If it wasn’t already apparent, women have the meatiest and most engaging material throughout the hour. Aside from Wendy’s power-playing and will-she-or-won’t-she angle and Darlene’s out-of-the-blue baby fever, there’s Ruth Langmore to consider. The young gun has been netting bigger and better assignments from her boss Marty for a while now, including a $25K per year raise, various management responsibilities, and the task of securing the purchase of a Proud Mary–style riverboat to serve as the cartel casino, which she manages by tipping over the seller’s wheelchair and kneeing his sniveling underling in the balls.
But Ruth is still very much under the thumb of her father Cade. She spends most of the episode regaling him with a vision of a picket-fence future paid for by Marty’s money, and winds up watching him stick up a convenience store just for fun, before he bashes her head into the dashboard of their car and insists she figure out a way to fuck the Byrdes out of their money, or else. That there’s an incestuous edge to all of this goes without saying.
And far, far away, Rachel (Jordana Spiro) resurfaces. You remember Rachel: She was the original owner of the Blue Cat Lodge, a sad-ass lakeside motel that Marty turned into his main front business. Once she got wind of what he was really up to, she stole a hundred grand and hit the road, and has apparently been living from flophouse to flophouse ever since.
When she gets brought in for DUI, who should resurface but Agent Petty (Jason Butler Harner), whose lover Russ Langmore got electrocuted by Ruth over all the Byrde-related craziness. He’s now out for vengeance — though why he needs any witnesses cooperation when the feds are clearly all over the Byrdes’ operation is beyond me — and, in a tedious tough-guy speech, he forces Rachel to help him take his quarry down. I may not be 100% sold on, well, any of this, but the entertainment value is as tough to dispute as a three-strikes-and-you’re-out felony verdict.
I reviewed episode two of Ozark Season Two for Decider. It’s one of the most “if you like this kind of thing, this is the kind of thing you’ll like” shows in recent memory. (I kinda like it.)
Tags: decider, ozark, reviews, TV, TV reviews