‘Ozark’ Season 2, Episode 2 Recap: Mob Rules

The second episode of Ozark‘s second season starts off with a bang. (Sorry. I’m sorry. I’m trying to remove it.)

Following what appears to be the show’s standard trajectory, Ozark Season 2 Episode 2 (“The Precious Blood of Jesus”) introduces yet another externally imposed timeframe for the Byrdes to pull off the impossible. In this case, it means Wendy and her new political ally and potential extramarital love interest Charlie Wilkes have to flip enough votes in the Missouri state senate to lift the cap on the number of state-sanctioned casinos so that the Byrdes and their employers (and potential executioners) in the Mexican drug cartel and Snell crime family can cement their alliance.

It also introduces yet another player into the mix, again in standard Ozark fashion: the Kansas City mob, represented by union racketeer and apparent killcrazy maniac Frank Cosgrove (John Bedford Lloyd). If anything, Ozark is instructional in how it portrays organized crime as a rat-king tangle of alternately rival and allied organizations on the level of the United States intelligence community, with every bit as much lethality. In essence, the challenge facing Marty and Wendy Byrde is the same one that faces any enterprising businesspeople trying to secure the right licenses and grease the right palms, only almost everyone they need to butter up or back down has multiple mass murderers on their payroll.

It’s revealing, then, that sleeping with Wilkes in order to persuade him to use his leverage against a recalcitrant state senator is the thing that stops Wendy Byrde short, though whether it reveals more about the Byrdes or about the real people writing this show is open to debate. After all, Wendy spent her evening tossing enough money at a stripper in her husband’s employ to get her to turn a trick with the husband of a different state senator, just so she’d be able to videotape their liaison and use it as blackmail leverage to push their casino bill across the finish line.

Meanwhile, she’s also been a party to multiple murders, and an eyewitness to one to boot. Why is having extramarital sex with a guy to whom she’s obviously attracted, at least on an intellectual/professional level, a bridge too far, particularly when her entire family’s lives are on the line should the bill not get passed? “Because the plot requires it” is really the only answer that works.

But infidelity is a throughline for the episode, weirdly. Marty’s entrypoint into the world of Frank Cosgrove, who’s been violently trying to thwart the Byrde/Snell/cartel casino operation since casinos are his exclusive province in the state, is his crusty housemate Buddy — aka “Jimmy Smalls” in the world of mobbed-up unions, apparently. Only after brokering a sitdown with Cosgrove does Buddy reveal that the gangster/teamster has long believed Buddy slept with his wife. In the end, though, easing Cosgrove about this winds up loosening him up enough to make the deal. Marriage is weird, what can I say?

Darlene Snell knows that better than most. After spending the opening reel of the episode nearly screwing up the deal between the Snells and the cartel by taking umbrage at the Mexicans perfectly reasonable insistence that the purity of their heroin be tested before shipment, she heads to an adoption agency. Her hope is to bring home a baby to compensate for the loss of her beloved goon Ash, killed by her husband Jacob as a token of goodwill to their south-of-the-border business partners. She’s got a way with kids, as a delighted little boy in the waiting room could happily tell you after watching her make funny faces, but it’s probably not enough to get around guidelines against giving kids to elderly parents.

If it wasn’t already apparent, women have the meatiest and most engaging material throughout the hour. Aside from Wendy’s power-playing and will-she-or-won’t-she angle and Darlene’s out-of-the-blue baby fever, there’s Ruth Langmore to consider. The young gun has been netting bigger and better assignments from her boss Marty for a while now, including a $25K per year raise, various management responsibilities, and the task of securing the purchase of a Proud Mary–style riverboat to serve as the cartel casino, which she manages by tipping over the seller’s wheelchair and kneeing his sniveling underling in the balls.

But Ruth is still very much under the thumb of her father Cade. She spends most of the episode regaling him with a vision of a picket-fence future paid for by Marty’s money, and winds up watching him stick up a convenience store just for fun, before he bashes her head into the dashboard of their car and insists she figure out a way to fuck the Byrdes out of their money, or else. That there’s an incestuous edge to all of this goes without saying.

And far, far away, Rachel (Jordana Spiro) resurfaces. You remember Rachel: She was the original owner of the Blue Cat Lodge, a sad-ass lakeside motel that Marty turned into his main front business. Once she got wind of what he was really up to, she stole a hundred grand and hit the road, and has apparently been living from flophouse to flophouse ever since.

When she gets brought in for DUI, who should resurface but Agent Petty (Jason Butler Hamer), whose lover Russ Langmore got electrocuted by Ruth over all the Byrde-related craziness. He’s now out for vengeance — though why he needs any witnesses cooperation when the feds are clearly all over the Byrdes’ operation is beyond me — and, in a tedious tough-guy speech, he forces Rachel to help him take his quarry down. I may not be 100% sold on, well, any of this, but the entertainment value is as tough to dispute as a three-strikes-and-you’re-out felony verdict.

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 2 Episode 2 (“The Precious Blood Of Jesus”) on Netflix