Summary
Even this close to the end, The Mosquito Coast wastes more time on a pointless subplot.
In The Mosquito Coast Season 2 Episode 8, Dina essentially escaped Casa Roja with reluctant help from Adolfo. Interestingly enough, Episode 9 starts with the young man telling Allie and Charlie that she’s gone and that he gave her everything he had to see her on the way — since Allie encouraged her to leave anyway, it seemed like the right thing to do.
Of course, we’re not lucky enough for her to have genuinely disappeared from the show, so we get a bunch of scenes of her wandering around alone, reveling in her newfound freedom.
The Mosquito Coast Season 2 Episode 9 Recap
This might be a moderately controversial opinion, but I just don’t think Dina is an interesting enough character for any of this to work. Maybe it’s just me, but I don’t really care what happens to her. I don’t think there’s any enjoyment in watching her finesse her way into spas or whatever because she doesn’t have much of a personality.
Mileage may vary, of course, but usually, this kind of solo excursion is earned within the narrative and characterization. Here, it just feels like something else to fill the episodes with because there’s nothing else of importance going on.
Allie and Charlie decide to keep this from Margot, who is planning more explosive eco-terrorism with Richard but is secretly feeding information about his activities to the U.S. government in order to secure immunity. Allie, meanwhile, has found a way to get Guillermo off Isela’s back by exposing his skimming money from the Cartels.
When some goons raid Casa Roja and start straight-up hacking into people, it’s the most interesting and urgent thing that has happened all season.
And yet we keep cutting back to Dina! I think the problem I have with this whole thing is that Dina’s idyllic new lifestyle isn’t the normality she has been constantly claiming she wants.
This is being a hustler. It’s a fantasy. And when she meets some extraordinarily obnoxious rich teenage girls, that’s supposed to be the start of her realization that she isn’t especially cut out for normal life anyway. So, in other words, it’s kind of a waste of time.
Any potential tension in this episode comes from whether the authorities will intervene in Richard’s plan thanks to Margot’s tip-off, and they do… only for her to discover that she has revealed her hand too early. Richard only told one person about what was happening, her, and now knows she’s a traitor.
She won’t be able to sink him in exchange for immunity, which means the fate of the Fox family rests entirely on Allie once again, who is trying to blackmail Guillermo into giving him the Mosquito Coast under threat of revealing his financial mismanagement to the Cartel.
This, and the repercussions of the Richard thing, will presumably be of primary concern in the finale.
But it’s just like this show to devote a good chunk of its penultimate episode to a go-nowhere subplot, isn’t it?
The Mosquito Coast Season 2 Episode 10 Recap
The Mosquito Coast Season 2 (Credit – Apple TV+)
A good example of how The Mosquito Coast misunderstands its own appeal is the fact that the finale opens with what is clearly supposed to be an emotional funeral for Silvia in Casa Roja. I know you needed me to tell you her name because we really have no sense of who this character is, why she was apparently so integral to this community, or what we’re supposed to feel in her absence.
Anyway, we catch up with the real action – if you can call it that – when Allie goes to the luxury hotel where Dina has been staying to meet her. If you recall, in The Mosquito Coast Season 2 Episode 9, she realized that she wasn’t keen on so-called “normality” after all.
But as she explains to her father, she doesn’t really know what normality is. She doesn’t have a home to return to. She only has her family, and her family has been lying to her for basically her entire life. She asks Allie to come up with a solution to this problem and, predictably, he can’t.
Eventually, Margot shows up, and Allie pitches the idea of them leaving Casa Roja for the Mosquito Coast, building a self-sufficient homestead there that is theirs and theirs alone, though nobody – other than Charlie, obviously – is especially keen on the idea. Margot and Allie start bickering, and Charlie has a meltdown.
This is obviously intended to be his big moment when he finally gets everything he’s feeling off his chest, but the writing tries to communicate his seriousness by having him swear at a really unnatural frequency that quickly becomes quite comical. It’s yet another example of the show having the right idea in theory but no clue how to actually bring it to fruition.
It just so happens that Richard and Guillermo’s men are at the same hotel since this is where they’re planning to sabotage the construction project by forcing the developers at gunpoint to live-stream confessions of their various crimes against the planet.
This is a bit too much happenstance for my liking, but it at least gives us some semblance of danger for the finale, even if the whole thing’s a bit chaotic, is over much too quickly, and builds to a conclusion that’s largely unsatisfying even if it seems definitive.
The Mosquito Coast Season 2 Ending Explained
So, here’s what happens. Charlie and Dina, true to form, follow Richard alone while Margot and Allie discuss their next steps. Charlie confronts Richard and ends up being dragged into the hostage situation, and when Allie and Margot realize the kids are missing, they hook back up with Dina and try to rescue Charlie before the gunfire starts and the bombs explode.
Guillermo turns up with William, Allie goes up the back stairs to find another way into the conference room, and with a quick toss of a flash grenade, he’s able to spirit Charlie away.
William, though, shoots Allie in the back as he flees, and Allie detonates the explosives, presumably killing everyone — William, Guillermo, Richard (who was shot by William anyway), Guillermo’s sister and father, and the developers — including himself, but buying the rest of his family time to escape.
Isn’t that rubbish? Like, all of that happens in a few minutes and we’re just supposed to not question the logistics at all, like how unlikely it is to have basically every major character in the same room at the same time, or how unceremonious Allie’s (presumed) death is.
We don’t really get any payoff to the ongoing character arcs and are instead treated to a sappy, “happy” ending, in which Dina, with the help of Allie’s designs, builds that ice machine he made so much of a fuss about to help the family presumably subsist on the Mosquito Coast, where they ended up after all.
In a way, this finale seems fitting for this show, which never managed to justify a second season in the first place. It’s the perfunctory conclusion it deserves, and hopefully a welcome nail in its coffin.
What did you think of The Mosquito Coast Season 2 Episodes 9 and 10, and the ending? Comment below.
