‘Ozark’ Season 2 Episode 7 Recap: Son of a Preacher Man

You have 48 hours to find an episode of Ozark Season 2 in which no one is given 48 hours to do something. Or 24 hours. Or two minutes. Or any artificially imposed time frame, actually, though I mention those numbers specifically because all three are cited in ultimatums issued in this episode alone. A black-marketeer gives Ruth and Cade Langmore 48 hours to steal a fancy thermal imaging system for him in exchange for ten thousand dollars. Marty Byrde gives Darlene Snell two minutes to tell him where she’s hiding his wife Wendy before siccing the cartel on her. Pastor Mason Young gives Marty 24 hours to retrieve his infant son from the foster system or he’ll kill Wendy, whom he’s kidnapped. Ozark Season 2 Episode 7 is called “One Way Out”; it might as well be named that after the strategy employed by the writers’ room.
Honestly, the timed-ultimatum thing is more funny than anything else at this stage, to the point where I wonder if it’s not intended to be some kind of recurring gag. The bigger problem with this episode, which follows one of the series’ strongest, is how much it feels like wasted time.

It’s odd, because it starts strongly enough. There’s a cold open in which Wendy and Marty entertain probing questions from an offscreen reporter, Wendy in full PR mode and Marty preoccupied to the point of muteness. Then, after the Ruth and Cade situation gets put in gear, Marty and Rachel rendezvous in a well-executed scene at the Blue Cat, during which they talk out loud as if they’re pursuing an affair, while superimposed captions from their concurrent text-message conversation reveals that she’s actually begging him to vouch for her to the cartel now that her identity as an informant is known to him, to which he regretfully replies that a) they don’t seem to believe a word he says anyway, and b) even they did, if they find out that he knows she’s a rat, they might well kill both of them, and his family to boot. After all this, they fake (or is that “fake”?) their way through one of the saddest and sexiest kisses I’ve seen on TV all year. It’s sexy because it’s sad.
Then the problems start. Wendy is kidnapped out of the blue by an unseen figure who puts a black bag over her head and drives her out to the middle of nowhere. It’s not a cartel guy or a Snell henchman or a Langmore or a KC mobster or a Charles Wilkes minion, though — it’s Mason Young, the pastor who lost his congregation, his wife, and most recently his son to his entanglements with the Byrdes and company. He issues Marty the “impossible” task of retrieving his kid from the system and returning him unharmed by the next day, or he’ll execute Wendy. We know, of course, that this is somewhat less than impossible given that Wendy is not likely to die at the hands of a supporting character on Mason’s level, and that she’s got a politico friend in Wilkes who seems to do the impossible routinely in this state.

Sure enough, it works out alright, or at least it seems. Marty gets the kid relatively easily, by promising the head of the agency he’ll be fostering the boy himself in order to keep his old friend Mason from committing suicide over the loss. But when he shows up with the baby, Mason flips out. He’s alienated from the kid, yelling at him and claiming Marty did something to him. Thanks to some alternately tender and ugly moments with Wendy, he’s also questioning his faith like never before, if the kidnapping at gunpoint weren’t indication of that enough.
Just when it seems he’s going to snap and abduct Wendy again, she stabs him with a screwdriver, he gets the better of her, and Marty shoots him in the neck, killing him. It’s Marty’s first kill — just like Jonah’s a couple episodes ago, if you missed the subtext — and he has a full-fledged panic attack, forcing Wendy to take charge of both the cleanup effort and the subsequent charm-offensive interview with a Kansas City journalist, arranged by a PR person hired by cartel lawyer Helen. It’s then that we learn the Byrdes have adopted the baby for real now.
One of this storyline’s biggest flaws is centering it on Mason in the first place. The preacher was most interesting as a genuine idealist kicking against the pricks; he’s much less compelling, and convincing, as a wildman or violent antagonist. (“All you do is lie!” he shouts at the Byrdes at one point, while they’re telling the truth; gainsaying does not make for a good antagonist.) His seemingly endless back and forth with Wendy about dealing with trauma, finding and losing faith, deliberately engineering crises in order to produce a result you can’t admit to yourself that you actually want, and so on don’t say anything new about these topics, and don’t work well for either character — Mason’s simply not strong enough, and Wendy’s strengths are all in the here-and-now performance choices of Laura Linney, not in her multiple-trauma backstory. Other than a single very strong long shot of Mason and Wendy struggling during an escape attempt, there’s nothing all that memorable going on here.

The addition of a baby to the Byrde family already seems like a regrettable development. It’s unfair, of course, to hold things that haven’t happened yet against the show as it stands, but Ozark is not really much for curveballs — remember the three ultimatums? So I’m sitting here imagining scenes in which Marty and Wendy rediscover what it means to be parents, or Darlene Snell launches into a white-hot fury when she sees the Byrdes have a baby when she’s wanted one all season, or the baby gets abducted and the Byrdes are given (insert amount of time here) to do something in order to get him back, and yawning preemptively. When I think about how little use the show has made of Sofia Hublitz, a fine actor who as Charlotte had some of last season’s strongest material, I start resenting the kid the way Charlotte and Jonah might well wind up doing themselves.
There is one gangbusters scene, though, and unsurprisingly it involves Julia Garner as Ruth. When she and her dad attempt to steal that boat equipment late one night, the owner surprises them with a shotgun, forcing them slip into the frigid water and hide beneath the dock. The incident retraumatizes Ruth, who was recently mock-drowned as a method of torture, into something approaching infancy. In an absolutely flabbergasting performance, Garner sobs and squints and stutters her way through, of all things, an apology to her father, for not properly vetting the owner’s routine. I did my best to transcribe it:

I promise I promise I promise I’m not I’m not a fuckup I’m not you got you gotta you gotta give me another chance Daddy I’ll make it alright Daddy I’l make it so you won’t have to think about this I’ll make you I’ll make you so so proud…
It is absolutely brutal to watch and listen to, so much so that it actually moves Cade to something actually approaching paternal care. “There’ll be other boats,” he says, in all sincerity. “All that matters is you’re okay, Ruthie.” She leans her head on his shoulder for comfort and, as he puts his head against hers, reveals that she may know where Marty’s money is hidden after all. “Let’s go get it then,” he says. The night is still young, and time is of the essence.

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 7 ("One Way Out") on Netflix