‘Ozark’ Season 2 Episode 5 Recap: A Federal Case

And now a tale of two Ozarks, both of which are told by the same episode. The first story is engagingly thorny and unpredictable. A mid-season climax, “Game Day” (Ozark Season 2 Episode 5) spills a gigantic mess of secrets across the Byrdes’ living room floor all at once, and follows everyone involved as they figure out what to make of all of them and how to move forward from there.

Here are the ones I can remember off the top of my head:

• The FBI continues its raid of the Byrde house
• The FBI find Charlotte’s box of weed-scented stolen cartel money
• Charlotte’s parents and the cartel also find out about this money (Marty lies and says it’s not cartel cash but whatever)
• Agent Petty tells his ex-boyfriend and fellow agent that he’s been dosing his star confidential informant, Rachel, with oxycontin
• Agent Petty tells Marty that Ruth tried to kill Marty by wiring his dock to electrocute him like she eventually did with her uncles (one of whom, Russ, was his lover)
• Agent Petty tells Marty he saved Marty’s life that day
• Agent Petty tells Marty that Jonah saw him on the property and pulled a gun on him that day too
• Marty tells Wendy that Ruth tried to kill him
• Jonah reveals to Charlotte that he’s set up shell companies from which the remainder of their stolen cash cannot be removed, though that’s likely just a cover story for not wanting to give her the money
• Charlotte overhears Marty and Wendy talking about Wendy’s affair and tells Jonah
• Agent Petty tells Marty that Charlie Wilkes has been implying illicit intentions toward Wendy over email
• Agent Petty shows Wendy that Marty saved the video of her having sex with another man that his private investigator filmed last season
• Agent Petty tells Ruth he had an affair with her uncle
• Agent Petty tells Ruth he knows she killed both her uncles
• Agent Petty tells Ruth he knows she tried to kill Marty
• Agent Petty tells Ruth Marty knows she tried to kill Marty
• Ruth admits all this to Marty

It’s a lot, right? And it’s beautifully handled, as far as it goes. Jason Butler Harner is a narcissistic creep as Petty, Jason Bateman’s Marty seems more and more like a wind-tossed plastic bag in human form, Laura Linney has some good lines as Wendy, and Julia Garner is absolutely gangbusters as always as Ruth, in straits more dire than she’s ever been before.

So that’s one side of things.

The other side is rather rote. Because of the FBI presence in town, the cartel wants the Snells to torch their opium poppy fields, leading to the umpteenth Snell/Byrde/cartel pissing match and “get it done or face the consequences” ultimatum. Buddy has bounced back from his near-death experience and advises Wendy to be proactive about the situation, volunteering to torch the field himself while she visits the Snells under false pretenses. Those pretenses involve Darlene’s out-of-nowhere desire for a baby (she didn’t think of this when they carved one out of the stomach of a preacher’s wife last season?), which leads to a lot of back and forth between her and Jacob about foster children and her and Wendy about adoption. Janet McTeer’s dully imperious cartel lawyer Helen Pierce returns and acts mean. You get the idea.

Some of this is fun enough to watch. I’m all for any excuse to put Peter Mullan’s Jacob on screen, and I’ll admit I was pleasantly surprised when Buddy didn’t die during his daring raid on the Snell family farm, Burt Young in The Sopranos style.

I’m much less sold on the waterboarding of Ruth Langmore, orchestrated by Helen to determine whether or not she’d ratted Marty out or if his trust in her, despite it all, was valid. I get the need to portray the cartel as the supreme badasses, and to sell Helen as the slay-queen sort who can torture teenagers on behalf of mass murderers but still wish she was at home playing with her kids; since you can’t just pause the action and turn to the camera and recite the URL for these cliches on TVTropes this will have to do.

But I have a harder time swallowing the idea that a billion-dollar drug operation believes this form of interrogation yields any useful information whatsoever when everyone outside the Republican Party knows it just makes people say what they think you want to hear, or that we as viewers need to suffer through the brutalization of a teenage girl to reinforce the bogus notion that Torture Works.

To add insult to injury, the scene was superfluous, because the issue of whether or not Ruth would flip was already tense and emotional as it was. You had the whole weird sexualized intimidation routine with Petty. You had the normally stalwart Ruth hiding, crouched in strip club office, wondering how to make it past the cartel alive. You had Marty learning Ruth had tried to kill him, and Ruth learning that Marty learned it, and Marty talking to Ruth directly about it, and Ruth admitting it. You had Wendy and Cade floating around in the mix too, with their own agendas and reactions to everything. Wasn’t watching these four people figure out what to do about the mess they were in more interesting than a Zero Dark Thirty reenactment?

I will at least give the show credit enough to believe that Ruth’s experience will wind up being the most important aftershock of this sequence, not Cade’s thirst for revenge or Marty’s guilt; Ozark has taken great pains to build Ruth up as its most interesting and well-rounded yet still difficult character, and I don’t see them suddenly non-lethally fridging her to make the menfolk feel things. But I can really only talk about what’s on screen in the here and now (at least until the Netflix UI automatically rolls me over into the next episode), and it was corny and ugly and pernicious. I expected better, and more entertaining to boot.

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

Watch Ozark Season 2 Episode 5 ("Game Day") on Netflix