‘Ozark’ Season 4 Episode 6 Recap: Take the Money and Run

Time to get out while the getting’s good. That’s the conclusion a wide variety of characters come to in the penultimate episode of this half-season of Ozark. This being Ozark, though, there’s always something to pull them back in.

Take Ruth and Wyatt Langmore, for instance. Wyatt’s girlfriend Darlene Snell is very much alive, thanks to Wendy’s better-late-than-never call to 911 at the end of the previous episode. When she straight-up murders Kansas City mob boss Frank Cosgrove for the crime of pissing her off—seriously, never antagonize this woman while she has a shotgun within reach—Wyatt decides to take Ruth up on her offer of collecting their cash and his kid brother Three (Carson Holmes) and getting the hell out of town. 

But when he returns to the Snell compound to break things off with Darlene, he finds her sobbing. Turns out that Social Services are going to take away her baby Zeke on account of her failing health—acting on a tip from Wendy Byrde, though Darlene doesn’t know this (yet). Rather than leave her alone, Wyatt scraps his plan and proposes. Given that Ruth has tipped off Frank Cosgrove Jr. about his father’s murder (with surprising tenderness; she too lost a father, as she tells Junior) and given him free rein to attack Darlene as long as Ruth gets a day to wrap things up in town, the timing for Wyatt could not be worse.

Then there’s Jonah Byrde, the prodigal son. At least that’s how Wendy sees him, and she’s bound and determined to drive him away from Ruth and Darlene and back into the family fold. Her method for this is…unconventional, to say the least: She deliberately flags one of his money-laundering accounts so that he’ll get arrested, which will, uh, make him want to rejoin the family and move back to Chicago with them, I guess? 

Of course, everyone else in the Byrde family is aghast when they find this out—no one more so than Jonah himself, who immediately packs his bags and leaves. “You can’t throw a kid into a burning building, Wendy,” Marty says, “and watch him come running back out into your arms and pretend that it’s love.” Wendy’s response, basically, is try me.

Even her political fixer Jim pays for his involvement with Wendy. When she extends an offer to bring him aboard full-time, she comes clean about the fact that the Byrdes launder money for the Navarro cartel. He seems to swallow his reservations about this, though he does call bullshit on Wendy’s glass-half-full spin on the situation. Unfortunately, the new arrangement brings Javi Navarro to his doorstep, giving Jim the whole “you work for me now” spiel. What could go wrong?

Javi’s involvement here takes some unpacking. After he sets up the FBI for a suicide bombing when they try to intercept another of his trucks, his uncle Omar decides to hand the reins of the cartel over to him…but it’s all a ruse. Omar’s plan—once Marty can gather enough evidence that Javi, not Omar, ordered the bombing, which Marty does with the help of an FBI wire—is to install Javi in the leadership position for the express purpose of handing the cartel’s new leader over to the Feds, lock stock and barrel. 

But I think the key scene for the whole episode, or at the very least Wendy’s outsized role in so much of it, comes when she and her estranged father try to sit down for coffee like civilized people after they travel to a morgue to see if a body belongs to her “missing” brother Ben. Wendy herself ran away from home to get away from her unloving, over-religious father, but she’s still bearing the emotional wounds of the fact that he did little, if anything, to stop her or bring her back home.

Seen in that light, her almost psychotic devotion to the concept of Our Family makes sense. She’s so determined to avoid repeating her parents’ mistakes that she’s making brand new mistakes of her own. The difference is that while her parents were shitty, they weren’t getting people killed left and right. This adds significant stakes to her interactions with Jonah and Darlene, and with the Navarros and Cosgroves circling around, the stakes only get higher. 

Simply put, there’s no way this ends well. The half-season itself, however, has every chance of ending very strongly—drawing on the smiling sociopathy of Laura Linney as Wendy, the badly damaged sweetness of Julia Garner as Ruth, the gawky gentleness of Charlie Tahan as Wyatt, and so on down the line. I just wouldn’t get too attached to anyone. There’s only one way all this ends, as the episode’s punning title “Sangre Sobre Todo” hints: Blood above all.

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 4 Episode 6 on Netflix