I miss the days when people on television wore colors. Sure, television is still in color, technically, but on far too many shows that color runs the gamut from Point A to Point A. Everything is blue and orange, apricot and teal, denim and wood, aquamarine shirts and orange skin tones. The fourth season of True Detective Season 4 served as a real Magic Eye poster for this critic in this regard — once I saw it, I couldn’t unsee it, and now I see it everywhere, up to including otherwise brilliant works of art like the second season of Andor. And I’m not crazy — oh no, not I! Watch this episode of The Better Sister and take a drink every time you see a shot with that exact blue-orange palette or a variation thereof. By the end you’ll be drunker than Nicki after getting roofied by her husband Adam.

Adam had to do it, he explains to Chloe in one of those dreadful scenes where dead people talk to the living as if sitting in the room right with them. According to Chloe and Nicky’s mutual abusive ex-husband, it would only have been a matter of time before Nicky’s alcoholism really did risk the life of their young son, Ethan. Better a controlled burn than a raging wildfire.

Of course, that’s what a controlling, abusive man would say of the situation. In a separate flashback from the one in which he hands Nicky a straight-up vodka-and-crushed-pills cocktail to enjoy in the pool, we also watch him rough up Chloe. His excuse is a familiar one if you’ve witnessed abuse: He’s just doing it to get her to settle down. Therefore, any injury she incurs is a “look what you made me do” situation. “There, are you happy?” Adam barks at her as she sits on her ass on the ground where he knocked her to, as if the whole thing had been her choice rather than his. 

All of this is observed by their son, Ethan, who hears — and internalizes — Chloe’s warning to Adam that she’ll kill him if he touches her again. This is why he staged the break-in at the murder scene and thus incriminated himself: He was trying to cover for his mom, whom he believed was the culprit. 

You’d be surprised how many suspects we cycle through in this episode alone. Now that Ethan’s off the hook, Guidry and Bowen are pounding the pavement again, desperate for a collar that will stick. Guidry uncovers a blockbuster revelation: The night he was killed, Adam nearly got in a barfight with a drunken Arty the doorman, who was aware Adam was abusing Chloe, a woman he clearly adores. Indeed, the show has planted enough hints and raised enough questions over the course of its run to make it seem like Arty is the slam-dunk suspect.

But Arty’s got still another surprise up his sleeve: In addition to being the kindly, fatherly figure who’s been such a presence in the lives of Chloe and Ethan, he’s also just some guy, and as such he’s been having a years-long This Time Next Year–style affair out on the East End during his trips out there with the family. That’s why his alibi for the time period during which Adam was killed stinks: He wasn’t killing Adam, he was schtupping his lover. 

And lo, a new culprit enters the battle. Throughout the season, we’ve learned more and more about Nicky’s situation, and they’ve made her look more and more blameless, beyond the basic fact of her alcoholism. She was nearly raped by her father in a case of drunken mistaken identity, and was emotionally abused by him for years. She was physically abused by Adam, who drugged her in order to frame her for negligence and take their son away from her, with her sister in tow. She spent a lifetime keeping both abusive relationships hidden. In the end, we learn, she even discovered the truth about the pool incident, but kept that to herself as well.

There’s one more thing she kept to herself, we learn from the detectives: She’s been taking care of Adam’s mother back in Ohio.

So maybe that’s how she found out how bad things were between him and Chloe, and that’s why she raced to New York, and that’s why…she killed Adam!

That confession is certainly a surprise, I’ll give the show that. It’s also one that calls the series’ whole modus operandi into questions. From the start, we’ve been told over and over that however flawed they are, and however often they mess up in the process, both Chloe and Nicky sincerely love Ethan and sincerely want to save him from an unjust conviction. That portrayal gets pretty hard to square with the fact that Nicky could have confessed and saved her son’s life this whole time!

There’s still an hour left of this show. I’m not expecting some big triumphant redemption of the whole enterprise, since even a gangbusters finale can’t fix nine previous episodes of wtf-is-this. But I’d at least like something that sorts out all these apparent contradictions. And there are still some loose threads that may help tie things off — Jake, the Gentry Group, and evil Agent Oliveros, for example, or whatever the hell Catherine’s deal is. (Is she good or evil, friend or foe? I haven’t the foggiest idea.) But I’m no longer hoping for a show that sticks the landing, merely one that comes in for a controlled landing and evacuates all its passengers safely.

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.