Ozark showrunner breaks down intense finale, Ruth's fate, and the Byrdes' never-ending problems
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Warning: This story contains spoilers for Ozark's final season.
It's been five days since Ozark's final episodes dropped, and we're still reeling from the intense finale that finally brought us the car crash teased in the season's premiere and a betrayal that led to the death of fan-favorite Ruth Langmore (Julia Garner).
All four of the Byrdes — Marty (Jason Bateman), Wendy (Laura Linney), and their children Charlotte (Sofia Hublitz) and Jonah (Skylar Gaertner) — ended the series unscathed and out from under the cartel, but they find themselves with yet another body to bury. While the family was able to leave the cartel behind, we're left with the sense that a new problem (and a new crime) will always be just around the corner.
Sounds kind of like karma to us — and showrunner Chris Mundy would agree. "I think they're dragging a curse around behind them," he tells EW.
Ahead, Mundy shares insights into the Byrdes' twisted end, Ruth's tragic death, and ending the series.
Netflix Julia Garner in 'Ozark'
ENTERTAINMENT WEEKLY: When did you know Ruth's fate? Is that something that you saw for the character all along? When did that come into play?
CHRIS MUNDY: No, it sort of developed over time. Kind of all of us in the room sort of saw at a certain point that it felt like the story, if we were going to stay truthful to the story. It's almost like you run into this dilemma about, are you trying to preserve the happy ending for the character that you love? Or are you trying to tell the story the way the story would actually play out?
It just became pretty clear as we came out of episodes 11, 12, something like that, as we were breaking the final ones, that this is what would happen to that character in that place in that situation, having done what she did in episode 8, that that sort of authentic ending was that. So then it was just a matter of trying to figure that out, making peace with that or just saying, "Okay, that is what would happen, but we don't want it to happen, so we're going to do something else instead." So that became the debate, basically.
And what were the other things you considered doing?
The other side, there was a version of it where ... she was gone from the Ozarks, and we followed her out of state to a new life. And there was a lot of talk about ... how much the Byrdes should be punished... How much judgment the show put on them or not, or how much it was just like, this is them in the world, and we can let everybody viewing it judge however they want. There was a lot of talk on that. But going into the final season, the idea was that Ruth would come out the other side. And like I said, it wasn't until after writing and breaking 8, the first one that starts this back 7 [episodes], and then kind of looking at it and playing it almost as prophecy, that we started really thinking that the more realistic version was what we did.
When we spoke for EW's Around the Table, your actors sort of joked about you being the Grim Reaper. So how did that Grim Reaper conversation go with Julia, whenever you had to sit her down and be like, "All right. This is what we're going to do?"
It went really well, but it was really hard and weird just because we're friends, and we both love [Ruth]. There's Julia and then there's Ruth, and both Julia and I love Ruth. So it was a strange thing, and I kind of just walked her through the last episodes, because she'd been asking about what happened after episode 10 as we were outlining the season. I just said, "It's going to go really dark. Just keep in mind that this is about to go really dark." And I kind of walked through it, and we walked her through it, and all of a sudden we got into the last one, and she was like, "Wait, am I about to die?" And I'm like, "Yeah."
This is the end of the show, so the character lives on in the same way, even if she's not out in a fictional world. In a lot of ways, we both kind of hope — I certainly hope — that in some ways it makes her a more memorable character, just because she had this end, and hopefully at least her last moment was brave and on her own terms. But I know we're very aware that we are feeling sad about it, and I feel really sad about it, then obviously there's going to be fans of the show who are really sad about it as well.
Her final line was such a perfect Ruth moment. But I'm curious, speaking of character deaths, of course we know that none of the Byrdes died, although it felt like there was playing around with the idea that maybe that would happen with the car crash. But did you guys consider giving anyone else the proverbial ax?
We talked about everything. We talked about every iteration imaginable, and there were writer pitches on Marty deaths and Wendy deaths. I don't think we ever talked about either of the kids. But with any character that died, it always needed to feel like it was for a reason that landed emotionally inside the show, not just because, "Oh, wouldn't it be cool if...?" So it always had to make sense logically, but also emotionally inside the world we were building. So we kind of talked about it. We talked about everyone. But going into the year, I was pretty sure the Byrdes' end was going to be the Byrdes' end, so then it was just a matter of what we did with Ruth and the others, too. But obviously we came to think about the storytelling ... primarily through those three characters first: Marty, Wendy, and Ruth.
Netflix Julia Garner and Laura Linney in 'Ozark'
Do you feel like the Byrdes won, essentially? Do they ever really get out of this? I kind of like the idea of it ending with them having another body to bury, potentially, but I'm curious what your opinions are.
I think they're dragging a curse around behind them. So you could say they won on one level because they did. They're going to ride off into the sunset. But I do believe that karmically — and I've said it in another interview, but we always put something up on the board at the beginning of every season that we're kind of thematically writing towards, and what we wrote was, "building a myth, creating a curse." And it was kind of the way we thought of it as like, "Okay, you can achieve this, but at the cost of your soul to a certain extent."
Yes. And I did think it was interesting too, to not actually show Jonah pulling the trigger. But you hear it, and so you can kind of assume that Mel dies, but I'm curious. In doing that, did you guys want it to be sort of open-ended?
No, I actually didn't. It's funny. I've had people ask, "Are we supposed to think that he killed one of his parents or this…" No, no. Yeah, absolutely, it's not supposed to be ambiguous in that way. It's not. It's supposed to be Mel got it. For sure, 100 percent. It's just, we didn't want to live in the aftermath of that violence for long. Then where do you go from there? At what point, then, do you take it through that act? Do you then go to the crematorium? What do you do? We didn't want to wallow. We wanted to be out. It happened. That's the end, and we wanted to be gone. But we were not trying to ask the question of whether or not, of who got it or… You know what I mean? That felt really clear. The gun was on Mel.
I took it as, Mel is now dead. They have another body to bury, and their problems continue. Even if they got what they wanted in terms of getting out from under the cartel, they're always going to have problems.
That's exactly right. You got it exactly the way we intended it.
Have you gotten to see fan reactions so far? Have you looked at that?
I've peeked a little, and my wife will be like, "Do not look." So I've seen a little. It seems there's a mixture, which is kind of what I expected. There's a mixture of people who seem really positive, and I've gotten a lot of really positive feedback. And then there's a lot of people that'll feel super mad, I think probably just essentially about the Ruth part of it, because people are so protective of that character, and I totally understand that, too. I'd like to think that if they didn't care about her, then they wouldn't feel mad that she's gone, so in that way we did our job in creating the character well, and maybe they'll kind of see the ending as just the end of a fable. So it feels like there's been a little bit of both. I don't know. You probably know better than I do.
Steve Dietl/Netflix Julia Garner as Ruth Langmore
Yeah, for sure. For you, in sort of envisioning the way that this all ends, what was the most difficult part for you in the writers room?
There were two separate things, that were two very different [things]. One was trying to be surprising, and yet feel inevitable... Which is something we always kind of strived for. To use an example from season 3: when Helen dies at the end of season 3, we wanted that to be very surprising for people, and then when they thought about it, be like, "Well of course. That had to have been the ending." So the biggest challenge of just knowing you're coming to the end-end is to maintain that feeling, so that was the hardest challenge just as a group.
And then the other thing that we debated the most was ... how much were we going to judge the Byrdes? Did they deserve to be punished for the things they've done or not? ... Was it our job to punish the characters, or was it our job to tell the story and then let anybody else have whatever opinion they want? So that was a big [conversation]… I was surprised how spirited that debate was inside our little gang of people.
Yeah, and it seems to me that you guys landed more on the latter end of that spectrum. Is that fair to say?
Yeah, I think so. I think we just wanted to let the story be, and then anyone could take away from it what they would. And it's a TV show, so there's certain things that people do in TV shows that you have a different tolerance for than if any of those people were ever in your life in any capacity. I think people would've been done with Marty already in their life a long, long, long, long time ago. But it's just interesting when you've been following these people for so long, what you'll choose to be mad about or not mad about.
I definitely felt almost like Ruth's death was a device for punishing or judging the Byrdes, where it felt to me like that was an indictment of them.
Yeah. I think that's totally accurate.
This interview has been edited and condensed for length and clarity.
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