Byrdes face mountain of trouble in ‘Ozark’
Del may be gone, but the Navarro cartel certainly isn’t going away, as Marty and Wendy Byrde find out very early on in season two of Netflix’s “Ozark.”
As the new round of episodes kicks off Friday, the Byrdes (Jason Bateman, Laura Linney) get a visit from the cartel’s ruthless lawyer and fixer Helen Pierce (Janet McTeer, “Jessica Jones”), questioning them about Del’s whereabouts and telling them of her client’s insistence that the Byrdes have the new casino up and running in six months. Otherwise there will be consequences.
Not a problem, says Marty. Except there is. Missouri has a cap on the number of casinos in the state and to get it lifted they’ll need the help of rich and powerful local Charles Wilkes (Darren Goldstein, “The Affair”). Enter the politically savvy Wendy to get his support.
Meanwhile, the Byrdes have their hands full dealing with the power-hungry Snells (Peter Mullan, Lisa Emery), at whose home Del met his grisly demise, and their new deputy Ruth Langmore (Julia Garner), whose father, Cade (Trevor Long), is out on parole.
It’s all a mish-mash of problems that has Wendy drinking in the morning and the Byrdes scrambling to keep ever-present danger at bay as they try to keep themselves and their kids (Sofia Hublitz, Skylar Gaertner) safe and alive.
It’s also the recipe for foreboding drama that has the series up for three Emmy Awards, including acting and directing nods for Bateman.
“The Byrde family is trying to end this show,” said Bateman, also an executive producer on the series. “The Byrde family is not interested in season two, three, four, five. Like, they want to get home. They want to be done with it. So, all the decisions are made to end this and make this healthy again, get boring again, you know, as a family.”
While Marty tries to keep the cartel happy and off his back and the money laundering operation back online, Wendy proves herself to be a shrewd operator, buying a funeral home and using the lay of the local political land to the Byrdes’ advantage in cozying up to Wilkes.
“She’s a very instinctive person,” Linney said of Wendy. “She’s shrewd and she’s smart. She’s not the most emotionally mature human being. So she’s surprising that way, because she is so effective, but her decisions can be questionable, at best. And really, everything stems from survival. She’s trying to survive. And so she goes to a very primal place in which to do that. And she sees where there are spaces that are not being filled, and she realizes she has got to fill it, she has got to do it fast. So, that’s really, I think that’s what you see. And she becomes impatient.”