‘Ozark’ Recap, Episode Two: Who Are the People in Your Neighborhood?

As the Byrdes settle in to their new community, Netflix’s Ozark seems to be settling in as well. “Blue Cat,” the show’s second episode, establishes not just the new setting but a storytelling strategy — one that answers, at least in part, the question of how a show that covered so much antihero-drama ground in its premiere could keep things moving for a full season. That storytelling strategy is, essentially, a rhetorical one: When faced with seemingly insurmountable crises or dead ends, Marty Byrde’s modus operandi is to verbally escalate the stakes.

The episode begins with the family camped out in a cheap motel. While Marty looks for failing or debt-ridden businesses to “invest” in, i.e. launder the drug cartel’s money through, Wendy searches for a house they can afford with the $20,000 they have to their name. (All the rest of their bagfuls of cash rightfully belong to Marty’s masters.)

Their kids, meanwhile, abandon guard duty at the motel to take in the local color. While Charlotte gets taken for a ride, literally and figuratively, by teenaged conmen Wyatt and Three Langmore — they go for a joyride in a boat she didn’t realize was stolen until they literally throw her overboard in an attempt to spare her from the pursuing police — her kid brother Jonah hits the arcade and befriends Tuck, a young man with Down’s Syndrome who offers him a knife as a gesture of friendship. While Marty strikes out in his hunt, Wendy finds a pretty sweet deal for a lakefront home, but with a catch: The current owner, a crotchety, terminally ill old man named Buddy Dieker, will only sell if he can continue to live out the rest of his days in the basement.

But Wyatt and Three have a far more capable and sinister sister, Ruth — Julia Garner, a recurring standout as troubled teen Kimmy on The Americans — and she’s responsible for the main action of the episode. When the Byrdes leave the motel, she swoops in and loots one of the suitcases full of cash.

Here’s where Marty’s penchant for talking his way out of trouble by talking his way into bigger trouble comes in. When he discovers the Langmore clan’s hideout, he bursts in and immediately reveals that he works for a cartel kingpin, all but daring the relatively low-stakes criminals to call his bluff, kill him, and face the fatal fallout. Later, when he strikes out with a last-ditch investment attempt at the run-down Blue Cat Lodge that gives the episode its title, he quickly picks a fight with a barfly who’s insulting Tuck, the owner’s son, in order to convince the skeptical woman that he’s on the up and up.

The strategy doesn’t always work: Marty’s attempt to out-bluster the local police chief is more insulting than intimidating, and nearly backfires completely. But Wendy saves the day by taking a different path with the same technique, noting that she’s now a homeowner, taxpayer, and voter in town, and implicitly threatening his reelection efforts. By the end of the episode, apparently tired of her kids’ constant questions and complaints, she even dumps the truth about Marty’s real business on them. Both of the Byrdes — and Ozark as a whole — have adopted the Donald Rumsfeld quote “If you can’t solve a problem, make it bigger” as their maxim, and it admittedly makes for engaging television when it happens.

But the show is still extraordinarily by-the-numbers in many other ways. Certainly its portrayal of the Lake’s locals is not breaking any new ground. If you expected even the reasonably sympathetic characters to spout racist, sexist boilerplate — the worst offender is the records keeper who complains that the “colored folks” complaining about the police at the Oprah taping she once attended need to “walk a mile in my Crocs”, groannnnn — then go ahead and fill that space on your Gritty Drama Bingo card. (See also “seedy strip joint” and “music so thoroughly indebted to the There Will Be Blood score you can name the song they must have used as a temp track.”)

And as in the pilot, where the entire premise of the show is established with a travel brochure Marty’s business partner just so happened to have on him before he died — like he’d been researching the area for, I dunno, a prestige-TV drama setting — happenstance and coincidence do way too much of the heavy lifting for the plot. Marty has three run-ins with locals who know the ins and outs of local criminality — the aforementioned Langmores, a storage-facility owner with a shed full of abandoned police evidence who regales him with the details of a defunct meth-smuggling operation, and a strip-club owner who can see Marty’s desperation to launder money from a mile away — before the hour is through. He makes his final decision not to kill himself when he looks up from the spot where he’d parked his car to investigate insurance payout rates for suicide victims’ families and sees the sign for the Blue Cat Lodge, which his son had told him about earlier that morning. He returns to the family’s motel room just in time to stop Wendy from emailing his gangster boss Del to report his death. (Personally, I would have made a point of calling her first!)

Some of the lucky or unlucky breaks that befall the family are understandable enough: The young Langmores would naturally work at a place where they could rip off tourists, for example. But too many others don’t: FBI Agent Petty, the lead investigator into the laundering operation, is made so unlikeable that you have to root for Marty by comparison, since there’s really no other way you would otherwise. It’s a shortcut, and a shame. You’d think a show that depends on its main character going for broke would be more interested in following suit.

Sean T. Collins (@theseantcollins) writes about TV for Rolling Stone, Vulture, the Observer, and anyplace that will have him, really. He and his family live on Long Island.

Watch Ozark: Episode 2 ("Blue Cat") on Netflix