In season 3 of Ozark, Marty Byrde is doing everything he can to keep his affairs in order
and his family safe.
He pays off the Cosgrove family and the KC Mafia and even offers them a percentage stake
in the newly opened Missouri Belle casino.
FBI Agent Maya Miller begins looking into the Byrde’s financial records in order to
prove they were laundering money, so Marty has to navigate a vigorous investigation.
And Marty agrees to enter couple’s therapy with his wife Wendy, but secretly pays off
their therapist Sue for her to sway their sessions in Marty’s favor.
But for all of Marty’s efforts, the Byrde family find themselves in constantly escalating
dangers.
To solve the problem of FBI Agent Miller looking into the casinos finances, the Byrdes and
Ruth must come up with new ways to launder money.
First they try “smurfing”, hiring teams of people to make bets and lose small amounts
every day, and eventually they escalate to having Wendy’s old gullible pal Sam Dermody,
now engaged to a stripper, to bet big and lose large sums of his fortune with the promise
of being reimbursed by the Byrdes.
When Agent Miller catches on to the scheme, she has Sam arrested.
Wendy Byrde believes the best way to further protect her family is to grow even more powerful,
so throughout season 3, she teams up with Navarro lawyer Helen Pierce to rapidly expand
Navarro’s empire in America.
Marty, fearing the expansion plans would put the family at greater risk, constantly tries
to thwart his wife’s power moves.
But when Navarro hears of the Byrde family dysfunction from Helen, he kidnaps Marty and
brings him to Mexico for some torturing.
The only way for Marty to save himself is by promising Navarro that he could turn Agent
Miller to the cartel’s side.
And so, Marty returns to America and is more amenable to Wendy’s expansion plans and
also begins working on flipping Agent Miller’s allegiance by confessing his crimes to her
to gain her trust.
Part of the Navarro expansion plans include buying a Kentucky horse farm, but that turns
out to be a ploy by Navarro to castrate the prize stud horse housed there by his cartel
rival Lagunas.
This escalates a drug war that had started in Mexico between the rivals and brings it
to America where the Byrdes were now in the crossfire.
The strain of the escalating drug war, the FBI investigation, and the conflicting business
plans further fractures the marriage of Marty and Wendy, who accidentally explode on each
other in a therapy session, revealing all of their criminal secrets to their therapist,
Sue.
Marty pays Sue off to stay quiet, but Helen has Navarro enforcer Nelson kill the therapist
to ensure her silence.
Making things even harder for the Byrde family to navigate is the arrival of Wendy’s brother
Ben.
Ben discovers the truth about Marty and Wendy’s various criminal affiliations and ingratiates
himself into the family business.
When he strikes up a romantic relationship with Ruth, he stops taking his bipolar medication
and his erratic behavior begins to become a liability.
Meanwhile, the KC Mafia head Frank Cosgrove has his men transporting money for the Byrdes.
At a money drop off between Ruth and some Cosgrove men, the Lagunas cartel shows up
and opens fire, killing the mafia members while Ruth narrowly escapes thanks to some
help from Ben and Jonah, who were observing the meeting with Jonah’s drone.
The business partnership between the mafia and the Byrdes becomes increasingly strained
due to Cosgrove’s hotheaded son, Frank Jr., constantly creating conflict with Ruth.
He starts a scene at the casino and needs to be thrown out by Ruth, his men are constantly
disobeying Ruth’s money drop protocols, and he even begins loan sharking at the Missouri
Belle against Marty and Ruth’s wishes.
Eventually, this escalates to Frank and his men beating Ruth to near death.
This causes the Byrdes to payout and cut ties with the KC mafia, but Ruth wants them to
go even further and have Frank Jr. killed.
When they refuse, Ruth begins to feel betrayed by the Byrdes.
Ben encourages Ruth to turn on Marty and Wendy due to their seeming disloyalty.
And let’s not forget about another enemy of the Byrdes, Darlene Snell.
She’s still bitter over the burning of her poppy fields, but now that they’ve begun
to regrow, she’s planning her own moves.
When Wyatt Langmore is arrested for breaking and entering, Darlene pays his bail and employs
him on the heroin farm.
The two even enter into a bit of an inappropriate romantic relationship.
Darlene then makes moves to bring Ruth over to her side, and to prove her loyalty, she
confronts Frank Jr. and shoots his genitals off as revenge for his attack on Ruth.
And then to top things off, Darlene pays a visit to Frank Sr. and offers him a 50-50
business partnership as an apology.
She’d supply the heroin, the KC mafia would distribute it.
As the season nears its finale, Ben is becoming too far gone.
He publicly confronts and attacks Marty at a charity event they were throwing at the
Missouri Belle and then goes to the home of Helen Pierce and tells her teenage daughter
Erin that Helen and the Byrdes worked for a Mexican drug cartel and were responsible
for several murders.
In response, Helen tells Navarro that the Byrde family had become too big of a liability
and was given the go ahead to do whatever seemed necessary.
With their backs against the wall and the threat of death imposed against their entire
family, Wendy is forced to make her toughest decision yet and gives up her own brother
to the cartel, who sends Nelson to kill Ben.
This decision causes Ruth to officially cut ties with the Byrdes.
Still fearing that Navarro would view the Byrdes as too big a liability, Marty and Wendy
devise a plan to prove themselves more valuable to the cartel than Helen.
And so, Marty takes Jonah’s drone footage of the Lagunas attack to Agent Miller in order
to secure the arrest of the Lagunas men, a small victory in the ongoing drug war.
Navarro then calls Marty, Wendy, and Helen to Mexico to attend his son’s baptism.
Fearing for their lives, the Byrdes arrive in Mexico via private jet where Helen is shockingly
executed by Nelson and Navarro welcomes the Byrdes, celebrating an increased cooperation
between the three of them.