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Ozark Season 4 was always going to take the season out with a bang—but Netflix viewers did not expect that to literally be the case. The final sound we hear in the show is a gunshot, with one last person potentially losing their life.
The Netflix show's ending is not as bloody as some viewers may have expected, but like every one of the show's four finales, there was a body count by the end of the episode—and not every main character made it out alive.
Ruth Langmore (played by Julia Garner), Wendy Byrde (Laura Linney) and Marty Byrde (Jason Bateman) were among the top predictions for who would die in Ozark Season 4, Episode 16 (titled "A Hard Way to Go"). Here's who made it to the end of the show, and who died across the final hour of the Netflix series
Who Died in the 'Ozark' Season 4 Finale?
Omar Navarro (Felix Solis)
A good finale should bring the story to a close, while also hinting at the next chapter that would follow after the show ends. So it was with the last episode of Ozark, where Camila Elizonndro (Veronica Falcón) tied up all the loose ends before taking over the cartel. Sadly for Navarro, that meant tying up the loose end that was her brother's life.
She arranged it so it would look like he was shot trying to escape while being transferred to a prison. Camila arranged it so one of her men would pretend to be a police officer, killing the driver of Navarro's transfer vehicle and then killing Navarro himself. With Javi (Alfonso Herrera) dead, there was now no one to stand in the way of her rise to power. There was, however, one last loose end...
Ruth Langmore (Julia Garner)
Ruth might have gotten away with killing Javi if Wendy and Marty had not organized one last party at the casino, to celebrate/gloat about how they finally seemed to be out of the cartel business. Allowing their legitimate business associate mix with their cartel clients is never a good idea, and this time it spelled Ruth's doom.
Though Wendy and Marty were able to ignore the cartel threats and keep quiet about who killed Javi, Shaw Medical Solutions CEO Clare Shaw (Katrina Lenk) was so spooked by Carmila's threat to "slash [her] from c*** to collarbone" that she told her that it had been Ruth who killed him.
Ruth has been a goner since she shot Javi (and likely before that), but in the end she seemed resigned to her fate—perhaps because she would now be reunited with Wyatt (Charlie Tahan), whom she kept having visions of throughout the episode.
Mel Sattem? (Adam Rothenberg)
Though it fades to black before we see who gets shot, it seems fairly certain that in the final moments of the Netflix series, Jonah (Skylar Gaertner) shot and killed Mel, the private detective that has been trying to work out what happened to Ben (Tom Pelphrey).
(In case you forgot, Wendy ordered her brother Ben to be killed after his erratic behavior looked set to expose her cartel business).
At the end of Episode 14, he breaks in to the Byrde household to steal the goat cookie jar that has Ben's remains. He thinks there is enough DNA in the jar to confirm that it contained what was left of Ben—which would also prove that the Byrdes knew he was dead this whole time.
Just as he is ready to leave and expose them, however, Jonah turns up with a shotgun trained on Mel. The screen goes black, and we hear a shot.
There are multiple ways this could be interpreted. Jonah could have shot Mel to protect his family, completing the journey that sees him follow in his parents' footsteps. This interpretation also chimes with Ruth's conversation with Jonah's grandfather earlier in the episode where she mentioned him becoming a "little Marty."
Alternatively, he could have shot his mother as revenge for killing his beloved uncle. This is possible but less likely—if we learned anything from this episode, it is that Wendy and Marty can withstand anything. And maybe Wendy was right—that car crash was a sign that she truly is invincible.
However, this could be the show ending on a cruel irony—Wendy and Marty talk about being "bulletproof" earlier in the episode, so what more fitting way to end the show than by proving they are not?
Ozark Seasons 1 to 4 are streaming now on Netflix.
