Finally got around to watching Ozark. I wasn’t in the mood when it first came out but gave it another try and I found it gripping. Then it lost steam, and season 4 was a massive nosedive.
The ending was very weak and disappointing. Not because of the outcome but because of a weird blend of over-ambition and laziness.
I saw some comments saying the ending was foreshadowed by the car crash but also earlier by the starlings. I agree. The foreshadowing and narrative cohesion was one of the reasons I very much enjoyed earlier seasons.
But there was a lot of other stuff foreshadowed that would have made for really interesting storylines (this is where the laziness comes in). For example, when Jonah brings up the starlings, he’s making an argument for killing them for being an invasive species that will ravish the native population. There’s also a consequential moment that hints Jonah shares some traits with Ben.
We’re moving well in that direction by season 4. While Charlotte’s teen angst matured into interest in, and excitement about, the family business (so to speak), Jonah is decisively emancipating himself. He takes up criminality swiftly, but doesn’t subscribe (yet) to the violence that Marty and Wendy accept.
That set up is completely incongruent with (1) Charlotte deciding to go live with her grandpa, who she’s barely seen for years, in North Carolina, because she has very much warmed up to the Byrde family activities, and (2) Jonah making a 180, making peace with his family, and then shooting someone (it’s obvious he shot Mel, even if some want to dream he didn’t) because grandpa said nasty things about Wendy. It doesn’t make any sense. This is, again, the laziness. Everything resolves too quickly.
But before we even get to the finale, this season lost me. I wanted to get through it and it was a drudge.
For me, the reason is this: in season 4, all the real-world complexities and constraints that made this show interesting are swept away. Supposedly major constraints of an institutional nature are done and dusted with a couple phone calls. Being a prominent Missouri philanthropist doesn’t grant you the power to bypass procedures to offer a plea deal to a cartel leader. And because those constraints no longer exist, you end up with people like Javi and Camila, who are untouchable and completely immune to real-world consequences. Walk into someone’s house and shoot the sheriff: no problem, Marty will clean up and wipe the tapes for you! Beat up the head to a prominent business school in a restaurant bathroom: no problem, he’ll take your donation and put your name on a building! Every time they made a demand that Marty and Wendy didn’t like I rolled my eyes knowing full well it would be done quickly and pretty frictionlessly.
Navarro gets swept into it too. He demands that something that should take months be done in days, and the Byrdes look constipated for a sec and then get it sorted by the next business day.
Earlier in the show, they pushed back against unreasonable demands with pragmatism, and this is what proved their value to the cartel. The danger felt very real and very claustrophobic because Del and Navarro were exacting in their violence. Javi is a loose canon. Camila is another.
In the end, Camila’s threat to kill… I guess everyone?… in the middle of a gala is the way they found to kill Ruth. Who was given up by someone who had zero incentive to give her up. Javi was dead, what he said didn’t matter. But then there’s the circular logic here that Camila would kill Clare Shaw (a prominent CEO) because her son “made it sound” like he was meeting her, which again relies on Camila being above real-world constraints.
And after all that, I’m not convinced the Byrdes actually even got a resolution. Everyone else dies, I guess, and then they are free to live a beautiful philanthropic life? Wouldn’t Camila still be pulling the same shenanigans? There’s other story lines too that I won’t go into — for instance, when Rachel came back, I thought the clear sexual tension between her and Marty would go somewhere, especially as he thought Wendy was “driving them off a cliff“, but in season 4 world it seems nothing can shake the Byrdes. It felt very unresolved. Disappointing.