcotte was a child, she was sexually abused by her father. After years of therapy she takes a remarkable journey back into her past-confronting her mother and other
Murder on the Rio San Juan
Apr 19, 1988
Frontline investigates the unsolved 1984 terrorist bombing at a press conference held by contra leader Eden Pastora. Eight people, including an American reporter, died that night o
American Game, Japanese Rules
Apr 26, 1988
Can America succeed in Japan? Frontline paints an intimate portrait of Americans living and working in Japan-baseball players, businessmen, and an American bride-all confronting a
Racism 101
May 10, 1988
Frontline explores the disturbing increase in racial incidents and violence on America’s college campuses. The attitudes of black and white students reveal increasing tensions at s
Guns, Drugs, and the CIA
May 17, 1988
An accountant for the Medellin drug cartel explains how he was asked by the CIA to provide funding to the Nicaraguan Contra rebels.
The Choice
Oct 24, 1988
Frontline examines in-depth the background, character, qualifications, and beliefs of the Republican and Democratic candidates, George Bush and Michael Dukakis.