The Sister Review: A Rocky Conclusion (Season 1 Episodes 3-4)
The Sister Season 1 “Episode 3” and “Episode 4” feel an awful lot like a Stephen King novel and not in the way it would like to.
That’s not an unfair comparison to make, considering that this limited series is adapted from the creator Neil Cross’s own book — entitled “Burial” — and is operating in a similar vein to some of King’s more stories. That’s not why we’re making that comparison, though.
One of the most common critiques of King and his writing is that he is very good at setting up a story and conflict, drawing the reader into the world that he’s establishing, and then not being able to bring it to a satisfying conclusion. That’s where The Sister falls in these last two episodes.
There’s this inescapable feeling that the series just didn’t know how to resolve everything. Part of this comes from a kind of disconnect from the way that Nathan (Russell Tovey) is written throughout the first half of the series — and the third episode to a certain extent — and then the way he is portrayed during the final episode.
The first two episodes presents us to a man who is kind of a bumbling buffoon. He’s gotten away with murder (or so we’re lead to believe), but not because he’s clever in any way. Rather, just from some sheer dumb luck on his part and having an accomplice who is far more adept at a cover-up than he is.
There’s not really anything within those early episodes to indicate that this is someone who, left to his own devices, would have been able to escape detection of the police. Yet, that’s the very thing that “Episode 4” would like to believe.
Almost out of nowhere, we’re supposed to believe that this is someone shrewd enough to not only set up Bob as the fall guy for everything and murder him but also that’s he’s able to get away with that. It makes us wonder who this Nathan is because he is not the same one that we’ve seen sweating and refusing to deal with reality.
The big problem here is that the series can’t decide what it wants to do with Nathan by the end of it. Does it want him to live happily ever after? To pay for his crimes? It doesn’t land in any one area for him and it just leaves him in an odd nebulous zone where he’s not going to jail and he has a kid on the way but his future with his wife is left ambiguous.
The Sister doesn’t want to blow up his life and it also doesn’t want him to get off scotfree and it isn’t able to bridge that divide to serve both of those masters. It doesn’t truly know what it wants so, as a result, it becomes a bit of nothing.
To its credit, however, the reveal of what truly happened to Elise is well done and is almost worth the price of admission. It allows itself to become a ghost story but at the same time not one at all. It’s a twist that serves the characters and in this it’s detailing just how dangerous and deranged Bob actually is.
It’s a motive for murder that we haven’t seen a lot on crime shows or films. It’s an interesting concept to actively make a ghost instead of just stumbling upon one. The only downside is that pivots the plot from one where Nathan is a perpetrator to one where he is an unknowing victim, which takes some of the accountability off of his shoulders and loses some of its edge.
What did you think of this episode of The Sister? Share your thoughts in the comments below!
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The Sister is now streaming on Hulu.
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Drew Koenig
Drew has an ongoing, borderline unhealthy obsession with pop culture, but with television in particular. When he's not aggressively trying to get out of a perpetual state of catching up, he can be found passionately defending the ending of Lost. More of his online work can be found at The Lost Cause and he also co-hosts The Lost Cause Pod.