Caution: major spoilers ahead for those who have not yet seen the series finale, “A Hard Way to Go.”

As Ozark’s Marty Byrde (Jason Bateman) once said, “People make choices. Choices have consequences.” And on Friday, five years and four seasons after he and his wife Wendy Byrde (Laura Linney) settled into Missouri to launder money for a drug cartel—colliding with sparkplug local Ruth Langmore (Julia Garner)—their story came to a dramatic end in Ozark’s finale episode, “A Hard Way to Go.” 

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. (RIP Darlene.) Ultimately, the room wrote the finale in accordance with its season-four credo: “Building a myth. Creating a curse.”

Hear more from Jason Bateman on Little Gold Men:

Ahead, in an exclusive series of conversations, Mundy, Linney, Garner, and Bateman (who executive produced the series and directed many Ozark episodes including its premiere and finale), discuss the the series’ conclusion, its shocking last scenes, and what the future might hold for Ozark’s survivors.

Ruth’s Final Moments

Mundy promises that he and Ozark’s writers did not go into writing the final season thinking that Ruth would die. But keeping her alive started to feel like something “the writers wanted instead of what would’ve actually happened.” He explained, “We felt like there were no repercussions from anything, and that if you thought about it truthfully, about the way it worked with the Byrdes’ relationship to the Ozarks and the people they came in contact with, and certainly the Langmore family, none of those people are standing. It felt too clean to have everybody get a damaged but happy ending—it felt like a fairy-tale ending to something that we were trying to make not a fairy-tale.”

But in plotting out the death of such a beloved character, 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 (Alfonso Herrera) killed her cousin Wyatt (Charlie Tahan) earlier in season four. “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.”

In a separate conversation, Garner says she had a vision of Ruth dying before Mundy told her about her character’s end. The Emmy-winning actor was doing meditative prep work for Ruth—half-consciously asking herself questions as Ruth and answering them truthfully as the character. “One of the questions was, What are you afraid of at the moment? Her response was, she’s afraid to die.”

Moments later, Garner says she received a phone call from Mundy.

“I said, ‘Chris, am I dying?’ He said, ‘Who told you?’”

The plot twist is all the more shocking considering that in the lead-up episodes, things seem to suddenly be working out for Ruth—she even manages to get her criminal record expunged. When I point this out, Garner says, “Not to sound really dark, but she already died when Wyatt died. Good things were happening to her [in the final episodes], but it still wasn’t filling that void. If she got hit by a car, she wouldn’t care. If there was a gun being pointed at her, she wouldn’t care. That acceptance—it’s really dark, but that’s really what it is.”

The scene in which Ruth dies—shot by Javi’s mother Camila (Veronica Falcon)—was the final scene that the Ozark cast and crew filmed in the series.

“It was really emotional, but everyone was there,” says Garner. “It meant a lot to me that Jason was directing it, because he started the show and he ended it. Chris was there. Laura was there all night for love and support, even though she wasn’t [in the scene]. It was a hard day, but a beautiful day.”

“Chris was really passionate about making sure that, if we’re going to kill a beloved character, we better do it in a way that fans of that character can feel good about,” adds Bateman, explaining how he directed the scene in that final showdown so that her character is standing. Ruth ends her life “metaphorically standing her ground and going out on her terms. I talked to Julia about how to navigate what Chris had given us [in the script], which was that the character has a moment of fear and realization of what was coming, then a moment to transition to acceptance and almost turning it into a good thing.”

“Obviously we don’t have the dialogue that says all of that. But hopefully you can see that in her performance—just a taste to motivate the audience to find acceptance like the character did.”

Garner says she still hasn’t processed “that a piece of me, that a person that was with me for so long, is gone essentially.” Asked how it felt knowing that Marty and Wendy survived but not Ruth, the actor said, “I can’t speak on behalf of Ruth, because she was dead by then. But as a viewer, it reflects real life in a way. The middle class, the poor, the dreamers almost always pay for it in a sense. The superpowerful people with all the money, at the end, they do okay.”

Marty and Wendy, Still Together

Since the early days of Ozark, Mundy has maintained that the show is about family. Yet as the Byrdes descended further into criminal darkness in seasons three and four, Wendy began making decisions that felt increasingly reckless for her family. (In the first part of season four, for example, she decided to speak publicly about her brother’s “disappearance” when she was directly responsible for it.) It seemed possible that Marty might leave Wendy or become collateral damage in her quest. But Mundy says the couple was just really testing the bounds of their marriage. 

“I think they love each other, but they’re also the only two people who have lived through this, in a way,” says Mundy. “How can they have a normal relationship with anybody else or in any other situation?”

Mundy did want the couple’s cohesion to seem like an outcome each spouse wanted by the finale.

“Wendy basically throws down the gauntlet in [season four’s] episode nine and says, ‘If you love me, you’ll keep going.’ And Marty makes a decision to stick with Wendy,” points out Mundy. “I wanted people to actually decide for themselves where they wanted to be.”

Mundy’s task was figuring out how to craft an organic marital rekindling after the characters diverged so much, “and make it feel realistic, especially amidst all the craziness.” His solutions were to bring back Wendy’s dad, played by Richard Thomas, for an emotional confrontation, and to threaten Wendy with the one possibility that could break her: her kids Charlotte (Sofia Hublitz) and Jonah (Skylar Gaertner) potentially leaving her.

Both events culminate with Wendy checking herself into a mental hospital.

“It makes Marty really look at who Wendy is and where she came from,” says Mundy. “Potentially in one way, it might have been healthier to lose the kids. But at the same time, it makes you decide what you want. Do you want to be a family unit? Do you not want to be a family unit? Are you doing it just because that’s what you’re supposed to do? What do you want or not want?”

Linney says that she very much enjoyed playing the character—as she threatened enemies, told off family members, and manipulated a cartel boss.

“It’s just fun to have material that supports big, huge choices, and wild behavior,” says Linney, noting how much she enjoyed playing an “emotionally immature” character like Wendy. “There’s an impulsive quality to her—an unedited version of her—which is really fun to play. And that it was all really rooted in the script.”

Linney says examining the family unit’s ever-shifting dynamics as they’re pushed and pulled in opposite directions across four seasons gave her a particularly tantalizing opportunity.

“There was this family, these four people who functioned well together, but who really didn’t really know each other or themselves,” says the actor. “Over the course of the series, they get to know not only who they are individually, but who they are as a family. I was like, Oh, that’s something that could sustain a multiyear story. If it’s about us getting to know who we all really are, that could be interesting.”

The Byrdes’ Final Showdown With Mel

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 what the world does not yet know—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 (Joseph Melendez) 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 obstacle path.

Mundy chose Jonah to get that final shot because he was the last Byrde to come around to the family’s criminality, after an estrangement spurred by Ben’s death. 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.”

The Kennedy line was another homage to early Ozark. The subject of the Kennedys was raised in the season-two premiere, “Reparations,” when Marty and Wendy are dancing at a gala discussing where they’d flee to if they had to leave the Ozarks in a hurry. Wendy suggests Hyannis Port, and Marty replies, “What, you think we’re the Kennedys now?”

Alluding to the myth that Joseph Kennedy accrued his fortune criminally in the Prohibition, Wendy asks him, “What do you think it was like starting out as a bootlegger in the real world?”

Says Mundy, “We layered in that myth-making, so it was nice to be able to answer it back at the very, very end.”

The Future for the Byrdes

Bateman and Mundy have both thought about what the family will do now that they’ve accrued enough political power.

Says Bateman, “I would bet you that they’ll go up to Chicago and they’ll test this theory of Wendy’s, which is, Have we acquired enough political capital to put into play some things that will help folks? Acquiring that capital was messy, but will the ends justify the means? My assumption is that, while they’re smarter now than when we first met them, I still feel like their hubris and arrogance will continue to trip them up. I think humility would probably guide them towards some better decisions, but I don’t think they’re there yet, unfortunately.”

Mundy put it more succinctly. “I think they’ve gone on,” he predicted. “They got everything they think they wanted. But I think they’re dragging around a curse, to be honest.”

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