Ozark: Kaleidoscope

August 8, 2017 7:23 AM - Season 1, Episode 8

In a flashback to 10 years prior, Wendy struggles with depression, Del asks Marty to be his financial adviser, and Agent Petty faces a family crisis.
posted by aabbbiee (3 comments total)

I liked the flashback story itself, but I did not like the way they cut it to jump around in the timeline. It was not well done and not necessary, and it really needs to be well done to make it work.

It also seemed to gut the narrative. Like, thinking back, I can see why the miscarriage and the resultant depression was a reason that Wendy would say, "yes, let's go for it" to Marty when he asked if he should work for Del. But I didn't make that connection while watching the episode because they seemed to want to make the miscarriage the big shock ending, instead of using it to set up the choice.
The choice is what I really cared about. I did want to know more about why these two smart, strategic, seemingly risk-averse people would choose to work for a cartel. And I guess I got the answer but I think they would have made the point better without doing the jump-around-timeline thing.
posted by aabbbiee at 7:52 AM on August 8, 2017 [3 favorites]

I actually had the opposite impression, I really liked the timeline-jumping stuff and the way it made me need to work a little bit to figure out what was going on. I tend to be kind of a sucker for these formalist exercises, though. Like Memento, I feel like if the events were just told in chronological order it wouldn't be nearly as interesting.
posted by whir at 4:42 AM on August 11, 2017 [1 favorite]

Not that anyone cares what I think five years later, but the narrative tricks here seemed like window dressing to distract us from how simplistic everyone’s just-so stories were.
posted by skewed at 6:59 PM on June 3, 2022 [2 favorites]