‘Ozark’ Season 4 Episode 5 Recap: Stop the Steal

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?

In the fifth episode of the show’s final season (“Ellie”), Wendy Byrde is both a student and a teacher of how to wheel and deal and profit from the misfortune of others. At the request of Senator Schafer, an old political rival whose support she now needs in the form of a seat on her charity foundation’s board, she uses her connections to pull an FBI file on an insider-training investigation into his son. That son, a federal judge, may have done some insider trading predicated on the success of his own son’s new voting-machine technology. 

Turns out the Feds weren’t on his tail after all, but that’s not really what the senator was worried about. The thing that mattered here is that the voting machines were impossible to audit externally, allowing them to suppress votes and rig elections—and since his son is off the hook, that gave him the maneuvering room to find and silence, permanently, a software engineer who was prepared to blow the whistle on this right-wing election-rigging scheme. 

Wendy, a dutiful liberal—she worked for Obama for god’s sake, before she started doing organized crime—is aghast when she discovers what she’s done. But she’s not so aghast that she fails to maintain the illusion that the Byrde Family Foundation represents some golden ticket out of trouble for herself and her family. 

Oh sure, she’s upset alright, but she’s able to vent her discomfort easily enough later that night by delaying a 911 call on behalf of Darlene Snell. Darlene shows up at the Byrde home to confront Wendy about the disappearance of Sheriff Nix, but she winds up having some kind of cardiac episode after Wendy kills her with kindness and casually drops the bomb that Darlene’s business partner Ruth Langmore is back in business with the Byrdes. There are shades of Walter White and Jane Margolis here, but the difference is that Walter seemed horrified by what he was allowing to happen; Wendy simply grins.

That final smile wallpapers over a lot of setbacks for Wendy. It’s not just her horror at being a part of the collapse of American democracy—she’s also maintaining the façade that her brother Ben is a missing person, in part to troll Darlene (who put up all those “MISSING” posters around town) but also, as far as her husband Marty sees it, to maintain a sort of illusion that he actually is alive somewhere, that she didn’t have him killed. 

Wendy also encourages her daughter Charlotte to ditch her SATs and skip going to college, so as to remain a part of the family business. Both Marty and Jonah find this ridiculous; Jonah warns Charlotte that one day their mom will get mad and fire her, so she’d better have college as a backup plan for when the inevitable blowup happens.

The real action of the episode, thriller-wise, revolves around heroin and the need to sell it. With the Navarros out of the game for the time being until Javi can ID the mole ratting them out to the Feds, the Byrdes turn to Ruth for the Snell supply. But since Darlene had no idea Ruth was in business with the Byrdes—not that it would have changed her decision at all—she sells the product to Frank Cosgrove Jr. of the Kansas City mob, who sells it in turn to a few associates. It takes much of the episode, and both Marty and Ruth enduring separate beatings, to get the product back from Frank Jr.’s cronies and into the hands of Shaw Medical Solutions per their initial agreement.

There’s one more wheeler and dealer to consider: Mel Sattem, the private investigator sniffing around after missing persons Helen and Ben. A former cop who lost his job when he was caught red-handed—or white-nosed—doing coke in the evidence locker of his precinct, he’s formidably good at his job, though he’s got things slightly wrong. He believes, correctly, that the Byrdes know something about Helen’s disappearance; he’s concluded, erroneously, that Ben killed her and that they’re hiding Ben, not knowing they were responsible for Ben’s death. I enjoy this kind of loose-cannon, wrench-in-the-works character, and I wonder how long it will be before his investigation bears bitter fruit. After all, virtually everyone he’s talked to is a liar under the surface. How hard will he scratch and dig before he hits paydirt?

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.

Watch Ozark Season 4 Episode 5 on Netflix