“Ozark” thoughts, Season Two, Episode Nine: “The Badger”

The episode’s cold open gives us a sense of what the Snells 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.

I reviewed the penultimate episode of Ozark Season Two for Decider. Love Peter Mullan, love Julia Garner.

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