The Better Sister: What really happened to Chloe’s knife in the ending?

The Better Sister does a stellar job performing on the most important parts of storytelling, from Chloe’s emotional payoff redemption to Adam Macintosh’s murder, weaving shocking twists, and offering a balance at the end. In the midst of those captivating performances and secrets being revealed, there was one question seemingly everyone in the room had in their mind: Where did Chloe's bloodied knife go?

At the beginning of the series, Chloe (played by Jessica Biel) comes across Adam’s corpse, and sometime later, she is shown with a knife that is covered in blood. Nicky later checks Chloe’s car, and to her surprise, a knife is sitting in the glovebox. Nicky eventually picks up the knife, and instead of confronting her, she takes it and washes it clean with bleach, erasing every trace of evidence marking her as the killer. That's the last time the weapon is brought up.

This unique snapshot is memorable on its own, especially in a mystery where every clue, goal, and connection felt interconnected. Why create the ‘bloody knife’ trope and then wash it away? Is this merely a misleading symbol, or was the intent to hint at a more extensive storyline leading to a potential sequel?

For now, let’s evaluate the options, the impacts on the storyline, and what this curious loose end could symbolize in regard to The Better Sister's future.

The knife that disappeared: Oversight or clue?

When a show is as intricately designed as The Better Sister, audiences definitely expect narrative cohesion when a central character is portrayed holding a bloody knife. However, Nicky's finding and discarding the knife doesn’t result in any further commentary on its relevance within the plot or any discussions about it from the characters. Even as Chloe is later absolved from the accusation of being the murderer, the fixated plot inconsistency that nearly everyone has particularly empathetically pointed out makes for glaringly insufficient storytelling.

The assumption that could be made is that the knife did serve some function; however, imprecisely serving the role of fake Chloe’s knife wasn’t the primary goal. Yet with other series misdirecting like Ethan faking a robbery or the manufactured evidence against Bill Braddock, all of those were resolved in the final episode. With the unsettling knife that remains in the open, the question is, was the thread intentionally left dangling, or was the intent simply to abandon the notion to explore?

Could The Better Sister season 2 solve the mystery?

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Despite The Better Sister being sold as a limited series, the finale was vague enough, not only with regards to Chloe’s knife, but also concerning Jake’s demise and the Gentry Group’s nefarious dealings, to suggest a possible second installment. Should that happen, the series could explore the potential depths of meaning around Chloe’s encounter with the knife.

One suggestion that is more popular than others is that, instead of being dead, Chloe found Adam alive, and out of sheer panic, anger, or the instinct to protect herself, she decided to put him down once and for all. That edicts the bloody aftermath, but does put forth an entirely new dimension of moral intricacy within her persona. It would also change the nature of Nicky’s calm retrieval of the knife from a gaze of meek compliance to an act of shielding them both from a known secret.

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