The Ending Of ‘The Better Sister’ Is Honestly So Twisted — Here’s The Breakdown

There’s no rivalry like a sibling rivalry. And there’s one show out right now that totally understands that and takes it to an extreme degree. The Better Sister, the new limited series on Amazon Prime Video, tells the story of sisters Chloe (Jessica Biel) and Nicky (Elizabeth Banks), who are very… different. Chloe is a picture-perfect housewife to Adam (Corey Stoll) and mom to teenage son Ethan (Maxwell Acee Donovan). Meanwhile, Nicky lives with addiction and works hard to stay clean. But, the sisters actually have a bit more in common than meets the eye; Adam is actually Nicky’s ex-husband, and Ethan is actually her biological son.

That’s right, Chloe and Nicky have more than just your typical sisterly tensions since Chloe basically stole Nicky’s life. And to throw another complication into the mix, at the beginning of the series, Adam is found murdered.

“It felt like Greek tragedy to me,” Elizabeth Banks told The Hollywood Reporter about the story. “The murdered husband, the two wives, the shared son living in his father’s shadow, talking to ghosts, the past sort of having an impact on the present, the betrayals, and the lies. So I love that we were going to have this big canvas.”

So how does all that sister drama and murder shake out? This is what happened at the end of The Better Sister.

The Better Sister Ending Explained

Image Credit: Amazon Prime Video

Right at the beginning of The Better Sister, Ethan gets arrested for Adam’s murder because the police found Ethan’s DNA under Adam’s fingernails. But, it’s clear the story is not so simple, mostly because The Better Sister is an eight-episode series, so things couldn’t wrap up that quickly.

Ethan goes on trial, and even though the prosecutors find evidence of Ethan posting threatening messages about Adam online, there is still no concrete evidence that Ethan is the killer. So, the jury finds Ethan not guilty. But the story doesn’t end there.

Ethan returns home to find the police records he requested about the night Nicky lost custody of him as a baby and left. He’d always been told he was found nearly drowning while Nicky was passed out nearby. But, there actually were no signs he almost drowned, and Nicky reveals she discovered that she’d actually been drugged that day. Dun dun dunnnnnnn.

Adam had actually manipulated the situation to cut Nicky out, and before his death, he was about to hurt Chloe, too. Ethan secretly contacted Nicky after he witnessed Adam push Chloe. So Nicky secretly drove to the Hamptons house to confront Adam. When she did, Adam got violent with her. And so, in an act of self-defense (and defense for Chloe and Ethan, too), Nicky killed Adam,

In the end, only Nicky, Chloe, and Ethan know the truth about Adam’s murder, and although it was quite the journey to get there, the three of them are reunited. Since The Better Sister is a limited series and right now there are no plans to expand the story, it looks like that’s where it ends.