Ozark

As one of the streamer's most suspenseful and successful shows wraps up, does it matter if fans aren't watching the big finish together?

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“Ozark” cinematographer Shawn Kim came aboard the show at the start of Season 4 with a good idea of what creators Bill Dubuque and Mark Williams wanted for ...

Customarily, the world of “Ozark” has a rich cyan-filtered look to it, “almost monochromatic,” he says. “If it was a continuing season, I wouldn’t necessarily be as bold,” he explains, “but knowing [the show is] coming to an end, I felt it important to have a little bit of punctuation.” We always have a psychological plan of the scene, and, hopefully, that translates to the viewer.” “This lets the audience into a more intimate space than they are used to on the show,” Kim says, capturing the sense that something is “fundamentally starting to take hold in Ruth’s character.” They used a 30-degree tilt to kill out any background, “just focused on three eyelashes. “This season, you’re starting to see more of the world but our characters become more in shadow so that even on a bright sunny day outside, we find a way to put them in shadow. “In terms of light, it’s mostly about denser shadows, elevated contrast — a bit more noir,” he says.

The series finale of "Ozark" releases on Friday, and the last season is weighing heavy on Mexican actor Alfonso Herrera, who portrays the memorable "Javi."

He has, of course, been proud to be a part of the series from the moment he accepted the role, but a lot has changed since then, both for him personally and in the world around him. Herrera recognizes there’s a risk in having to affirm his skills and experiences as a Latino actor. He added that he’s most proud of the fact that "Ozark" has challenged his limits as an actor, which is inextricable from his personhood. “His philosophy was to give me certain clues and thoughts and ideas of how the writers’ room saw him," Herrera said. This role of Javi presented itself at the end of 2020, at a time when everyone was forced to reevaluate what they wanted for themselves, professionally and personally. From plays in Mexico City to audio series like “Batman Unearthed” on Spotify, Herrera has made a meal out of confounding his critics and thrilling his fans. "I am always open to strong stories.” I think that the number of things I’ve experienced made me who I am right now — I could fit into Javi in a positive way,” said Herrera. And I have to give some kudos to many actors and actresses that have made things a little bit easier, like Demián Bichir," Herrera said. From there, he began booking steady television work in Mexico City, including the Latin American phenomenon that was "Rebelde." "If he doesn’t like you, he’s gonna let you know in a very direct way, which is, I would say, a positive thing." A relentlessly curious actor, he has won praise and some disapproval for refusing labels.

Warning: The following story contains gigantic spoilers from Ozark's final seven episodes — proceed at your own peril.

THE GIST: The bad guys win. Camila murders Ruth after learning she was the one who killed her son. And what about Ruth? Was our favorite potty-mouthed heroine alive and well by the end of the series finale? HIGHLIGHT: Ruth’s spot-on analysis of narcissistic hypocrite Wendy in the episode’s final scene was satisfying beyond measure — so much so that I’m dropping the transcript here for posterity: “Wendy? She’s f—king soulless. She’s like a f—king predator that doesn’t even know why it’s killin’ anymore.” Did the Byrdes pass their final cartel test with flying colors?

Alfonso Herrera loves that Ozark's final season didn't go the way you thought it would.

He’s a cultural reference in many ways, so I’m very excited to share a set with him and to work with him and with his team. So we are in the process of that, and I am very excited to be a part of this amazing saga. That is what Zack enjoys the most, and he is very clear about it. (Laughs.) On my first day, I was in the van on the way to work, saying, “Alfonso, don’t fuck it up. So I would point that one out, specifically, but I would also say the last one, which was the goodbye to everyone. What I sense so far is that everybody likes to have a good time. He’s a cultural reference in many ways, so I’m very excited to share a set with him and to work with him and with his team,” Herrera says. The last time I got into a fight, I was 13 years old. But we did have the opportunity to share lots of stories outside of the set. And if he doesn’t like something, he’s not afraid of creating a huge catharsis for himself, affecting the other person involved. The human side of each and every Ozark character is there because the scripts are very well-written and the direction is right on point. Tony is a very good friend of mine, and we’ve worked on different projects back home in Mexico. But no, actually, we haven’t talked about it.

With one more episode to go, Wendy goes completely off the rails to secure the power she's worked the entire series to acquire. A recap of “Mud,” episode 13 ...

She calls panics and calls Rachel, who is busy watching Duck Dynasty. She finally gets a hold of her BFF, warns her that Nelson is coming, and talks her through getting on the roof with a rifle and shooting Nelson as he gets out of his car. The Byrdes offer her power and a license from the government to keep it and the ability to stay behind the scenes. Tell Camila who actually killed Javi. She wouldn’t agree to Omar’s murder, but he could stay behind bars, and she could run the operation with the FBI. Of course, that gets Ruth killed … She goes into the station and tells Wycoff everything she knows about Javi’s murder, including that she killed Javi and that Javi killed Wyatt and Darlene. If Wycoff tells anyone, who would believe him? Shes goes in on him for falling off the wagon, being a cheater, not being a real Christian. She implores him to take the life-changing money and run, but he doesn’t budge. It will be the last time he asks anything of Ruth and Rachel. He tries to call Wendy, but she’s not answering. the Foundation and reveals her plan. She has the cash and needs to be committed for the night, but it turns out that she can’t buy her way into the facility because they’re already overcapacity. Ruth attests that she needs to keep her clean record and doesn’t give in. She goes and pounds on Nathan’s door, dropping the bag on the bed. Marty has to go to prison and tell Omar and Camila what’s up with his kids and cash flow. And yet the first body to fall is a bit unexpected.

The Byrde family sees perhaps its biggest threat yet with the introduction of antagonist Javier "Javi" Elizonndro in Season 4 of "Ozark.

It's exactly the likability of the character that provides Herrera's key to embracing him, and that enthusiasm comes across every time Javi is onscreen. Herrera's approach to navigating that unpredictability, grounded in giving sufficient coverage by relevantly altering the performance decisions between takes, is a great way to land Javi's complexity while freeing Herrera to try novel things–and that continued novelty is the most Javi thing possible. AH: Exactly. So, I didn't have that much of a problem not judging Javier. On the contrary, I was – and that's why it's so fun to play Javi, because the possibilities are, it's so unpredictable. I really enjoyed Javi, and I really laughed reading the script. I enjoyed him, I really enjoyed Javi. So, it was not difficult for me to say, "I like this guy! The Byrde family sees perhaps its biggest threat yet with the introduction of antagonist Javier "Javi" Elizonndro in Season 4 of "Ozark." Smart and ambitious yet unpredictable and violent, Javi (adeptly portrayed by Alfonso Herrera) has his sights set on climbing to the top of the Navarro cartel.

The dark, menacing beach town where Ozark is set doesn't bear much resemblance to the Queens streets that inspired Nas' 1994 debut album Illmatic, ...

“You ever wonder if he’d trade that record if it meant not having to go through all that shit?” Langmore asks Mike. “If you’ve got to ask the question,” Mike says before trailing off. She’s a 19, 20-year-old white woman who lives in a trailer in Missouri. That's very far from Queensbridge. At the same time, she’s around the same age as he was when he wrote that album. The second we decided it should be Illmatic, it couldn't be anything else.” The parallels seemed too perfect,” said Mundy. I also felt the way the album lays out, it feels very whole, but there are different moods in there that were going to suit what we shot. (The rapper told Billboard he was a fan of the show when the cameo was announced.) “[There are] parallels between Ruth and Nas. I mean, in one way, they're very different.

Do Marty and Wendy Byrde get away with it in the end? Find out as we break down the final episodes of Ozark here.

The Byrdes' knew laundering money for the cartel would come with a price. In the finale, the bill is due. A recap of “A Hard Way to Go,” episode 14, ...

Felt a bit like a cheap joke to end the series. The presumption could be that Rachel takes over the Belle and runs that operation, but she’s got some heavy guilt over Nelson and will know what happened to Ruth. It feels like all of that could collapse and pull the Byrdes back in. The thematic thrust that the Byrdes can do anything hits home, but Jonah killing a man who is just trying to find justice for his uncle? Ruth and the Belle will remain part of the operation that Camila will lead. And so he came to find the evidence in Ben’s ashes. The Byrdes have to watch this truck come and not swerve out of the way. He couldn’t “put all the guilt away.” The Byrdes are so good at putting all the guilt away. Bring her in on the operation with the FBI to keep the Belle a part of it. Ruth agrees to get the kids to see Ruth, but she needs reassurance from Wendy that if Ruth does her part, Wendy won’t retaliate even if Jonah decides to go with Nathan. It can’t be her fault if Jonah still insists on leaving. He offers her a deal to escape, a new identity, a chance to leave town and start clean. When Marty and Wendy chose to uproot their family and launder money for a Mexican drug cartel, they knew in their hearts that it would come with a cost. Now that it’s over, we can look back on the story of a family who was willing to do anything to survive and could quite literally get away with murder.

He may have played a convincing mountain man from Missouri, but Trevor Long, who starred as Cade Langmore, actually calls Narragansett, Rhode Island home.

“He found out I was from New York and he couldn’t believe it.” He wondered if I went to his school or if I was from Alabama,” Long said. Long plays a very convincing Ozark mountain man, but in actuality, he was born in Poughkeepsie, New York, and grew up in Pittsburgh after moving there in second grade.

Ozark's final episodes (season four, part two) began streaming on Netflix Friday. In the first episode of the last batch, Ruth Langmore (Julia Garner) does ...

But then he said, ‘Are you the one that's going to Europe this summer with your family?’ And I said, ‘Yeah, that's me. They had me reading for Ruth at the time, Ruth and Charlotte funny enough, just for the initial round of auditions. I don't think I was there but she called me and she was like, ‘Okay, so you're going to laugh really hard,’” Hublitz recalled.

Well, there you have it. With the final seven episodes of Ozark season 4 now available to stream on Netflix, the acclaimed crime drama has come to an end.

All four seasons of Ozark are available to watch on Netflix now. I know for us, creatively, we didn’t think it would go past five. "My gut feeling is that they have an appreciation for letting things run the right amount of time for them, and creatively.

Ahead of the acclaimed series' final run, the actress talks bringing "levity" to Charlotte—and growing up in lockstep with her character.

“It made me feel proud for how far I’ve come in my life—but also, it reestablished how proud I am for how far Charlotte has come and the character development,” she says. And when you’re having difficult times in your life, you have to learn not to bring that to work,” the breakout actress explains ahead of the finale’s part-two release. “I’ve always tried to not say ‘no’ with my face and my body language and…engage in a positive way, even if the scene doesn’t call for that.” The line immediately hints at Charlotte’s grounded, mature nature as she accepts her fate of moving from Chicago to Missouri’s Lake of the Ozarks—high school ego and tinglings of a young woman in tow. It’s a simple question posed by Ozark’s Charlotte Byrde, played by newcomer Sofia Hublitz—who stars alongside her fictional parents Marty (Jason Bateman) and Wendy ( Laura Linney), brother Jonah (Skylar Gaertner), and neighbor Ruth ( Julia Garner)—early on in the first season of the Netflix original series. Viewers of the crime drama, which recently released the last seven episodes of its fourth and final season after becoming one of the most popular shows in the U.S., know that very question would unfurl a seemingly never-ending answer: her white-collar parents were “laundering money for a Mexican drug cartel.

The series finale of Netflix's 'Ozark' ended with a literal bang -- read our recap and then grade the episode.

At least Ruth went out in a blaze of full badass glory, uttering these final words as she waited for Camilla to pull the trigger: “I’m not sorry. Oh, and speaking of the good guys losing, Ruth’s dead, too. “You don’t get it, do you?” he sneered, before adding, “You don’t get to win… “I couldn’t do my job,” he explained to the quivering couple. Hooray… wait, where did Jonah come from and why is he holding a rifle and why is he pointing it at Mel and not his freakin’ parents and there’s only 10 seconds left of the episode and OH, HELL NO it can’t end with… After the screen on Season 4, Episode 14 cut to black, a gunshot rang out.

The Netflix crime drama's final moments capitalize on a core truth: No one escapes unscathed. Here, a review of how the series finally ends its four ...

And so the camera pans to Jonah, standing near the house and aiming a shotgun at their home invader. From the beginning, Marty and Wendy never had a real escape route, but the most heartbreaking revelation is this: Neither did their children. The evening is a flurry of champagne and gowns as the Byrdes dance under the donations flooding into their foundation. Her eyes shift and her lips twist as she steels herself to admit the truth: “It was Ruth Langmore.” She’s not so terrified that she can’t lie on behalf of the Byrdes—remember, she’s got a contract set with them—but Ruth? Ruth’s death she can live with. After Father Benitez (Bruno Bichir) warns Marty and Wendy that Nelson is missing and Omar wants to see them, Marty visits Ruth to confirm Nelson’s at the bottom of her pool. 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. (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, threatening Ruth—is for his wife. At the house, 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. Finally, we reach the moment first foreshadowed at the beginning of season 4, when the Byrdes are cruising home to the tune of Sam Cooke, only for a semi-truck to drift into oncoming traffic. Marty has finally reached a breaking point as he attempts to simultaneously assuage the cartel, the FBI, and his family, so he plays his nastiest card: If Ruth doesn’t help him win back his kids, he'll tell the cartel that she killed Javi. Backed into a corner, Ruth agrees. After tapping her shovel to smooth over any disturbed dirt, she lifts her gaze to meet that of Wyatt’s (Charlie Tahan), her cousin who died at the hands of Javi Elizonndro ( Alfonso Herrera). (You’ll recall that Ruth recently killed Javi, Omar Navarro’s (Felix Solis) nephew and the cartel heir, in retaliation.) This Wyatt is an apparition, of course, but that doesn’t make the sad smile he gives her any less gut-wrenching. But as much as Ozark has enjoyed how easily we underestimate certain characters—women, in particular—the show is ultimately about who we overestimate and why.