The polarizing ending to Season 4 of Ozark explained (2023)

the ozarkfourth seasonHe came and he left. Endings are tough, especially for a critically acclaimed show, but after five years, Ozark is finally coming to an end. Was it a good ending? It depends on who you ask.

Ozark began in 2017 with Chicago accountant Marty Byrde (Jason Bateman) making a deal for his life: After finding himself on the wrong end of a drug cartel gun, he says he'll launder money in the Ozarks in exchange for safety. of his family. By the time we arrivedfourth seasonIn the first part, in January, Marty and his wife, Wendy (Laura Linney), became involved with this cartel.

They had set up a casino to launder millions, had buckets of blood on their hands, and were working with the cartel and the FBI to cut a deal that would finally allow them to leave town and start over. During Ozark's four seasons, the pair constantly found themselves in sticky situations that they managed to escape from at the last second. But the walls were closing in on them when the second part of the fourth season began: could they make a final Houdini?

As the request ofremake of the last season of Game of Thronesshows, dedicated fan bases can be hard to please. Some of what happens in the finale has divided fans. See how this story ends.spoilers ahead.

Pour one for Ruth Langmore

Before reaching the Byrde family, the big news to come out of the Ozark finale involves Ruth Langmore. While the Byrdes may have a happy ending, Ruth doesn't. She was shot dead by Camila Navarro, the new head of the cartel.

Ruth, played by Julia Garner, is a consistent highlight of the show, and her troubled relationship with Marty was especially compelling in the first three seasons of Ozark. fourth season first partended with Ruth running down a roadin search of Javier, Omar Navarro's nephew. (Note that many of the events of Season 4 revolved around Omar's fear of his ambitious and brash nephew: Sensing Javi's bloody invasion, Omar makes a deal with the FBI that ultimately goes awry.) Javi had just of killing Darlene Snell and Wyatt Langmore. Wyatt was Ruth's next of kin, the one she hoped would break the "Langmore curse" of ending up prematurely dead or in prison.

Ruth wanted revenge for her cousin's death. And she took revenge.

In the second episode of season four, part two, Ruth arrests and kills Javi. She crashed inside the Shaw Medical offices. Ruth hijacks a dinner party between the Byrdes and Shaw Medical CEO Clare Shaw. (The cartel through Wendy struck a deal with Shaw in season four to supply cheap heroin, a key ingredient in many pharmaceuticals, with Shaw in return making a large donation to Wendy's foundation.) At gunpoint, she requires Shaw to lure Javi into the office to sign a stock delivery agreement for Javi's mother. As Javi swings, Ruth shoots him.

Fortunately for Ruth, Omar Navarro takes responsibility for Javi's murder. By conspiring with the Byrdes prison, Navarro wants to regain control of the cartel from him. To do this, he sends Marty to Mexico to inform the cartel that Navarro was the one who killed the ambitious Javi. There, Marty meets Camila, Omar's sister and Javi's mother.

Enter Camila, the new boss

Camila pretends to understand cartel politics, but has Omar killed in prison. Omar survives the assassination attempt and suspects someone from the cartel is behind the plot. More Betrayal: The Byrdes conspire with Camila to overthrow Omar, staging another hit and having Camila make the same deal with the FBI that Omar agreed to and which would see the Byrdes clean their hands of the whole cartel thing.

That plan goes awry when Camila goes to prison to say goodbye to Omar. There Omar, realizing that something is wrong, tells Camila that he did not kill Javi and that he does not know who killed him, he only knows what Wendy Byrde told him. Camila believes him, but goes ahead with the murder anyway. After four seasons of pulling the strings, Omar Navarro is eliminated.

The closing scenes of the final episode focus on a Byrde Family Foundation gala, where major donors arrive to fulfill all of Byrde's fantasies. The gala is attracting major donors so they can return to Chicago and live out their days as charitable owners of a large nonprofit organization. Finally, theyfezthis. Until Camila entered the party.

She confronts Clare Shaw about the day Javi died. Camila says that she'll forgive Shaw for withholding information if she comes out now, but all kinds of unpublishable things would happen if she found out that Shaw was lying to her. Shaw relents and tells Camila that Ruth Langmore did it. (However, Shaw lies and covers for the Byrdes by saying that only Shaw and Javi were in the office at the time of the murder.)

Camila calls one of her henchmen and tells her to kill the Byrdes and their children if Marty or Wendy try to warn Ruth ahead of time and Camila comes for her. In the final scenes, we see Marty and Wendy discuss their options and realize they don't have any. After four seasons of dodging sticky situations, they're completely helpless. They are safe, but there is nothing they can do to save Ruth, which is painful for them and for us.

As the Byrde family takes the stage at their gala, Ruth Langmore confronts Camilla outside her home. She knows what's coming, but she's defiant to the very end. “I'm not sorry,” she tells Camila, “your son was a murderous bastard. And now I know where he got it from. Camila shoots Ruth right through her heart.

Explaining death tovanity fairShowrunner Chris Mundy said that Ozark would be too much like a fairy tale if Ruth survived. “I wanted everyone to have active options in the last seven episodes,” Mundy told the publication. "Ruth could take revenge or not, and he knows that if she did, it would trigger things that could end up with her getting hurt."

a miraculous getaway

before we arriveotherin a big way, a quick note on the car accident that opened the first part of the fourth season. In the scene, if you don't remember, the entire Byrde family is in the family car talking about their big move to Chicago now that they're done with the Ozarks. In the midst of the euphoria, Marty loses his attention and goes off the road, causing the car to flip over and run off the road.

Turns out it wasn't a dream, or anything important. The accident occurs in the middle of the final episode, but, unlikely, no one is hurt. It comes after one of the biggest subplots of the second part of season four, that of Wendy's father, Nathan Davis, trying to gain custody of Jonah and Charlotte. He plays a worried grandfather, and Wendy has a nervous breakdown that lands her straight in a mental hospital.

But thanks to an interrogation by Ruth Langmore, Nathan turns out to be nothing more than a vengeful father who takes Jonah and Charlotte just to spite Wendy. Once Nathan Davis, held at gunpoint by Ruth, tells Jonah and Charlotte of this, the kids decide to meet up with Marty and Wendy.

The happy ride home is when the dramatic but insignificant accident occurs.

Jonah is a Byrde again

After the gala, moments after we see Ruth dead, the Byrde family arrives at their home. The children run inside, and Marty and Wendy are dejected by the fate that has befallen Ruth and her inability to do anything about it.

Marty sits at the family table, head in hands, and the camera pans around to show us that the glass door has been shattered. Someone has been there.

It turns out to be Mel Sattem, a disgraced ex-cop turned private investigator. He made his Ozark debut in season four, part one, where he was investigating the disappearance of Helen Pierce. He returns here, working for Nathan Davis in an effort to find Ben Davis. Ben was notably killed off in season 3 on the orders of his sister Wendy's, because Ben's antics would have literally killed the entire family. Of course, no one knows this apart from Byrdes and Ruth.

Sattem discovers that Wendy was lying about the last time she saw Ben, and obtains photographic evidence that Wendy took Ben to the restaurant that would be the site of his last known appearance. He becomes a key asset in Nathan Davis's attempt to get a court to separate Jonah and Charlotte from his parents, so Marty and Wendy eliminate him. Not with violence, but with sweet diplomacy.

Since arriving on the show, Sattem has searched for a justification. He was fired from the Chicago Police Department for stealing cocaine evidence, but other than that, he appeared to be a well-meaning, legitimate cop. He is now drug free and wants to get back on the force. Marty and Wendy, well connected to the Midwestern authorities, reinstate him. But there is a problem: if he wants to return, Sattem has to leave immediately. He can't testify against the Byrdes in court.

Let him do. Sattem was staying at Ruth Langmore's Lazy-O Motel and checked in to return to Chicago. However, as she leaves, she realizes that the large pot of goat biscuits that she saw in Langmore's trailer was now in the Lazy-O. He doesn't know it, but it's where Ruth keeps Ben's ashes.

When he returns to Chicago, he just can't do it. He can't stop thinking about the Byrdes and that cookie jar. She then clicks: Ben wanted to buy a farm and raise goats, and Ruth was keeping her ashes in a goat-themed cookie jar. Wendy's brother's ashes were cold hard evidence against the Byrdes.

The Byrdes try to bribe him, but Sattem refuses.

"You can't win. You can't be the Kochs or the Kennedys," he says. "The world does not work that way". Wendy replies, "Since when?"

Then we hear a gun cocking. It is Jonah Byrde, who in the first and second parts of the fourth season has distanced himself from his family. He cannot reconcile the immoral acts committed by his parents and he is especially frustrated by his unrepentant mother. Yet there he is, pointing a gun directly at a researcher trying to do good. Marty and Wendy watch, pride on their faces as Jonah accepts the family and what they've done.

As the screen goes dark, we hear a gunshot. But who or what did Jonas shoot? Did he shoot Sattem or shoot the cookie jar to destroy the only evidence that exists against his family? Some speculated that Jonah, with the greatest sense of justice among them, would not have shot Sattem to death.

If you go by what showrunner Chris Mundy says, Jonah shot the Sattem. Mundy told Vanity Fair that Jonah's Sattem killer showed that "the family came together through this act of violence." But this death is not shown on the screen, so it is left open-ended. Who or what do you think Jonah shot?