This week on Apple TV+ thriller The Mosquito Coast, the Fox family’s boat suffers some serious damage but the show itself refuses to run aground.
Allie suffers a bad bug bite that takes him out of the equation when they need him most. Plus, Charlie finally comes clean about his guilt, and Dina starts being honest with herself. It’s an excellent episode with all the tension and beauty you could hope for.
Mosquito Coast recap: ‘Least Concern Species’
Season 2, episodes 2: In this week’s episode, entitled “Least Concern Species,” the Foxes — Allie (played by Justin Theroux), Margot (Melissa George), Dina (Logan Polish) and Charlie (Gabriel Bateman) have a big problem on their hand. After a day spent cleaning the intake from all the river gunk their boat has swallowed up, and teaching Dina how to steer, a huge storm blows in.
Allie dodges a rock, but the engine quits. And, as they’re trying to fix it, the boat slides right back into the rock, bashing a big old hole in the hull. They start taking on water and need to get ashore before they sink, which involves another crash landing.
The next day, they must move the boat from the crash sight, which means using their winch to get the boat out of its rut. They break the tree they use as leverage before it works, and then Allie collapses. He was bitten by a toxic mosquito of some kind and possibly has blood poisoning.
A surreptitious supply run
Now the fugitive family has two big problems. Margot and Charlie head to a nearby oil refinery to try and sneak aboard and steal medical supplies, while Dina stays behind and brainstorms how to plug the hole before the boat’s engine room floods.
Margot tries talking to Charlie about the guy he killed at the end of last season but he doesn’t really know how to talk about it until she pries a little. He’s fixating on it a lot, naturally, and dreaming about it.
She tells him, from experience, that it gets easier to live with killing someone with every passing day. Of course, she also recognizes that the insane life the Foxes handed their kids isn’t exactly fair and Charlie should never have been in that position in the first place.
It’s a good scene, two people in impossible circumstances trying to make sense of something that neither should have to deal with. The Foxes are aware that to their kids, they no longer really represent any kind of moral authority. It’s like they’re being guided by other kids. Certainly, Allie being prostrate with fever doesn’t help them seem any more grown up.
Meanwhle, back on the boat …
Dina sets about trying to fix the damaged boat (while avoiding the alligators stalking the river) by taking the life jackets, ripping the buoyant material from inside and attaching them to a piece of metal, and then winching it tightly to the side of the boat from inside. She keeps up a one-sided conversation with her ailing father as she goes.
While he’s out, she tries explaining some stuff to him that she never found the words for before. She tells her dad that a story he used to read to her scare her to death. She didn’t say anything at the time because she could see how much pride he took in being a good dad. To let him know he’d made a mistake would have taken away from that feeling.
Once Charlie and Margot reach the oil field and find it deserted, they see telltale signs of a violent altercation. That’s good, because no one will prevent them from stealing what they need. But it’s also bad, because what if the perpetrators are still in the area?
They cautiously raid the place for anything useful — they find the medicine they need but the food’s all gone bad.
When he recovers, Allie praises his kids’ ingenuity and skills to try to get everybody’s head back together, working as a unit, loving each other, and not keeping any more secrets.
Fox family dynamics
I confess it took me a minute to get on the peculiar wavelength the actors are on this week, but it’s mostly excellent stuff. There’s a kind of childish cluelessness to everything they do while trying to save themselves that is a little out of step with who they’ve been up to this point, but it still proved compelling.
Allie continuing to pretend to be a normal dad has a peculiar tension about it. He’ll be explaining the steps required to make sure they don’t all drown, then pause to quiz the kids on a famous quote.
He doesn’t see anything inherently wrong or warped in their dynamic, which is what makes him so fascinating to watch. He’s really only pulling the wool over his own eyes, but he’s not exactly wrong in his assumption that by just soldiering on, eventually everyone will have no choice but to follow his lead.
On-screen action
This week’s set-pieces were well handled, from the boat crash to the quiet raid on the oil compound. The former is a pretty excellent compromise between the real set and what I gather is largely a CGI rendering of the boat being tossed on the stormy seas.
It’s very good stuff, and of course The Mosquito Coast’s location is so evocative and beautiful you can easily lose yourself in the long shots of the boat dwarfed by the miles of trees on either side.
The bit where Charlie and Margot sneak around the camp, finding evidence of the bloody struggle, is almost like a horror movie. The Mosquito Coast has rarely just been a show where the only characters with whom we interact are the Foxes. So it’s cool to see it focus on them exclusively, without losing any of the series’ best features.
★★★★☆
Watch Mosquito Coast on Apple TV+
New episodes of the second season of The Mosquito Coast arrive on Apple TV+ every Friday.
Rated: TV-MA
Watch on: Apple TV+
Scout Tafoya is a film and TV critic, director and creator of the long-running video essay series The Unloved for RogerEbert.com. He has written for The Village Voice, Film Comment, The Los Angeles Review of Books and Nylon Magazine. He is the author of Cinemaphagy: On the Psychedelic Classical Form of Tobe Hooper, the director of 25 feature films, and the director and editor of more than 300 video essays, which can be found at Patreon.com/honorszombie.
