Wendy Byrde (the exquisite Laura Linney), has checked herself into a mental hospital in an attempt to prevent her father, Nathan (Richard Thomas), from taking their kids back with him to North Carolina. Wendy might be a terrible parent, but she refuses to let her children suffer at the hands of Nathan, an alcoholic who was sometimes abusive to her as a kid. Marty has finally reached a breaking point as he attempts to simultaneously assuage the cartel, the FBI, and his family, so if Ruth doesn’t help him win back his kids, he might tell the cartel that she killed Javi. Marty meets with Camila, Omar’s sister and the Byrde family’s ally as they attempt to a) kill Omar and b) fulfill their deal with the FBI. They sketch out their plan, which involves a cell transfer in which Omar will “escape” only to get gunned down, and Camila will take over the cartel, so long as she continues making regular payments to America's finest law enforcement agency. But Camila wants to meet with the FBI first to soothe any doubts, and Marty agrees. Meanwhile, Ruth confronts Wendy at the mental hospital, where she tells her she’ll try to get the kids back on her side.
Ruth finally admits she’s sorry for letting Ben (Tom Pelphrey), Wendy’s brother, out of the same exact mental hospital last season. If she’d have left him alone, despite his suffering, he’d still be alive. Ruth withdraws a gun from her safe and visits Nathan in his motel room at the Lazy O, with the premise of toasting Ben's life and death. For the first few minutes of their conversation, Ruth and Nathan discuss Wendy’s “reputation” for promiscuity, a trait Nathan clearly resented. “Well, you beat her,” Ruth says, with a sweet smile. After Nathan’s face falls—“How's that?”—her eyelashes flutter. “You won! You got Jonah and Charlotte!” But we know the act won’t last long, and within minutes, Ruth’s switched off the doe-eyes. “You don't even fucking want them, do you?” she asks. Increasingly agitated as the conversation grows frosty, Nathan admits his real intentions: He only wants custody over Charlotte and Jonah to punish his daughter. “She was a slut and an embarrassment,” he says. As he turns to place the whiskey bottle on ice, Ruth pulls out her gun and shoots a glass on the counter, exploding it into pieces. Charlotte and Jonah come running, and Ruth demands Nathan tell them the truth behind his custody battle—or she’ll shoot him in the dick. (This show has a thing for dick-shooting.)
Showrunner Chris Mundy says: “Marty and Wendy love each other, but they’re also the only two people who have lived through this. How can they have a normal relationship with anybody else or in any other situation?” After leaving the mental hospital as a family, Wendy has accomplished her task of getting the gang back together. As she climbs into the passenger seat, she shoots Marty a sweet, almost bashful smile. “You really didn't have to threaten Ruth,” she says, as if it’s the most romantic gesture her husband has ever attempted. In the Byrdes’s love language, it probably is. Season 4 has spent many of its best Marty-Wendy scenes emphasizing the dynamics of their marriage: Wendy pushes for control, and Marty acquiesces, in part because she's erratic, but also because he loves her. (Keep in mind that, in Ozark’s pilot episode, Marty spent the first half obsessed with the fact that his wife was cheating on him, and the second half desperately trying to protect her.) Whether or not it’s true, he feels, by now, that everything he’s done this season—going to Mexico, cooperating with the FBI, distancing from Ruth—is for his wife. Marty visits Ruth to confirm Nelson’s at the bottom of her pool. Marty offers to give her a new identity after Omar's assassination, but Ruth refuses: “I like my name.” So Marty invites her, as the casino's new ownership, to meet with the cartel and FBI, where they’ll hammer down the details of their laundering arrangement. Source: elle.com
Showrunner Chris Mundy tells Vanity Fair that the writers room argued spiritedly about which of the show’s still-standing characters, Byrdes included, would survive the finale—considering that so many people who crossed Marty and Wendy during their criminal descent wound up dead. Ultimately, the room wrote the finale in accordance with its season-four credo: “Building a myth. Creating a curse.” But in plotting out the death of Ruth, it was important to Mundy that her fate be self-propelled. So Ruth’s death is a direct result of her decision to avenge Wyatt’s death by killing Javi. “I wanted everybody to have active choices in the last seven episodes,” says Mundy, pointing out that Ruth had a decision to make after Javi killed her cousin Wyatt. “Ruth could go for revenge or not, and she knows if she did, it is going to unleash things that might end up with her getting harmed. People keep saying Ruth got caught in the crossfire of the Byrdes, but Ruth's actual death had nothing to do with the Byrdes. Ruth killed Javi, and the Byrdes tried to help her stop it but Ruth held them at gunpoint. Wyatt's death happened because of his association with Darlene, not the Byrdes. Darlene even had positioned against the Byrdes and had crossed the cartel. The Byrdes couldn't save Ruth or they all would've gotten killed. They actually showed remorse and were trying to think of anything they could do to stop it, including calling a hitman, but everything was in play already...”
The show winds down after Ruth’s death with a coda scene in which the Byrde family returns home to find Mel (Adam Rothenberg), the private investigator who had been looking into Ben’s death. Mel’s holding the cookie jar containing Ben’s ashes, and reveals that he has discovered that Wendy offered up her brother like the ultimate sacrificial lamb in her quest for power. “You don’t get it, do you?” Mel tells Wendy and Marty, in their backyard. “You don’t get to win. You don’t get to be the Kochs or the Kennedys or whatever fucking royalty you people think you are. The world doesn’t work like that.” At that moment, Jonah appears with a shotgun—a callback to the season-one finale, in which Jonah pulls a gun on Garcia only to find out it is unloaded. (Buddy, played by Harris Yulin, saved the day.) This time, though, the gun is loaded. Jonah pulls the trigger, the screen cuts to black, and a gunshot is heard—meaning that the Byrdes have miraculously survived Ozark’s deadly fate. In a way, Mundy says, Jonah killing Mel signifies “the family being brought back together through this act of violence.” The showrunner wanted to end the series on a note so unexpected that it took viewers a beat to process whether Jonah killing Mel is “a thing to cheer for or not.” He adds, “We wanted people to think about the reality of what happened, not just in the context of watching a TV show, but also in whatever reality these characters are going to keep living in.” Source: www.vanityfair.com
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