It may not be fair, but endings often ruin an otherwise sound film or television series. Perhaps more than any other act, it is the final one that sends an audience out into the world happy, excited, disappointed, or annoyed with what they’ve just sat through. While no one will likely react to Netflix’s His & Hers’ conclusion like its streaming neighbor Stranger Things, it seems likely the third act will earn the same mixed reactions that greeted the final chapters of its Alice Feeney source novel. And with good reason. It is baffling and undercuts the show’s most compelling aspects.

In a small Georgia town, a woman has been killed, viciously stabbed to death, and left on the hood of her car in the rain. Detective Jack Harper (Jon Bernthal), the face of law enforcement in the area, gets the case alongside his new partner, Priya “Boston” Patel (Sunita Mani). Small towns being what they are, the victim, Rachel Hopkins (Jamie Tisdale), is a close friend of his sister Zoe’s (Marin Ireland) and frenemy of Anna (Tessa Thompson), a former Atlanta news anchor who’s returned to town to cover the story.

If you find yourself thinking, “That’s interconnected, but it could be MORE interconnected,” don’t worry, His & Hers has you covered. Anna brings along cameraman Richard (Pablo Schreiber), husband of the perfectly blonde Lexy Jones (Astrid Rotenberry). She’s the woman who snagged the anchor job after Anna went on a sabbatical. The return home is the demoted reporter’s chance to settle old scores and win back the news desk. She has to do it, though, while her mother Alice (Crystal Fox) shows increasingly worrying signs of dementia.

The cast is pretty uniformly strong, with Bernthal and Thompson leading the pack. Both are way too close to the case, constantly undermining the investigation to settle personal scores, satisfy their ambitions, or obscure their own actions. While neither is evil, they value themselves over and above their commitments. They’re quick to grab an opportunity or sidestep responsibility and even faster to rationalize it as a good thing.

Bernthal’s slick lawman as adult big man on campus finds a nice foil in his partner, Priya. As he repeatedly questions and browbeats her in the name of “teaching” her the job, Mani subtly reveals herself a far craftier cop than he seems to realize. To be clear, the show doesn’t do that. They occasionally hit you with sledgehammer obvious moments to get the point across. But, in between those blows, Mani lets you in on the secret with a slight shift of the head or a slowed gait.

On the other side of the subtlety divide are Ireland and Fox. As the least financially fortunate of her high school friend group—which also includes local posh school headmistress Helen Wang (Poppy Liu)—she seems miles from the prep school mean girl she once was. However, Ireland instills the character with a nice bit of nastiness, making her scenery-chewing compelling. It suggests her lack of economic success didn’t so much eliminate her high school cruelty as make it rougher and more recklessly wielded. Fox, on the other hand, has to play a cliché, and loudly. She fulfills the requirement and does find some patches to evoke empathy in the audience, but it is largely too well-worn a trope to throw sparks.

Frequently dark, wet, and muddy, His & Hers is a bit more smartly lit and color corrected than a lot of Netflix’s original offerings. Figures don’t get lost in the black; actions don’t become utterly incomprehensible in the shadows. It may be damning with faint praise, but the series does well in balancing its inky palette while remaining legible to the average viewer watching an average-sized television. You choose to watch this on your phone, though, you only have yourself to blame.

Unfortunately, when adapting a work, the creators reach a point where they need to either stick with the source material’s shortcomings and hope presenting it in a different medium will help or try to fix things. Series developer William Oldroyd and Showrunner Dee Johnson opt for the former. Sadly, neither wholly benefits from the medium shift. By making concrete what one could imagine in various shades of vagueness in the book, His & Hers only further emphasizes that the two big surprises in the third act are inherently ridiculous.

In the end, that leaves a tension. Is the show good because it was well-acted and shot? Is it bad because the final act reveals its plot as poorly constructed? The truth is, while the ending is ludicrous, it being far-fetched isn’t what ultimately undoes the series. It is how those twists upend the engaging narratives surrounding Thompson and Bernthal. The questions raised about how much their pursuits of truth and justice exonerate them for their selfishness are chewy. Well worth delving into. But the twists don’t just background those sticky queries; they obliterates them. If your final act makes the most interesting part of your story null and void, that’s bad storytelling. And that goes for His & Hers.

His & Hers is streaming & watchable now on Netflix.

His & Hers Trailer: