‘Ozark’ Season 2 Episode 6 Recap: Workingman’s Dead

This one sneaks up on you. After a big prestige-crime blowout in Ozark Season 2 Episode 5, the second season of Ozark heads into the homestretch in the cryptically titled “Outer Darkness,” its sixth and best episode. The title phrase calls to mind cosmic concepts from Lovecraft and Tolkien, but the episode itself is a stately and intimate thing — a surprisingly thoughtful mood piece about death and the severing of human connection by both mortality and immorality. I dug it.

Its opening sequence is the first thing it gets really right. It’s a simple matter, plotwise: Buddy, the Byrdes’ housemate and ace in the hole where dirty deeds and last-minute saves are concerned, dies in the middle of a pleasant chat with Wendy during their ride home from the Snell compound, where he secretly torched the hillbilly crime family’s opium field while Wendy blew smoke up Darlene Snell’s ass about adoption. It’s a scene that easily could have closed off the preceding episode as one more big mid-season climax moment; here, it sets a tone and gives the hour-plus that follows a firm identity all its own.

In addition to being a fine, warm sendoff for actor Harris Yulin, it also gives Laura Linney her best moment on the show to date, I think. As Wendy and Buddy drive home in the dark, they chat pleasantly about Jr. Walker & the All-Stars’ proto-funk masterpiece “Shotgun,” about life in Detroit at its peak of economic and cultural success, about the Byrdes’ dream to get the hell out of here and flee to a nowhere town off Australia’s Gold Coast. Wendy’s in the middle of waxing rhapsodic about this plan when she realizes Buddy has gone quiet. She looks over and sees that he’s died, and her grin tightens, her eyes water, the laugher in her voice turns to choked-back sobs. She’s processing the sudden loss of a man she cares about and the need to keep it together and keep driving home all in the same moment. It’s lovely to watch.

So is basically everything that follows, where Buddy’s death is concerned. There are fine moments of mourning and celebration and grief and general coming-to-terms for three of the four Byrdes. Marty stands vigil by Buddy’s corpse at the mortuary, shocked at how small and empty his body looks without his boisterous soul to animate it. Jonah respectfully examines his belongings and learns his real name was Jimmy Small, decorated veteran and loyal union man.

Both Wendy and Jonah deliver heartfelt and genuinely moving eulogies at his funeral service, each in their own way conveying to the surprisingly large gathering how much this man’s friendship and love meant to them despite the odd circumstances of their meeting and the gaps in age and background that you’d expect to have kept them at arm’s length. I found myself surrendering to that woozy love-drunk feeling you get when someone you care about very much dies — the sense that you’re adrift in a sea of your own feelings for them, and suddenly alone in that sea now that they’re gone.

Buddy’s death is reflected and refracted in this episode’s de rigeur race-against-time plot element as well. Just as the Byrdes feared and the Snells refused to face up to, the FBI comes calling at their farm, discovering not just the charred remains of their opium field but also a scattering of graves beneath the ashes. These are the remains of various Snell victims over the years, and perhaps over the decades.

Though it’s not like Marty and Wendy and their cartel lawyer Helen can get a straight answer out of the Snells about them: Jacob is beatifically abstruse about whether the human remains belong to anyone tied to the web of criminality around the Byrdes, and Darlene stays locked in her defiant-to-the-point-of-denial mode. This attitude of hers, and the way it all but ensures disaster for the family, has been one of the least plausible things about this season, right up there with Agent Petty and the FBI not surveilling any of their suspects as they schlep back and forth to each other’s property seemingly without consequence.

Oh well. The main concern here is that the feds will discover the body of disappeared cartel lieutenant Del (he’s apparently buried elsewhere) or that of Grace, the slain pregnant wife of now-itinerant preacher Mason, who wants more than anything to crack that case and find his wife’s remains. (We don’t know for sure yet but it seems Wendy, who tries in vain to warn Mason not to press the issue, winds up calling the cops on the streetcorner preacher to keep him away; the cops wind up separating him from his child, which given what we know about how this country now works is an ugly thing to behold.)

It’s Marty’s bright idea to pivot off a throwaway comment from Jacob about family burial plots on the property, exhume those old skeletons and pull a switcheroo with the DNA recovered from the site, so that the results come back tied to Jacob’s ancestors rather than his victims. We learn that Marty keeps his money stashed in one of the coffins at the funeral parlor the family owns, so clearly he’s no stranger to seeking utilitarian uses for death.

The living have it plenty bad as it is. Ruth Langmore starts the episode all but sequestered in her trailer, sobbing in the shower and thoroughly traumatized by her torture at Helen and the cartel’s hands. With some justification, she primarily blames Agent Petty for her suffering, since he deliberately made her look like an informant in front of the cartel’s watchful eyes. She transmits a warning about Petty’s cruelty to her newfound confidant Rachel over at the Blue Cat, without knowing Rachel has already had plenty of first-hand experience in that department.

But Ruth’s speech, and Petty’s (sorry) pettiness toward her over the failure of his search warrant for the Byrdes’ property to yield any slam-dunk evidence, seems to turn Rachel against him permanently. She refuses his offer of oxycontin, and also refuses to give any more to Ruth than the couple of pills she gave the girl earlier that day to soothe her obvious pain.

These are just a couple of the defeats Petty suffers this episode. Not only does the Snell search turn up bupkes and his star informant start getting cold feet, but he also runs right into a wall where powerful Missouri politico Charles Wilkes is concerned. Just when he thinks he’s got the guy dead to rights, Wilkes’s body man reveals that they’ve uncovered all the petty (again, sorry) but potentially career-ending crimes he’s committed since arriving at the lake: trashing his hotel room, firing a gun in a crowded bar, mugging a drug dealer. Wilkes offers a deal: In exchange for their silence on these matters and further info about Marty, both Wilkes and Wendy must be let off the hook.

The episode ends with a pair of understated climaxes for its two plotlines. Jonah takes the stuffed head of the deer he killed on his hunt with Buddy, Marty, and Jacob the other day and gives it a Viking funeral, setting it on fire and pushing it out into the water to burn. It’s his way of saying goodbye to Buddy, but it also reads like some kind of ritual regarding his own entry into low-grade criminality, from writing dumb upperclassmen’s papers at a profit to sealing cartel cash and laundering the money just like his old man taught him — all of which his parents find out about after he gets suspended from school when his scheme is discovered, and Wyatt Langmore gets expelled for coming to his rescue when an angry client starts beating him up.

Finally, Rachel — moved by Buddy’s funeral, by her and Ruth’s painful encounters with Petty, and apparently by a short speech from Marty about how since he first became a father he’s been desperate not to die and thus leave his children without a last line of defense — makes a pair of bold moves. She kisses Marty, who kisses her back before they come to their senses. Then she starts unbuttoning her shirt, the point of which Marty understandably misses until she reveals the wire she’s been wearing the whole time.

Jordana Spiro is all soulful eyes and ache in this scene as Rachel, while as Marty, Jason Bateman finally seems to have seen something he can’t immediately file away and power through — a tendency he’s developed as a survival tactic for himself and his family, even as it leads to a workaholism that’s destroying his marriage. It’s another sad and surprisingly powerful moment.

It also takes place while Marvin Gaye’s untouchable “Inner City Blues (Make Me Wanna Holler)” plays on the jukebox. Normally this is the kind of music-cue cheat code I object to on principle, since even at its best Ozark is not even playing the same sport as What’s Goin’ On, much less in the same league or ballpark. But as the day past the song remained playing in my head: Gaye’s falsetto, the percussion hit that recurs throughout the song and much of the entire prog-R&B concept album it comes from, the way the song seems to cohere from the ether into a driving lament for a whole way of life.

It’s likely we’re supposed to take its resonance with the story at face value; Marty, after all, no doubt wants to holler, the way they do his life. But if you’re feeling generous you can chalk it up to one of those cosmic forces that sometimes seem to hold sway in our lives, when something amazing or terrible happens at just the moment when the perfect, or perfectly gutting, song comes on to complement it. Maybe at this very low ebb in both their lives, Rachel and Marty just so happened to be listening to a song about a very low ebb in human life in general. Stranger things have happened.

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 6 ("Outer Darkness") on Netflix