Dina’s gone on this week’s episode of The Mosquito Coast, the Apple TV+ show about environmental terrorists on the run from Big Brother abroad. She decides to take a walk on the wild side in the company of rich and fatuous tourists and doesn’t exactly love what she sees.
Allie and Margot have to think on their feet if their schemes to buy the other freedom are going to work out. Charlie finally gets the kick out the door he needs — but at what cost? It’s a thought-provoking chapter of the saga of the Fox family.
The Mosquito Coast recap: ‘The Counterfeiters’
Season 2, episodes 1: In the episode, entitled “The Counterfeiters,” Adolfo (played by Alejandro Akara) comes in for his shift working Ridley’s (Mike Ostroski) supply boat and finds an angry Allie Fox (Justin Theroux) waiting for him. Dina (Logan Polish) left Charlie (Gabriel Bateman) a note saying she was fleeing for good this time — and that she might never see her family again.
Charlie told Allie, but not his mom, and Allie wants to keep it that way. Margot (Melissa George) is going to be furious when she finds out, and indeed will probably risk upsetting the several different schemes they have going like spinning plates to do so. These include Richard’s (Ariyon Bakare) idea to blow up a new processing plant that just opened.
Margot calls Raban (Matt McCoy), desperate, because she’ll be on the next job, but Raban clearly doesn’t have all the right permission slips signed. By the time he agrees to it and has proof he’ll give Margot, Dina and Charlie immunity, the operation’s already happening. Raban has to have guys ready to move for tomorrow afternoon.
Dina tastes the high life
Meanwhile, Dina hasn’t gotten far just yet. She’s posing as a Spanish-speaking local and getting by on the little money Adolfo gave her when he dropped her at a bus stop. She manages a neat con by stealing a bicycle belonging to a tourist couple and riding it back to the resort they’re staying at, which gets her a little taste of the high life when she sweet-talks her way inside.
Soon she’s got her own room key, and she’s hobnobbing with spoiled rich Connecticut socialites, trying to get access to their dad’s private jet. A few minutes of luxury is amazing. But after a few hours, Dina’s made ill by the whole spectacle of tourists eating hamburgers while TVs blare the news of a school shooting. This is everything her dad warned her about, and it’s making her sick to her stomach.
Allie tries blackmail
Isela (Natalia Cordova-Buckley) catches Allie on her computer and he tells her his idea to bring down Bautista (Daniel Raymont). He and Charlie photographed evidence that he’s skimming from the cartels he’s helping run drugs for. If the bosses find out, they’ll kill Bautista.
The trouble is, Allie skipped work to do this. So Bautista sent guys with guns to go find him at the commune. He’s got about 15 minutes to email his blackmail without being detected and then escape. In the confusion, Bautista’s thugs kill one of Charlie’s friends at the commune. That might be the push he needs to fall out of love with life in the jungle.
Bautista collects Allie and demands an explanation. Allie tells him about the blackmail in front of William Lee (Ian Hart). Bautista’s well and truly stuck, so he asks Allie what he wants. His answer: The Mosquito Coast. Allie wants to move there, with a clean transfer of title and no further involvement with Bautista or the cartels. Just a free life. Bautista goes to his sister’s house and gets the title from her (Cosima Cabrera), but William’s noticing that his employer is starting to sweat. This isn’t going to end well.
Allie should be jumping for joy. But between the collateral damage of the poor murdered woman from earlier in the day, Charlie feeling more adrift than ever after witnessing it, Margot about to turn in Richard to save them all, and Dina lost out in the real world, he’s not feeling much like celebrating. His only glimpse of hope comes when Dina texts Adolfo’s phone, which Charlie stole. The two men text her that it’s OK if she wants to come back, and she says she’s ready to.
Who can you trust?
Photo: Apple TV+
This was a good episode of The Mosquito Coast, alternately nerve-wracking and sublime. The stuff with Margot selling out Richard, and the unanswered questions from her botched sting operation, are awful to contemplate.
Did Allie sell her out to preserve his mission to get the family to a safer safe haven? Or did he do it because he didn’t want to go to jail? Or was it simply that Richard knew enough to know that Margot couldn’t be trusted and her last-minute change of heart was every bit the ploy it seemed? Still, Margot’s in a whole lot of trouble unless Allie does actually know what he’s doing and can get her, Charlie and Dina to safety.
The stuff with Dina at the hotel was fabulous. There’s little that’s as fun to watch as good con artistry on film, and Dina quickly moving up in the world from penniless local to jet-setting heiress in the span of 15 minutes makes for fantastic TV. It’s a shame we won’t see more of this kind of thing (unless I miss my guess), because her brief dalliance with high society is such a beautiful window into Dina’s perspective. It’s all meant to be seductive, so of course she’s seduced, but the hollowness is pronounced and unavoidable.
Unfortunately, this means her dad is right. Which begs the question: What is her life supposed to be? Heady and slick.
★★★★☆
Watch The 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.
