Ozark “Mud”

So, I spent this episode trying to figure out if Wendy hit a new low or not.

Kinda hard to tell when arguably the entire Byrde family has been swimming through mud this entire series.

There’s a lot going on to set up the finale here.  Ruth and Rachel are taking care of business, basically keeping Marty from laundering money at the casino while at the same time Omar is saying Marty can’t launder money anywhere else.  Wendy tries to fix that with a hitman making threats because of course she did.  It doesn’t work.  Marty tries reasoning with the kids again.  Jonah is certain Grandpa is a better person than their mother.  Charlotte doesn’t argue much either way.

All that and Ruth and Rachel dispose of Nelson (great scene), and Camila is basically outed as the mastermind of her brother’s attack all while she is demanding to know who really killed Javi.  Omar says it wasn’t him, but Wendy was the one who told him.

So, yeah, there’s a lot going on.  But the episode more or less begins and ends with Wendy’s attempt to get herself put into the local mental hospital because she needs a break, or so she says.  She is far too impatient to fill out the paperwork at the beginning of the episode, and brings out her best “I want to see your manager” tone.  However, that doesn’t work because being a Karen doesn’t always work in a crowded healthcare facility.

When she later goes back and claims she did was thinking of murdering her father, she gets right in.

Now, this episode did do right with Nathan by showing that, well, everything Wendy has been saying about him–that he is an abusive drunk–is absolutely true.  He still has liquor bottles hidden in his room, and a conversation he has with Ruth while drunk shows he is condescending, rude, judgmental, and a whole host of other things that he’s managed to keep hidden pretty well until now.  He won’t take a two million dollar bribe from Wendy because he may be doing this just to hurt her.  Ruth simply points out things like he should look into good schools for Charlotte and Jonah, and he doesn’t even care about that.  He even suggests she isn’t really Ben’s type, and that you can’t trust blondes.

Man, how did Ruth resist smacking him one?

Point is, Wendy seems fine when she’s in the hospital, and the statements she makes to Marty make it sound like this is just another level of manipulation as she insists he has to bring the kids to see her.  The thing is, Wendy may need the help, but it’s hard to say because her behavior hasn’t really changed much over the course of the last couple seasons aside from her begging her father on the courthouse steps, something he said was done to humiliate at least one of them.  And again, Nathan never once contradicts anything Wendy says about his old ways and behaviors, particularly when Wendy says her late mother was the real Christian.  About all he’ll deny was cheating on his dead wife, but he shuts up when Wendy says her mother said it was true, but she still forgave the drunken abuser.

You know, Wendy doesn’t forgive.  Neither do Jonah and Nathan from the looks of things.

They might be more related than they thought.