Laura Linney in Ozark.Photo: Steve Deitl/Netflix
In a new edition of surprising timeliness, theEncyclopedia Britannicahas this to say about the Lake of the Ozarks, the man-made body of water that features so prominently in the Netflix thrillerOzark,which just concluded with seven episodes released April 29:
“Covering an area of 93 square miles (241 square km), the lake is approximately 90 miles (145 km) long and has a shoreline of more than 1,100 miles (1,770 km). The lake, with facilities for fishing and aquatic sports, is a popular recreation and resort area. In recent years, however, the interloping presence of Marty and Wendy Byrde, a professional couple from Chicago and the parents of teenagers Charlotte and Jonah, has reduced the area to a moral swamp polluted with corpses. Experts are hopeful that the area’s image as a family vacation destination will rebound now that all the Byrdes have returned to Chicago.”
The second half of that entry, needless to say, is not really from theBritannica. It was just a polite way to lead you down into this recap without top-loading the text with spoilers. Because there’s a lot to unpack here: Coming after four nail-biting seasons, the finale was a violent, joltingly cynical wrap-up with abrupt reversals of fortune and a shocking death.
If the question drivingOzarkwas whether the Byrdes would get out alive, the answer at the very end was a definitive “yes” — “yes” as in “You betcha!” If anything, Wendy and Marty (Jason Bateman) found themselves stronger than ever, close to invulnerable, corrupt but assured in their power, and confident about how to increase it: The future lay in Wendy’s bogus-sounding Byrde Foundation, ostensibly dedicated to championing worthy causes even though it was rooted in dirty business. You wouldn’t contribute your rolled-up pennies to the thing.
In the end, we realized, the Byrdes were just bad people — even son Jonah (Skylar Gaertner), as we’ll explain, became a cold-blooded killer — and they seemed to regret nothing.
Actually, it’s possible that Marty, who always tried to keep up a pleasant front, as if he were a dependably tail-wagging neighborhood dog, wasn’t completely happy. But the show long ago became Wendy’s. The ending certainly was hers.
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Steve Dietl/Netflix
Unfortunately for Ruth, her act of vengeance overheated the gastric juices flowing through the corrugated-steel digestive tract that was coiled within Javi’s mother. Camila (Veronica Falcón) first entered the show in season 4 as a quiet, furtive figure discreetly stationing herself at the back of the room. Now, suddenly, she was out in front and on the march, with a vicious two-pronged plan of attack. 1) She had her brother Omar assassinated and — allowing the Byrdes to extricate themselves from the whole inchoateOzarkmess through a delicate arrangement involving the FBI — took over the cartel. 2) She also resolved to destroy whoever had destroyed Javi. Wendy, Marty, and Clare could all finger Ruth — they had been witnesses — but Clare, who for all her clout tended to fold like a caterpillar poked with a pencil eraser, was the one to spill the beans (Camila threatened to do awful things to her with a knife).
A good deal of the wrap-up, in fact, focused on how members of the Byrde family were starting to resent Wendy’s manipulation of everyone and everything. She was accused of undermining Marty’s authority — if Marty hadn’t been behaving like a dependably tail-wagging neighborhood dog, this might not have been an issue — and she also alienated the children, who came close to going off to live with Wendy’s father, Nathan (Richard Thompson). A man of deep religious conviction with an even deeper mean streak, he told Wendy he had never even found her especially lovable. Then again, Nathan’s opinion of her had probably been fatally torpedoed after a private detective (Adam Rothenberg) tipped him off about Wendy’s role in the death of her mentally ill brother Ben (Tom Pelphrey): In season 3 she ordered a hit on Ben after he proved too unstable to be trusted with the family’s secrets. Then, in an un-endearingly sentimental gesture that nearly undid the whole family with seconds to go before the closing credits — again, below — Ben’s ashes were preserved not in an urn but in a kitschy cookie jar.
Dramatically, this Wendy pile-on was a bit unfair, and maybe sexist, but it gave Linney the chance to have a terrifying public meltdown that, even with all the show’s violence, was possibly its single scariest moment (a lot of Wendy’s growing importance, one suspects, had to do with Linney’s breathtaking ability to run with any scene she was handed, no matter how extreme). After that, Wendy checked herself into a mental-health facility, where she recuperated nicely — so nicely, you wondered if she had been faking it to make the kids feel guilty.
To which Wendy coolly responded: “Since when?”
At that point, Jonah came into view with a shotgun and, as the screen went black, we heard a blast. First, though, we had seen Wendy’s side-glance reaction: She looked pleased, even proud, that her son was ending their troubles on such a tidy if brutal note. She had told him earlier: “Your dad and I were trying to build something for all of us, and I promise I will not trap you inside it.” But Wendy, it turned out, was not truthful about a lot of things.
source: people.com
