Old friends can be wonderful. Sometimes they drop back in our lives, and it leads to fun reunions and remembering the good times. Sometimes, however, they need help. That’s the kind of old friend that visits Daniel (Jesse Williams) in the third episode of Hotel Costiera, titled “April.” And this old friend comes with plenty of baggage and plenty of trouble.
We begin with Daniel traveling to the police station. Turns out the cops have given him a heads up that an old Marine buddy, April Mackenzie (Jess Khan-Lee), has been picked up. He’s able to get her out of it without charges, but it’s clear that April isn’t in a good place.
The next day, as Daniel discusses the next steps in the search for Alice with his team, April pops back up. She’s sober now, but still in a pickle. Turns out that while she was wilding out the night before she lost a bracelet. But it’s not just a piece of jewelry, it’s a hidden piece of code that’s part of an off-the-books job April took to earn some fast cash. She needs it back and turns to Daniel and his team for help.
Quickly, they begin to look for her hookup from the night before, Ferdinando (Giovanni Ludeno). He turns out to be an easy man to find, once they look in the right spot. After catching up with him, though, it turns out the bracelet won’t be easy to get back.
A card game with stakes
Ferdinando gave the bracelet as a gift to his wife. His wife, as it turns out, is a notorious loan shark with a vicious side named Teresa the Terrible (Cristina Donadio). It’s unlikely she’ll just hand it over, and Ferdinando isn’t willing to steal it or to ask for it back. He can’t risk revealing how he came to acquire it. But he does offer a solution.
Teresa is a fiend for the card game Scopa. So, the plan is for Daniel and Tancredi (Sam Haggarth) to join the game as a ruse to sneak upstairs and snatch the bracelet. It goes off the rails when they’re invited to play at Teresa’s table, and it turns out she’s wearing the item. So, instead, they go all in and win the game.
Later, Daniel sneaks back in to grab the bracelet. Teresa wakes up, but it turns out she’s a fan of Daniel. The implication is he plies another skill to get her to give it up. Either way, the mission is a success.
A friend in need
But April still isn’t in a good place. She’s drunk—again. And Daniel is sure she’s in need of some help. When she talks about taking more side jobs, he becomes concerned about her well-being. While April is passed out, he grabs her phone.
When April wakes in the morning, she learns Daniel has squelched her deal. He’s returned the money and called it off. Before she has time to process her anger, she learns he also called the MPs. April is still an active Marine, and now she’s facing a drunk and disorderly charge. As she’s hauled off, it’s clear she’s not pleased with Daniel. It was some tough love, but it’s what he thinks she needs to get back on track.
Thoughts on Hotel Costiera episode 3
This is the first episode of the season to steer away from the formula. We don’t get much from the hotel, and in fact don’t even see Augusto (Tommaso Ragno) in the episode.
We also don’t get much from the search for Alice, though Daniel does manage to track down Bruno (Pierpaolo Spollon) by the end of the episode to keep making progress. Still, this was a fun kind of bottle episode. We get some more pieces of Daniel’s past, and we get a chance for Haggarth to shine in the extended game sequence.
Hotel Costiera is now streaming on Prime Video. All six episodes of the first season are now available to stream. Check back here as we recap all the episodes.