‘The Better Sister’ cast, creatives react to surprise finale death

This article contains spoilers for The Better Sister series finale, “They’re In Their World.”

When one case closes, another opens. 

Just when sisters Chloe (Jessica Biel) and Nicky’s (Elizabeth Banks) legal drama appeared to finally be behind them, The Better Sister ended its thrilling series finale by throwing one last curveball into the mix with the reveal that Jake (Gabriel Sloyer) — Adam’s (Corey Stoll) coworker and Chloe’s paramour — is now dead, too.

So, who did it? Well, much like their characters, the cast of the Prime Video series all seem to know who the real culprit is, but they certainly aren’t telling. “We don’t really know,” Biel tells Entertainment Weekly over Zoom as Banks, who is sitting beside her, bursts into laughter.

“I mean, I don’t know, right now we gotta… There was a book that closed. And then there’s a little extra page,” Banks teases. “So that’s where we’re at. We’re on page one.”

Creators and co-showrunners Olivia Milch and Regina Corrado hope that any lingering questions surrounding Jake’s death “can be answered at some point” in the future. “We have some ideas and thoughts,” says Milch. “And we have an answer. But I think that, when it comes to these sisters, there’s always some mystery to uncover.” 

While Jake’s killer has yet to be unmasked, it is revealed in the final episodes that Nicky stabbed Adam during a brutal confrontation after discovering that he’d been physically abusing Chloe. However, Milch says eagle-eyed viewers may have been able to suss out that Nicky was the culprit much earlier in the season based solely on Banks’ movements.

“You see in the eighth episode that Nicky has the bite mark on her back, and there’s a certain physicality that Nicky has throughout the whole season that there’s something that’s bugging her,” she says. “And you see the pills that Chloe finds in her suitcase in episode five and you realize in episode eight, ‘Oh, those are the antibiotics that she stole from Adam’s mom because she had this bite mark on her back.’ Similarly, there’s some cuts on her fingers that seem like they’re from her jewelry making.” 

Corrado adds that Banks also brought “a layer of guilt” to her character’s solo scenes that “if you go back and look at it with the knowledge that you have once you know the truth, you could see it in her performance.”

“Nicky is a character who essentially, the entire time that we’re with her, she has murdered somebody, right?” Milch says. “She’s holding that this whole time, while she’s seeing her sister again, while she’s watching her son [Ethan, played by Maxwell Acee Donovan] go through what he goes through. And for us, it was always very important to know that at any moment Nicky could turn herself in, right? At any moment she could put a stop to everything. But if she does that, she loses access to her son, she loses access to her sister. It’s the same predicament she was in before, and that was the fundamental tension: is there a way to get through this without giving up the life that had already been taken from her?” 

The same is also true with Chloe quietly carrying the weight of Adam’s abuse throughout the season and, later, Ethan’s confession that he arrived home while Adam was still bleeding out and, thinking Chloe had stabbed him, chose not to call emergency services and instead staged the crime scene to look like a burglary gone wrong in order to protect her. 

“As you get to the end, certain behaviors start to make more sense,” Milch continues. “You realize, ‘Oh, this is what these people have been holding.’” 

Stoll notes that Ethan choosing not to call for help was a “pretty intense” decision to make, especially since there was a chance that he could’ve saved his father. “It shows how ruined that relationship was,” he adds, “at least from Ethan’s perspective, that life is easier without his dad around.” 

After learning Nicky was trying to save her from Adam, Chloe steps up and covers for her sister by pinning her husband’s death on his boss Bill Braddock (Matthew Modine). Meanwhile, Nicky gets Detective Nancy Guidry (Kim Dickens) kicked off the case just as the officer gains irrefutable proof connecting her to the crime.

“When Chloe finds out that’s what Nicky did, that she protected her, Chloe realizes it’s my turn. I have to protect my sister, and I also owe her for the life that I stole from her without knowing it,” Milch says. “And so everything Chloe does in that final episode is to try to protect Nicky and Ethan and say, ‘How can I make this right? And have us be together the way that we ought to be, because I’m not going to let this happen again.’” 

For Banks, it was pivotal that Ethan’s name was cleared by any means necessary. “For me, as a mother, it was like, we need someone else to be taking the fall so there’s no doubt in anyone’s mind that Ethan didn’t do it,” she explains. “It’s like, how are we going to make sure that he can grow up without this hanging over him, that there’s enough reasonable doubt that there’s someone else to pin it on and it isn’t just like the jury found him not guilty… this way, we were able to say to Ethan, ‘Don’t worry. No one’s ever going to think you did it.'”

Whether Braddock actually ends up serving any time for Adam’s death is another story. “Do we think that Bill would walk? Yeah,” Corrado says. “Hypothetically, right? If you’re reaching past the novel, a man like that — or men like that, let’s not make it specific to Bill — I think it’s common for them not to stay in jail for certain trespasses. Particularly a man so, so powerful.”

The move, Milch notes, also highlights how Chloe has taken “a step up to a whole other level of machinating and conniving” that her high-profile peers like Bill and her publisher pal Catherine (Lorraine Toussaint) may not have initially expected from her. “Suddenly, Chloe may be now quite formidable on many levels that I think Catherine both revels in but is wary of,” Toussaint adds. “But, for a character like Catherine, that’s the fun. The game is on.”

And it’s a game that Milch and Corrado are more than ready to play in a potential second season if given the opportunity.

“We definitely felt very committed to delivering a super satisfying conclusion,” Milch says. “We wanted somebody to feel like they got to the end of the eighth episode and they were like, ‘Whoo! My questions are answered. I know what happened.’ But there’s more intrigue and more mystery, because nothing’s totally knowable and solved.”

She continues, “We just love these characters so much and we constantly are texting about what’s happening to them and what could happen to them. And so we would love [a season 2], but we wanted to make sure that, at the end of this, people felt like, ‘Okay, this is great.’ And hopefully they love the characters as much as we do, and maybe we get to keep having some fun.”

The Better Sister is streaming now on Prime Video.