‘Ozark’ Season 4 Episode 13 Recap: Foundations

The second-to-last episode of Ozark ever opens with Ruth Langmore overseeing the destruction of her decrepit, trailer-strewn homestead on the lake. She plans to build a huge new house—multiple houses, actually—on the land, and the cranes are trashing trailers and digging holes for the house’s foundations everywhere.

The episode ends with Ruth and her business partner Rachel looking down at the muddy, rainsoaked ground, to which they’ve recently added a dead body. So much for leaving that Langmore past behind her.

To be fair to Ruth, calling Rachel to warn her of the hitman Nelson’s approach and coach her through killing him was, at least, a selfless act by Ruth. Finding herself tailed by the gunman, she pulls into the Osage Police Deparment, flips Nelson the double bird, and then walks inside to spill the entire story of how her cousin Wyatt really got killed to the acting sheriff, Deputy Wycoff. None of it’s on the record, so to speak, and she insists she’ll say he made the whole thing up if he tells anyone. But she doesn’t want an innocent man going to jail for a crime she knows for a fact he didn’t commit. She does actually have a good heart.

Not that this matters to Nelson. As soon as she goes inside, he’s off to her old home, whether to stake it out or to kill whomever he finds there. Ruth had to warn Rachel, had to tell her it was a kill or be killed situation. I’m just surprised it worked out so cleanly for the women; I was sure for a minute there that Rachel had returned to the show only to be added to the pile of corpses.

But this episode has quite a few surprises up its sleeve. Show of hands: Who saw “Wendy checks herself into a mental hospital” coming? I sure didn’t! At first it seems like she’s genuinely searching for help, even if her Type-A approach means trying to speedrun the process and blowing up at the receptionist and nurse for not following her orders.

But by the end of the episode, her intentions are more clear. First, because she’s Wendy, she’s hoping that being hospitalized will cause her children to come running back home—pure, textbook manipulation. Second, she legitimately believes that unless she is closed away in the mental health facility, she will go out and kill her father. We have little reason to doubt her.

And we have more reasons to sympathize. In this episode we learn that her dad is still a closeted drunk—Wendy discovers his shoebox full of half-empty bottles when she goes to his motel room to try and buy him off with $2 million—and that he still has the nasty, sexist, self-righteous attitude she’s been warning everyone about—revealed when he gets into an ugly conversation with Ruth Langmore, so ugly I thought it might turn violent.

The problem with Wendy checking into the hospital is, well, everything else requires Wendy to be up and about. Ruth and Rachel have successfully taken over the Missouri Belle casino and won’t allow Marty to launder money through it any longer. Omar Navarro wants his money laundered fast, and will accept only the Belle as the mechanism, not any of Marty’s other businesses. There’s a big Byrde Family Foundation fundraiser scheduled at the Belle imminently, so laundering money through the donations might be a possibility—but Wendy herself insists the Foundation must remain clean (or clean-ish, given all the bribery going on all over the midwest to make it happen); she even gets out of bed with the crooked Senator Schafer so she doesn’t get the stink of his rigged voting machines on her.

So the Byrdes make a pitch to Camila: Secretly kill your brother and take over the cartel as a shadow boss, with Marty helping her run it and the FBI giving it their tacit blessing. The only problem there is that Camila is told by Omar that he didn’t put the hit out on her son Javi, and she knows it was Wendy Byrde who told him Javi was dead in the first place.

The one thing that puzzles me about this episode is how anti-climactic, how anti-penultimate it feels. Four seasons of buildup, four seasons of scheming and murder, and this is how the second-to-last episode ends? With the death of a minor character whose name you might even remember (the judges will accept “the hitman from the cartel”), at the hands of someone who’s only been back on the show for the past couple of episodes? It’s not even as if Rachel’s life has really been explored since her return—she’s effectively just a new partner for Ruth, and the torment she went through as a result of getting mixed up with Marty Byrde is barely acknowledged, except insofar as she’s not particularly friendly to the Byrdes anymore. It just feels like a missed opportunity, both to beef up the show’s penultimate episode and to avoid overloading the finale with too much momentous stuff. Spread the wealth, I say!

But it’s fascinating to watch the wheels finally start to rattle and shake as if they might come off of Wendy any minute. She spends much of the episode drinking and talking to herself, with a huge self-inflicted bruise on her forehead. Her children seem to blame her exclusively for their family’s parents, telling Marty he just does what she tells him to do. Her no-good father, the problems at the Belle, the onrushing fundraiser—they all threaten what’s left of her equilibrium. And, of course, she hospitalized herself.

I’m starting to wonder if, in the end, we’ll look back at Ozark as primarily Wendy’s story rather than Marty’s or even Ruth’s. I wonder if watching her American dream completely fall to pieces, scattering dead bodies all along the way, is the whole point.

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.