Julia Garner. Julia Garner. Julia fucking Garner.

I reviewed the mid-season finale of Ozark Season 4 for Decider.

Simply put, there’s no way this ends well. The half-season itself, however, has every chance of ending very strongly—drawing on the smiling sociopathy of Laura Linney as Wendy, the badly damaged sweetness of Julia Garner as Ruth, the gawky gentleness of Charlie Tahan as Wyatt, and so on down the line. I just wouldn’t get too attached to anyone. There’s only one way all this ends, as the episode’s punning title “Sangre Sobre Todo” hints: Blood above all.

I reviewed the penultimate episode of the first half of Ozark Season Four for Decider.

Ozark has a grim view of our country, and that may be its strongest characteristic. In Ozark’s world, everyone’s a grifter, everyone’s constantly hustling, everyone’s on the make and on the take. Art imitates life, you know?

I reviewed episode five of Ozark Season Four for Decider.

Wendy Byrde is becoming a loose cannon in Ozark Season 4 Episode 4. Not that she’d acknowledge it if you asked, of course. Like just about everyone in the Byrde family, she’d be the first to tell you that everything’s under control, provided we all stick together As A Family. This, of course, became markedly harder to do after she made the Sophie’s choice of sacrificing her brother to protect her husband and children. (And herself.) Her son Jonah hates her, and has joined what amounts to a rival drug organization with Ruth Langmore and Darlene Snell. Her husband, meanwhile, watches dumbfounded as she repeatedly says, falsely, that her brother Ben had addiction issues—which is why, she says, he is missing today, and which is also why, she says, the Byrde Family Foundation has gone into business with Shaw Medical Solutions to open opioid rehab centers. 

“It’s reckless,” Marty says. 

“It’s good PR,” she replies.

I reviewed the fourth episode of Ozark‘s fourth season for Decider.

There’s a point early on in Ozark Season 4 Episode 3 where FBI Agent Maya Miller notes that cartel boss Omar Navarro, with whom she has been dragged to a meeting, has a two-month-old son who was nearly killed at his own baptism. It’s a time frame worth remembering: Everything we’ve seen on this show since that baptism massacre—all the ups and downs, the betrayals and backstabbing, the schemes and plans, the life-changing upheavals—have taken place in a matter of just a few weeks. Ozark storytelling is a bit like the omicron variant: In just a little time, it’s fucking everywhere, man.

I reviewed the third episode of Ozark‘s fourth season for Decider.

The funny thing about Ozark is that despite packing so much plot into any given episode, it feels strangely slow-moving. Tons of stuff happens, but the sheer volume of plot mechanics is such that any one development hamstrings the movement of any number of others. I think that, ironically, the show would feel much faster and more gripping if it limited itself to a smaller number of storylines at a time. Is that likely? I wouldn’t hold my breath.

I reviewed episode two of Ozark Season Four for Decider.

Literally titled “The Beginning of the End,” the show’s final season premiere (technically speaking, anyway—the season will be divided into two parts, released separately) starts out in typical Ozark style, i.e. a shocking cold open. Perhaps you recall how Ozark Season 3 ended, with the Wendy and Marty Byrde’s frenemy Helen Pierce getting her brains blown out right in front of (and all over) them? Well, we start out half a continent and an unspecified amount of time away from all that. Wendy (Laura Linney) and Marty (Jason Bateman) chit-chat about an FBI meeting. Their kids, Charlotte (Sofia Hublitz) and Jonah (Skylar Gaertner), talk about leaving behind laundered money as a surprise for some lucky person in the future to find. They’re all so distracted by basically being happy together, for the first time in god knows how long, that they don’t see an oncoming truck until it’s (almost) too late.

Which, as I sit here thinking about it, is not a bad metaphor for Ozark in general. The Byrdes are constantly bombarded with do-or-die assignments and ultimatums, bearing down on them like a tractor trailer headed into oncoming traffic. In this episode, for example, they are tasked by cartel boss Omar Navarro (Felix Solis) with shutting down the heroin operation of local crime boss Darlene Snell (Lisa Emery) and securing some kind of sweetheart deal with the FBI for Omar himself, who wants to retire from his criminal enterprise a free man. This is how Ozark works: The Byrdes are told to do something under pain of death—in this case either at the hands of Omar himself or his grasping nephew Javi (Alfonso Herrera)—and we watch them figure out how to do it or die trying. No one’s died yet, so they must be doing something right.

I’m covering the first part of Ozark‘s bifurcated fourth and final season for Decider, starting with my review of the season premiere.