The Sophomore Step Towards the Main Mission
I found Ozark on Netflix last year when I was looking for something to fill the void of House of Cards. Jason Bateman is an actor that if he’s in a movie, I will watch it. Arrested Development was hilarious and after watching The Gift, I really wanted to see him in a dramatic series.
I’m going to spoil season one right now so if you haven’t watched it, now would be the time to stop reading. What can you pull out of your ass when someone is about to kill you and your family? Marty Byrde convinces really bad people that he will be able to launder their money in the Ozarks and he moves his family there from Chicago to do so.
After buying the majority of the sleepy resort town, he still can’t find a way to cover the funds — my memory is a little hazy but he comes up with the idea of opening a casino. Brilliant plan, the execution involved math, science, economics, and a bunch of other courses I B-’d my way through in school so I can’t explain to you if the plan was plausible, but I was rooting for him to succeed.
What stood in his way were The Snells. A couple that had been growing heroin in the backwoods of the Ozarks for decades. The first season ends with Marty trying to balance the survival of his family between these completely different psychopaths.
If season one asked what you could create to keep your world together, season two examined what you then do when your world no longer exists. The two characters that stood out to me in season two were Ruth Langmore and Darlene Snell.
We meet Ruth when her and her siblings find a bag of cash belonging to Marty in season one. She tries to hustle him out of the money and when that doesn’t work out, she asks him for a job. It was a guise to get to know what he was up to and take over his operations. Along the way she learned that even though she came from a family of criminals, the felonies committed by Marty on a daily basis was art work and out of her league. He becomes a father figure to her and she ends up choosing him over her own family.
The second season has Ruth growing into a lieutenant for Marty. She runs the strip club and handles his administrative orders. She even steps up her game and negotiates for him in the purchase of the riverboat that will become their casino in season three. During the second season her father is released from prison and her loyalties are tested.
In a moment of raw vulnerability, Ruth bares her dreams to her father and the wishes for her future — she wants to buy a house for the family so they aren’t living in a trailer in the middle of the woods and she wants to send her cousin, Wyatt, to college. She believes that he has a future outside of the Ozarks, which turns out to be a dream that not a lot of people can get behind. The belief is that no one can leave the Ozarks.
When her father doesn’t share her vision for their family, Ruth is torn between staying loyal to the person that built their family or to strike it out on her own. If she wasn’t a Langmore, who was she? Season 2 sets this up to grow in season 3.
Darlene Snell is a force of nature. In the first season I wrote her off as being just Jacob’s batty wife. At the end of season 1, I knew she had a lot of crazy brewing inside of her, but I didn’t know the fire had a purpose aside from lashing out.
In the most romantic flashback I’ve seen in a while, we learn how Jacob and Darlene meet. When Jacob returns from Vietnam, he heads to the local diner and has lunch with a nice girl. It looks like the kind of scene old couples tell you about when they talk about the first time they met. The scene then shifts. A loud girl in jeans walks in and sits down at the table with them. She looks right at Jacob and tells him that he can either live a boring life with the vanilla shake sitting next to her or he can get up and follow her, Darlene, out of the diner and to a life worth living. Jacob follows her and they were together ever since.
Where Ruth craves stability and a family foundation, I can’t put my finger on what Darlene truly wants. She spent the season wanting a child and wanting to keep everyone off of her and Jacob’s land. Was her happiness just Jacob and the wilderness? Jacob and Darlene both had “WTF” moments and I can’t say that one was saner than the other. The way that we left Darlene at the end of the second season, I expect that season 3 will tell us about her background and why she made the final decisions she did in this season.
The female characters drove the season while drugs and money took a backseat this time. I was okay with this because I didn’t tune in to watch Narcos, I tuned in to watch the implausible. We received that in the form of Wendy Byrde.
Laura Linney shows her work in everything she does. I hated her in the first season, but as the season unraveled you see how she ended up where she did. A woman can only work with the cards she’s dealt and when her other half is blocked off and not communicating she has to navigate the ship on her own and sometimes her decisions won’t be okay with him. What do you do?
Wendy made a river boat casino happen in the middle of nowhere. She helped convince a town, two hillbilly drug dealers, U.S. council members, the Mexican drug cartel and the 1% of her district that her crazy as hell idea for a casino in the middle of what people knew to be a heroin poppy field was a good idea. She pulled it off and didn’t take one day off to lose her shit. I thought she would cave at one point, take a single “fuck you” day for being ignored by Marty, but she was the bigger person and kept working for the family even while she wasn’t getting any of the things she wanted. The things women do for their sweethearts.
I’m too scared to get to know Helen Pierce. She looks like the kind of woman that can afford to buy Winsor London and it just looks right on her off the rack. How does a cool as a cucumber British lawyer end up representing the Mexican drug cartel? They’ll probably let us know in season 3. She does mention at one point that being on long trips kept her from her children, so she too has a family. I love how Ozark evolves the idea of criminals.
Marty. Wendy. Helen. They’re the bad guys. They should be in jail and you know, if they don’t end up in witness protection, it’s because they’re dead. We should not be rooting for them to make it, but we enjoy a cup of tea while watching their next move. That’s what Ozark has done. It’s asked us to invest in the humanity of the characters that handle the operations of organized crime.
Even though season 2 gave us so many stellar female performances, it doesn’t count Marty out. The women in his life evolved and learned things about themselves without him, in fact, they evolved because he wasn’t there for them. Marty isn’t completely made of stone. Those quiet moments with Rachel spoke volumes without words. Marty does feel, it’s just his luck that he has the worst timing.
I’m invested and I will be back next summer for season 3. Why? Anyone that throws the Kansas City mafia under the bus to open a casino with a Mexican drug cartel on land they stole from lunatic poppy farmers with the help of the U.S. Government in exchange for a decent night’s sleep deserves my attention.
