The Intense Moment That Makes No Sense To Ozark Fans
As Netflix's pitch-black crime drama Ozark barrels towards an inevitable bloodbath in its upcoming fourth and final season, the question has become not just who might survive the coming fray but if anyone actually will.
When last we saw Marty and Wendy Byrde (Jason Bateman and Laura Linney), they'd just gone all in with vicious Cartel leader Omar Navarro (Felix Solis). And with their ties to the Navarro Cartel now sealed in blood, they're clearly on a collision course with the Kansas City Mob, the backwoods Snell faction, and, of course, the FBI. They may even find themselves in conflict on the home front, as young Jonah Byrde (Skylar Gaertner) has become an emotional time-bomb on the verge of exploding.
Needless to say, with so many players on the board, it's hard to see a way for the Byrdes to fly free that doesn't come at a heavy price. As many of these conflicts have been festering on Ozark for three full seasons so far, it seems only right that they all come to a boil at the same moment.
According to many Ozark diehards, though, a showdown with the Kansas City Mob is a least one season overdue. Marty did, after all, make a dangerous tactical decision in the series' second season, when he reneged on a deal to hire Frank Cosgrove's (John Bedford Lloyd) union crews for construction on his casino project. And that decision earned a prompt, violent reaction from Cosgrove's mob muscle, who literally blew up Marty's Byrde Industries business offices.
It seems that event — and particularly the handling of it by Ozark's season 3 creative team — continues to baffle fans.
Kansas City mobsters blowing up Marty's office confounds the Ozark fandom
Fans' confusion is largely because the moment signaled a dramatic escalation between Marty and the Kansas City faction that seemed certain to dominate the season 3 storyline. While tensions remain high between them (especially after the savage beating of Julia Garner's Ruth Langmore by Cosgrove's own son), the matter of the exploded office building is barely alluded to. In fact, there's really only one line about how Marty had to pay Frank and his goons off to smooth things over.
Some viewers don't believe money was enough of a price. One deeply confused Ozark fan has even started a Reddit thread dedicated to figuring out why there were no real repercussions for the attack. The answers show just how puzzled the Ozark fandom is about why nothing much came of the bombing.
Reddit user u/FutureApollo was first to respond, offering that Ozark writers callously decided to go another way, "Seemed like a set up for season 3 conflict, but the writers went in a different direction." User u/Bobarhino was equally perplexed, believing the action dictated a bigger reaction: "I kinda hate the direction they went with that. Just brush it under the rug? Really? That's f****** war. There definitely would have been retaliation and/or Marty certainly would have been in trouble with the cartel for allowing it to go there in the first place."
While other Redditors delivered similar opinions, user u/rusty___shackelford offered a rather brilliant solution to the problem: "Netflix should just edit that blown up office scene out."
Given how brief and unnecessary the scene is on the season 2 finale (and now the overarching narrative in general), that solution actually makes sense. And considering some fans' reactions, Netflix might want to consider it.