Ozark - Coffee, Black - Review: "Never Ending Job"

After the church fire, Marty gets interrogated by the cops about the incident, but it quickly turns out that the Snells and Mason are the least of Marty's problem in this episode of Ozark.

No, the main issue is the cartel hitman sitting in front of the Byrdes' house, which does not only puts pressure on Marty but also worries Jonah. To this point, "Coffee, Black" followed Ozark's trend of opening its episodes with a foreshadowing scene. This episode opened with Tuck going to a store to buy a gun, which turns out to be for Jonah. Later on, we see that Jonah asking him to buy the gun after he saw a cartel man show up at the Blue Cat. In fact in this episode, things only get briefly good for the Byrdes when Marty manages to make the last payment he owes to the cartel on time. Him and Wendy celebrate with a drink, but that good feeling does not last long when the cartel man shows up with a truck full of money. It's another 50 million to wash, so Marty is far from being off the hook in the Ozarks.

The other issue Marty has rises when, following Eugenia's death, Sam asks Marty for his money back so that he can pay for his mother's funeral. Instead of returning the money (since that would not help Marty), the Byrdes offer to pay for the funeral. Wendy goes to the funeral home with Sam and when she realizes the cost of the extravagant funeral Eugenia wanted, Wendy manages to make a deal with the business's owner. In the end, the Byrdes own a funeral home now. Meanwhile the FBI shows up again and Agent Evans offers Wendy to put her and the kids into witness protection. She refuses and, later on, tell Marty about that little encounter.

And then there is Russ Langmore. Petty tells him he works for the FBI and offers him a deal if Russ helps them get Marty. But in order to do so, Russ has to go through Ruth and get her to confess that she plans on killing Marty. That does not work out. In fact, Ruth figures out that Russ is up to something, which pushed her uncle to chose another path. He decides that he needs to take matters into his own hands and kill Marty. Him and his brother plan to act together and then to leave town with Russ's kids.

And that is where things escalate into insanity. Marty receives the truck full of money and Jonah sees the cartel guy, so he gets Tuck to buy him a rifle, and hides it in the woods. Luckily, Buddy saw him do that and removes the ammunition from the rifle before putting it back into its hiding place. Then the whole Byrde family wraps the cartel money and hides it in the walls of a Blue Cat room (despite the fact that Marty promised Rachel he'd be out of her air once he had met his initial deadline). Meanwhile, Russ and Boyd are on their way to kill Marty when they get electrocuted at the Blue Cat dock. Rachel and the cartel guy handle the situation while Marty goes see Ruth (because he figured out she had something to do with her uncles' death). She admits she could not let them kill him, and the two of them seem to be friends now, somehow. That last part is still a little unclear, Ruth's intentions being hard to read, and should unfold in the season's finale.

"Coffee, Black" was a pretty intense episode of Ozark, and certainly one of the strongest of the show. It moved the main story along quite a bit while focusing on the show's most interesting storylines (we saw very little of the Snells and that was great). Now the season finale seems to be in good shape to be rather wild. That's my take, what did you think?