Ozark has a grim view of our country, and that may be its strongest characteristic. In Ozark's world, everyone's a grifter, everyone's constantly hustling, everyone's on the make and on the take. In the fifth episode of the show's final season ("Ellie"), Wendy Byrde is both a student and a teacher of how to wheel and deal and profit from the misfortune of others. At the request of Senator Schafer, an old political rival whose support she now needs in the form of a seat on her charity foundation's board, she uses her connections to pull an FBI file on an insider-training investigation into his son. That son, a federal judge, may have done some insider trading predicated on the success of his own son's new voting-machine technology. Turns out the Feds weren't on his tail after all, but that's not really what the senator was worried about. The thing that mattered here is that the voting machines were impossible to audit externally, allowing them to suppress votes and rig elections-and since his son is off the hook, that gave him the maneuvering room to find and silence, permanently, a software engineer who was prepared to blow the whistle on this right-wing election-rigging scheme. Wendy, a dutiful liberal-she worked for Obama for god's sake, before she started doing organized crime-is aghast when she discovers what she's done. But she's not so aghast that she fails to maintain the illusion that the Byrde Family Foundation represents some golden ticket out of trouble for herself and her family. There's one more wheeler and dealer to consider: Mel Sattem, the private investigator sniffing around after missing persons Helen and Ben. A former cop who lost his job when he was caught red-handed-or white-nosed-doing coke in the evidence locker of his precinct, he's formidably good at his job, though he's got things slightly wrong. He believes, correctly, that the Byrdes know something about Helen's disappearance; he's concluded, erroneously, that Ben killed her and that they're hiding Ben, not knowing they were responsible for Ben's death.
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