‘Ozark’ Season 2 Episode 9 Recap: Till Death Do Us Part

Let’s get it out of the way up front and count the time-sensitive ultimatums issued in Ozark Season 2 Episode 9. One: Marty and Wendy Byrde have two days to sign their daughter Charlotte’s legal emancipation paperwork or her new lawyer will be forced to enter Charlotte’s statement about her parents into the court record. Two: Marty and Wendy Byrde have until 5pm tonight to get ready for a make-or-break elbow-rubbing session at Charlie Wilkes’s lakehouse, during which the gaming commissioner will make a demand they cannot refuse to honor if they want the casino to go through. One, two! Two time-sensitive ultimatums! AH AH AH AH!

“The Badger” is the penultimate episode of Ozark‘s second season, but it weirdly doesn’t feel like things are picking up steam for some inevitable climax or confrontation — though I don’t doubt one’s in the offing, most likely pitting crazy hillbilly crime queenpin Darlene Snell against ruthless cartel lawyer Helen Pierce, with intimidating mob boss Frank Cosgrove and ornery redneck convict Cade Langmore riding shotgun in some way. I just mean that this episode felt like more of its own thing than the prelude to some other thing.

But at the same time, it also didn’t feel like the traditional penultimate-episode climax, a model once favored by shows like The Sopranos and Game of Thrones, and one which Netflix shows have tended not to employ. This is true even though something happens that’s the stuff penultimate-episode climaxes are made of. Driven apart by the collapse of their autonomy, the loss of their land, and the constant and often bloody humiliations that have all come to pass since their deal with the cartel was made and immediately screwed up when Darlene killed the Mexicans’ negotiator, the Snells finally turn on one another.

Jacob, whose plan is conciliation and surrender in exchange for security and vast quantities of cash, aims to stab his beloved wife to death in the woods as they go for one last walk before the developers start tearing things up; Darlene, whose goal is war and vengeance, beats him to the punch, spiking his coffee with cyanide and cradling him as he dies. They both have a sense of fatalistic humor about it — I which feels true to who they are. “I never could keep up with you, Darlene,” Jacob groans as he lies dying, one last admiring wisecrack before the couple dissolves permanently.

The episode’s cold open gives us a sense of what they saw in one another, and how Darlene’s wild side is not some out-of-the-blue thing, as it’s at times seemed. In a flashback set to Glen Campbell’s gorgeous romantic dream of a song, “Witchita Lineman,” we see Jacob as a just-returned Vietnam veteran, clean cut in his uniform. Darlene is a young hellcat — there’s no other word for it — who crashes the date he’s on at the local diner and, promising him a life of excitement that won’t leave him wishing he’d died in ‘Nam after all, whisks him away to skinnydip. She’s half naked by the time she even introduces herself. So, y’know, I get it.

So does Jacob. During a rueful conversation with Marty and Helen, he learns he’s made an error that gives the government claim to nearly all his land just like what happened to his ancestors in 1929. The camera lingers on actor Peter Mullan throughout Marty and Helen’s explanation of just how badly he’s gotten swindled, giving it an effect that’s like the opposite of the similar “I DRINK YOUR MILKSHAKE” speech at the end of There Will Be Blood — here, the point isn’t the glee Jacob’s enemies take in beating him, since they really aren’t taking any, but in his own sense of failure, his realization that Darlene was right and they never should have gone into business with the cartel, his other realization that things wouldn’t have gotten this bad if Darlene could control her anger, and no doubt a sense of stupidity about spending a lifetime trying hold on to what his family built up from nothing, only to lose it all again. (Though millions in cash from the casino would probably salve the pain a little.)

Anyway, at the end of it all, he asks Marty this: “What do you do, Martin, when the bride who took your breath away becomes the wife that makes you hold your breath in terror?” It’s a gorgeous, portentous line, and Mullan savors it; I wish he’d had been given anything that Boardwalk Empire/Deadwood memorable during his recent stint on Westworld, just for example. He knows he forged a connection with Darlene so deep from the start that severing it will be a disaster. He was just wrong about who’d bear the brunt.

Speaking of disaster, and aren’t we always on this show, the other family units at the center of the story are suffering major ones of their own. As mentioned above, Charlotte is going through with her emancipation plans, and has confided at least some of the details of the Byrdes’ criminality to her lawyer. This leads Wendy to say something to the effect of “if you really think we’re that bad you should probably be concerned when I say I’ll do anything for my family,” which…doesn’t help. Nor does the fact that, as Marty himself admits, Charlotte is right — they are more a pack of criminals than a functional family. Marty’s only hope is to whisk them all away the second the casino gets approved, which looks like it’s going to happen…but only if, to placate the right-wing gaming commissioner, he makes the casino a non-union shop, which will infuriate the Kansas City mob.

Ruth Langmore, meanwhile, is horrified when armed robbers burst into the strip club she manages and rob the safe — because the thieves are her father Cade and cousin Wyatt, whom daddy dearest convinced to help him by lying about Ruth’s involvement. Ruth demands the money back from Wyatt and pulls a gun on her dad to get his share back as well, but he blows her off, and then decides to rat out her supposed friend Marty to Agent Petty.

Petty, in a pair of touching scenes, is moving back home to help out his addict mother, for whom he feels real affection. He also goes fishing one last time as a sort of celebration of his short life with Russ Langmore, with whom he’d once dreamed of opening a bait and tackle shop. It’s to the point where he seems so chastened and serious and sincere that you’re actually happy he’s figured out a way to use the casino as a sting to roll up the cartel and the KC mafia all in one fell swoop, and presumably the Byrdes too — though thinking about it now, if the feds need the casino to open, a lot of whatever showdown is on the horizon is gonna be a moot point.

But my favorite scene, and once again this is no surprise, belongs to Julia Garner as Ruth, and Charlie Tahan’s Wyatt as well. (Tahan is great at conveying the mien of a brain too big for the lanky, undernourished, greasy-haired body it’s been crammed into.) She approaches him with a letter from the University of Missouri. It’s thin, so she’s already trembling and weepy, fearing the worst but assuring him there are other colleges to which he can apply. When he proves unable to open it himself, she musters the courage and does it for him. Reading, her crying becomes tears of joy as she sees he’s been accepted, and her smile of actual happiness is just the most hearbreaking thing to see. Wyatt, you see, feels he can’t bring himself to go yet, and not just because he’d leave his kid brother Three behind. He needs to know what really happened to his father in order to be able to move on with his life. Ruth, of course, knows that if she tells him the truth, it could be even worse than not knowing at all.

Wyatt winds up running off with Charlotte in a van, and Wendy, who’d been tailing them with seeming anger in her eyes, lets them go. Maybe everyone would be better off if they just picked up stakes and moved in different directions. But family ties you up tight.

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.