Ozark Season 3: 10 Important Things Everyone Forgot About Seasons 1 & 2

Money launderer Marty Byrde (Emmy-winner Jason Bateman who also directs and executive produces the show) tries to keep his new casino afloat while wife Wendy (Laura Linney) deals with the Mexican drug cartel. Just your typical harried, two-career couple.

Ozark season 3, the dark, brutal drama returns to Netflix on March 27th with 10 episodes and kicks off six months after the season 2 finale. The once-thick as thieves Marty and Wendy are fighting each other for control of the family’s destiny; Marty wants to keep the status quo; Wendy aims for expansion. As if their hands aren’t already full (the couple also has two kids Charlotte and Jonah), plus Wendy’s mentally unstable brother Ben (Tom Pelphrey) is coming into town to stir the pot. Let’s catch up.

10 How It All Began

Marty and his financial partner Bruce are approached by Del to launder drug money. Marty expects Wendy, a public relations guru for political campaigns, to give it the thumbs down, but to his surprise, she’s game. Bruce and Marty take on the client who kills his previous thieving financial advisor in front of them, so they get the message. Apparently Bruce didn’t because he skims too and is murdered.

Marty moves his family to the Ozarks to invest in businesses through which he can wash money for Del’s cartel. He gets involved with the locals, Ruth Langmore (Emmy winner Julia Gardner) in particular.

9 The Byrdes Move In With Buddy

The family rents a lakefront house from its terminally ill homeowner, who continues to live in the basement. After realizing a cartel operative is shadowing the Byrdes, Buddy ultimately saves the family by holding a shotgun on him, so Wendy and the children can escape, then shoots the drug henchmen.

Buddy’s health declines and he’s hospitalized but recovers after returning home, just in time to join a plot against local heroin dealers, Darlene and Jacob Snell. His part is to gain access to the couple’s farm and burn the poppy field. Buddy dies in Wendy’s car as they leave the Snell farm and the Byrdes arrange an elaborate funeral.

8 The Snells Are Really Bad People

They may look like Ma and Pa of the mountains, but make no mistake these two are as ruthless as organized crime lords.

The worst of the two is Darlene, who would kill you as soon as look at you. Here’s proof: She shoots Del after the two struck a drug deal because his retort to her nasty comment was even nastier. She kills new mother Grace when her preacher-husband Mason no longer wants the Snells to use his church to launder money. She poisons her own husband who she suspected (and rightly so) of betraying her to work with the cartel.

7 Ruth and Marty’s Love/Hate Relationship

She stole from him. She wanted to work for him. She tried to kill him. She saved him from being killed. She wanted to be part of his inner circle. In the first two seasons, the sassy local criminal just couldn’t seem to pick a lane.

Garner, who beat four Game of Thrones actresses to win Best Supporting Actress in a Drama Series sees her character finally take a major position in Byrde Enterprises as manager of its new casino boat. By the season 2 finale, she is self-confident as well as grateful to Marty for being the first/only person to believe in her and her abilities. However, as she gets deeper into the business, she doesn’t see much difference between the Byrdes and her own lawless family.

6 RIP Roy Petty, FBI

His mother was an addict, so he spent his law enforcement career fighting a personal war on drugs. He tried everything to nail Marty: from sending his ex-boyfriend and fellow agent Trevor to intimidate the Byrdes to turning Rachel, Marty’s partner in the Blue Cat bar, into a drug dependent FBI informant. Later, the agent resorts to denying Rachel any more drugs, causing her to score compromised heroin from which she ODs.

Having had enough of his nemesis, Marty has a cartel associate give Roy’s mother a generous stash. Before Roy can retaliate, he has a run-in with Ruth’s jailbird dad Cade, who kills him.

5 The Byrde Empire

It began with the Blue Cat inn and restaurant, where Marty met Rachel and hired Ruth. He moved on to add the strip club Lickety Splitz, where the Snells were already laundering their drug money. He then tried to switch Mason’s boat-based services on the lake into a brick and mortar church. Then there was the boat repair shop.

He and Wendy also acquired a funeral home that they purchased with the funds they swindled from the owner who happened to be the mother a real estate agent Wendy worked with to find the family home and ended up working for as a stager. Last but not least, there’s the riverboat casino.

The couple’s portfolio is nothing if not diverse.

4 Charlotte’s Emancipation

Oh, you know how kids are. One minute they’re doing homework and the next they’re living in a van. Older Byrde sib played by Sofia Hublitz, who’s friends with Ruth’s University of Missouri bound nephew, Wyatt, stole $10,000 from her parents and split it with little brother Jonah. She also stole an expensive book for Wyatt, which he refuses, explaining how the punishment for someone poor like him would be a lot worse than what she’d get.

After buying the aforementioned vehicle and living in it, Charlotte informed her parents she’d hired an attorney to legally split from the family.

3 Jonah As Michael Fleming

Like father, like son. When he found out that his dad is a money launderer, Jonah (Skyler Gaertner) surfed the ‘net to learn how to be one as well.

The precocious tween took his half of the $10,000 from Charlotte to open a bank account with the alias Michael Fleming. When mom Wendy discovered this, instead of giving the boy a timeout, she used the laundering network he created to donate to politician Wilkes’s charity, then informed the politician he accepted cartel money, blackmailing him into supporting the casino project.

2 Wendy: The Future Is Female

She began as her husband’s reluctant sidekick and ended up calling the shots. Mrs. Byrde was so badass while carrying out Marty’s plans that Navarro Cartel attorney, Helen Pierce, took notice. In a twisted form of women helping women, Helen’s praise and encouragement gave Wendy the boost she needed to start plotting and planning on her own.

Aside from outsmarting Wilkes, she orchestrated the death of Cade after he attacked Charlotte, and saved Jonah from being kidnapped by Darlene by getting the now lonely widow a baby to adopt–Zeke, the son of deceased Mason. At the end of season 2, Wendy had a renewed interest in her life of crime.

1 Marty Has Had It

His life had become one giant game of Whack-a-mole. When the FBI wasn’t looking for him, other criminals were. When not looking for yet another business from which to launder money, he was looking over his shoulder. Was Ruth about to backstab him–literally? Was Rachel wearing a wire? Was Wendy cheating on him again? Then the mafia had union issues with the casino and let him know by blowing up his office.

Once the riverboat casino got approved, Marty wanted to hand the whole operation over to Ruth and confided that the $50 million in cartel money was hidden in Buddy’s mausoleum. This freed him to arrange his family’s escape to Australia. Wendy, however, decided they would be staying in the Ozarks.