Fun
Frisky
Nostalgic
Intense
Adventurous
Choked Up
Curious
Romantic
Weird
In a word, Ozark‘s super-sized season finale was brutal.
Really brutal.
Really, really brutal.
Okay, so the last one worked out alright.
But the rest? Gosh.
Even though two major murders, those of Pastor Mason Young’s pregnant wife Grace and Del’s enforcer Garcia, happened off screen, and even if you basically knew what was going to happen — let’s say because, oh I dunno, you made the mistake of watching a scene from a previous episode on YouTube and a scene from this one popped up right afterwards and spoiled it for you — “The Toll” was still violent enough to shock. Some might find the sudden spike in graphic violence gratuitous, but I think that’s a perfectly appropriate approach for a story like this. You need the wall to come crashing down to make the build-up feel worthwhile.
But there’s a curious omission amid the carnage in this episode: Marty Byrde doesn’t cause any of it directly. Jacob and Darlene Snell kill Grace to punish her husband for refusing to help them distribute their heroin. The Byrdes’ live-in housemate Buddy kills Garcia to stop him from killing them instead. Del has Marty’s toenails ripped off to try and find out what happened to Garcia. Darlene and her husband kill Del and his bodyguard because she’s a sociopathic racist who hates being called a redneck. Pastor Mason appears to kill his baby (he’s merely christening him) because after the horrors that befell him once he went into business with the Byrdes, he’s questioning whether life is worth living at all.
But Marty, the man at the center of all this misery? His knuckles may get a little bloody when Del’s head explodes a few inches way from them, but his hands are basically clean. “Marty Byrde doesn’t have the stones to kill anyone,” Ruth tells her suspicious cousin Wyatt; she may be wrong or she may be right, but Ozark never puts Marty, or us, in a position to find out.
Compare this to the approach of Breaking Bad, which from its pilot episode onward centers on Walter White’s decisions whether or not to kill — whether out of direct self-defense, general self-preservation, or plain old greed and vengeance. It never shies away from showing us the consequences of these decisions, either. It feels odd for Ozark to let Marty off this particular hook.
Indeed, Marty himself still feels odd. I think Jason Bateman (who directed the finale) has done fine work with the character, particularly during moments of rage; it’s hard to articulate, but Marty gets angry the way real people get angry, in concentrated but random bursts. Yet overall, Byrde reminds me of another business-whiz antihero whose show took a while to figure him out: Joe MacMillan, Lee Pace’s character from Halt and Catch Fire. During Halt‘s first season Joe felt more like a series of gestures in the direction of a person than an actual person. The comparison isn’t perfect — Joe was designed to be a larger-than-life, master-of-the-universe type whose secrets and foibles were just as grandiose as his ego and successes, and Marty is a much more low-key figure. On Halt, the supporting characters carried the weight until Joe could catch up, or more accurately until the writers figured him out. The powerful scenes in this episode involving Ruth and Wyatt dealing with Russ’s death, Charlotte and Jonah struggling with the idea of forming new lives under new identities without their father, and Agent Petty doing his best Michael Shannon in Boardwalk Empire as he explodes with rage after the failure to arrest Del, remind me of that dynamic.
And if Marty is a kind of gap in the story, he’s hardly the only one. More than a few plot holes remain, even if the surrounding material is sturdy enough to withstand them. To wit:
Why would Del bother giving Marty another $50 million to launder when, as he himself says later on, Byrde could barely get past the $8 million finish line?
If Garcia had drawn his gun before he started menacing the Byrdes, he could have killed Jonah and Buck alike after they pulled guns on him. Why wouldn’t he do such a common-sense thing?
The Byrdes are now pretty much the most infamous family in the area. If the cartel’s people did their due dilligence, they’d know Marty was seen by local law enforcement to be at least tangentially involved in four suspicious deaths or disappearances and counting. Why would a man like Del visit them personally with that kind of heat on them?
Del suspects Marty of murdering one of his top lieutenants, to the point of trying to torture a confession out of him by pulling out his toenails. Why would he trust Marty enough to travel with him to the remote headquarters of a local druglord?
On the flipside, the Snells blame Marty for all of their misfortunes, and recently went as far as murdering a pregnant woman over it. Why would they trust Marty to enough to allow to travel to their remote headquarters with an out-of-town druglord?
Didn’t the gaggle of law-enforcement agents parked in cars at the foot of the driveway hear the volley of gunshots in the house they could observe a couple hundred yards away?
Agent Evans is forced to let Marty go because he can’t produce the eyewitness who saw Del get into the car Marty is now driving, thus proving that Byrde is lying and giving the feds and cops probable cause to search the Snell residence for the missing Mexican man. That’s because the witness is Agent Petty, who’s undercover. But if the purpose of going undercover was to gather up enough evidence to nail Marty and Del, and since the main asset he was working in his false identity is the now-dead Russ Langmore, why not go ahead, blow his cover, nail Marty, and search the house?
And so on and so on. But look — if I’m picking nits, I’m doing so gently. After an opening stretch that had me ready to make like poor Rachel, the Blue Cat Lodge’s terrified owner, and take the money & run, Ozark won me over with its tension, its cast, its skill in burrowing deep into several different kinds of dysfunctional families and couples. If its broadest and blandest moments are behind it, as they seem to be, I’m looking forward to the next summer season.
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.
