You will watch few performances this year as sleeveless as Jessica Biel’s in The Better Sister. Biel’s character, the allegedly ultra-competent magazine editor Chloe Taylor, spends half the episode swanning around in a heather gray tank top, presenting a physique and a silhouette that look like the work less of a trainer and more of an impressive visual effects workshop. The effect portrays her as both tightly muscled and tightly wound, a woman who ensures her body, face, and hair look spectacular so no one will look too closely.

And you don’t have to take my word for it, either. Over and over in this episode, characters comment on Chloe’s appearance, in ways that can be deemed either effusive or offensive depending on how you feel about the contemporary beauty standards and/or the patriarchy. Her sister Nicky admiringly plays with Chloe’s ultra-neat bob, purring about having wanted to get her hands on that hair since she arrived in New York. Her increasingly estranged mentor/advisor/financial backer Catherine insists on a face-saving memorial get-together for her murdered husband Adam — if only, she says, to make sure Chloe eats. When Chloe envisions a conversation with Adam, he tells her “You look thin,” sounding concerned — until they both grin at how much she always loved it when he’d tell her this.

I think I speak on behalf of everyone with eating-disorder experience when I say, Yeesh! But also, yeah, that tracks: Chloe absolutely would interpret that as a compliment, even if in public she’d likely mouth all the right bromides about body acceptance. It’s very easy to talk about that kind of thing when your body looks like Chloe’s — and the show’s final scene, in which she strips out of her dress for the wake and stands around in black underwear and high heels for a while, makes sure we get an eyeful. 

Not salaciously, either, though obviously everyone involved knows the character looks sexy in those moments. I think the show’s setting up contrasts with how Adam viewed Chloe versus how he saw both her less disciplined, messier sister and their less physically fit, less Type A son Ethan. It’s also saying something about what parts of her she feels are important, what aspects of herself she needs to maintain to present the perfect public face. The point is, The Better Sister is aware of what it’s doing.

I wish the rest of the character made this much sense. As she has from the start, Chloe vacillates wildly from being the kind of canny move-maker and people-worker who rose to the top of a competitive industry, and the kind of credulous, oblivious person who never thought to wonder if their comparatively fucked-up older sister maybe got it worse from their alcoholic, emotionally abusive father than she did. I understand that their dad made an effort to divide and conquer, but Chloe’s a very smart person who’s had many years to reflect on all this out from under his influence. It’s reminiscent of how she’s a formidable business executive who somehow also loves talking to homicide detectives without an attorney present for her minor child.

But it’s not just her psychology that feels wonky, it’s her vocation. The year is 2025 (presumably), and Chloe Taylor is a liberal print magazine editor so famous that paparazzi with telescopic lenses stake out nearby building rooftops on the off chance that she’ll stroll around her terrace. Her doorman is getting in physical fights to hold the shutterbugs at bay. Quick question: Can you name an editor of a current popular magazine? Now can you name one in their early 40s? Now can you see TMZ making much time for them?

And like her sister Nicky, who in this episode has sex with a cater waiter in Catherine’s driveway and agrees to cover up Ethan’s prison beating seconds after telling him keeping secrets is poison (advice cribbed from an AA acquaintance played by Paul Sparks), Chloe seems bound and determine to screw up their son’s case. Advised to lie low by his attorney, she goes to Catherine’s soirée. Concerned with Nicky’s behavior, she watches from across the room as her alcoholic, addict sister pounds drink after drink. The show excuses this by having her get interrupted over and over again while trying to make her move, but this woman is a major magazine editor and society doyenne who, you’d think, is probably pretty good at extracting herself from conversations with people she doesn’t want to talk to at parties. 

Even harder to write off is Chloe’s decision to shittalk her sister to a reporter at the memorial who’d outed Nicky as Ethan’s secret biological mother in a story that wasn’t even 18 hours old at that point. I can’t think of any way in which this makes sense, not even from a blowing-off-steam perspective, since this guy’s as responsible for all that steam build-up as anyone. 

To be fair, he has a lot of help. Tired of Chloe’s condescension, Nicky finally reveals…well, reveal may be a strong word, as the story we hear sounds either watered down or just the tip of the iceberg. But Nicky tells Chloe that before he sobered up — before Chloe’s mom, whom she dreams about nailing their dad’s coffin shut despite his ghost’s friendly demeanor at his own funeral, installed locks on the girls’ doors — he drunkenly got into bed with her and tried to have sex with her. 

Nicky says her dad thought he was in bed with their mom at the time, and stopped once she finally made him realize he wasn’t. It’s not the litany of horrific, deliberate abuse I expected, that’s for sure. Still, Chloe reacts like even this drunken mishap is beyond the pale for the guy, though she knows full well his favorite hobby was getting loaded and taking the girls drunk driving. We’ve all got blind spots, and most likely there’s also more information we in the audience aren’t privy to yet regarding the family’s secrets. It still strains credulity that a person as formidable as Chloe’s made out to be had not even considered such possibilities. 

She’s gonna have to consider a lot more. In this episode, we learn that her husband’s mysterious client finances stadiums in the Middle East, home of aristocrats and oligarchs who, much like our own, will fuck you up if you get in their way. Maybe they found out he was talking to the FBI and decided on a change of counsel. Chloe, meanwhile, discovers that Jake searched her home for Adam’s files; that relationship’s on ice. Catherine, burned by having been kept in the dark about Ethan’s birth mother, pushes Chloe out at the magazine, at least for the time being. (Catherine’s daugther Janey, meanwhile, is a Sinister Gay out of the same playbook as Ethan and Jake’s boss, Bill.) But the bottom line is this: Unless and until Chloe makes sense as a person, watching her try to make sense of this mystery will remain a challenge.

Sean T. Collins (@theseantcollins) writes about TV for Rolling Stone, Vulture, The New York Times, and anyplace that will have him, really. He and his family live on Long Island.