Summary
The Mosquito Coast benefits from a turn or two in this episode that changes up the tedious family dynamic for something more interesting.
This recap of The Mosquito Coast season 2, episode 3, “Talk About the Weather”, contains spoilers.
Oh, finally. Other people! I can’t pretend to have ever considered The Mosquito Coast a particularly good show, but if last week’s episode taught me anything, it’s that spending time with just the Fox family isn’t at the top of my to-do list.
So, “Talk About the Weather” finds everyone arriving in the middle of the night at a jungle hideaway populated only, it seems, by other people on the run from something or someone. The woman who runs the place, Isela (Natalia Cordova-Buckley), knows Margot and Allie personally, but even then she isn’t interested in giving them a free pass. This is a working community, not a wellness center, and while that might not be exactly what the kids were imagining, it’s better than being dead or in prison.
The Mosquito Coast season 2, episode 3 recap
Two weeks later, everyone seems to have fit right in, although admittedly some more than others. Allie is in his element, obviously, having found a kind of nomad utopia, and even Charlie is having a decent time, spending nights in the jungle watching butterflies and spending his days topless, playing football (badly) with the other boys. Dina, though, isn’t having a great time, wishes death upon the goat she has to milk, and is just counting down the seconds until she’s provided with the passport Allie promised her.
Only, that doesn’t seem to be happening. The commune is regularly visited by a boatman named Ridley and his handsome young apprentice, Adolfo, who tips Dina off — after sneakily providing her with some prescription drugs to help with her boredom — that Isela has sold off Allie’s trawler to Ridley. She has no intention of them leaving, and Allie doesn’t seem to have much intention of going anyway.
The big revelation of “Talk About the Weather” is that Dina and Margot, kind of contrary to the dynamic we noted in the previous episode, are actually planning to escape and leave Allie behind. Margot has been siphoning off cooking oil — Allie’s favorite all-purpose substance, which Ridley has been bringing in by the literal boatload — to keep the trawler tip-top so they can flee at a moment’s notice. The drugs Dina acquired from Adolfo are to dose Allie so they can escape. With Isela having sold the boat, they decide to make their move immediately.
Unfortunately, when Isela tells Allie that she has sold the vessel and he should collect from it anything that he needs, he discovers an errant fuel cap and deduces that the vessel has been filled up without his knowledge. It isn’t hard for him to figure out why. When he returns to the settlement it seems very much like Margot and Dina had chosen that moment to poison him. Wise to it, though, Allie takes everyone outside to show them something — the trawler, sinking to the bottom of the river. Rather than have Isela sell it, or his wife and daughter escape on it, he instead decided to scuttle it.
The Mosquito Coast benefits from this development. Now, instead of being about a boring family on the run, it’s about a boring family who has essentially been kidnapped and held hostage by the patriarch. That and a brief scene of bloody executions reminds us that the Foxes are still being pursued, and may have to work together again sooner rather than later. Will they be able to, knowing what they know about one another? We’ll have to wait and see.
