Major spoilers ahead for Tell Me Lies season 3.
The Tell Me Lies finale was always going to be polarizing.
The season 3 ending, announced hours before its air date as the conclusion to the Hulu series, had a lot to pull together after a season that took its characters (especially Grace Van Patten's Lucy Albright) to shocking new lows. Explaining the plot of Tell Me Lies to friends who haven't seen the show has often felt like a comical exercise; it's one chaotic thing after another in a show that is often both extremely hard to watch and admirably emotionally ambitious.
But the final 10 minutes of Tell Me Lies—heavily debated as they will surely be—are somehow the perfect ending to a show as hellish as this one.
What happens in the Tell Me Lies finale?
The series is told through dual timelines, one in 2008 when the world's most toxic friend group is in school at Baird College, and one in 2015 when they've reunited to celebrate the wedding of Bree (Cat Missal) and Evan (Branden Cook).
A main arc of season 3 has been Lucy's descent into full-on dissociation, after Stephen (played in a truly disconcerting way by Jackson White) coerced her into making a video admitting she lied about being raped for the attention (which isn't totally true, since she lied to protect Sonia Mena's Pippa).
In the finale, Chekhov's video is posted to Facebook, and as the whole campus turns on her, Lucy is expelled. She assumes it's Stephen's payback for her messy attempt to interfere with Yale, but we learn that it was actually her best friend, Bree, who leaked the video. (Points to Wrigley for actually thinking through a revenge plan with Yale that actually worked: calling Yale to tell them about Stephen spreading Diana's nudes around and this getting his admission rescinded).
Bree's fateful decision comes after simultaneously learning that Evan cheated on her with Lucy freshman year, and being surprised with a f*cked up “intervention” involving Bree's mom, 17-year-old grooming victim Amanda (Iris Apatow), and the two professors (Oliver and Marianne) who seemingly can't help but manipulate their students into having sex. Bree posts the video without knowing that Lucy is covering for Pippa—she thinks Lucy is just an awful liar, which, valid. It doesn't excuse her actions, but the twist does add dimension to Bree (up to this point the moral center of the show), and allows for maximum chaos at her wedding in the 2015 timeline.
The last 10 or so minutes of the episode bring us back to the wedding, where Stephen puts the pieces together that Bree is the one who “ruined Lucy's life” by sharing the video, and that she's known about the cheating for years. Stephen also knows that Wrigley and Bree have been having an affair. Learning all this tips him into a hyper-villain mode, and he gleefully takes the mic before the last dance to share all he knows and feels about his “friends.” He tells an oblivious Evan he legitimately hates him, and then he's off to the races. Britney Spears' “Toxic” plays. Everyone is collateral damage. A cake fight ensues. Bree and Wrigley share a telling stare that indicates they'll maybe finally actually be together.
And when Stephen tells Lucy that they've both ruined everything, that there's no coming back from this and that he should just drive off into the sunset with him, we watch painfully as Lucy says yes. But they have to pit stop at the gas station first, and when Lucy runs in for coffees, she returns to find Stephen has left her in the dust.
Her reaction is glorious—a whole conclusion in one series of facial expressions. Confusion turns to realization, and just when we think she might cry yet again, her lips sputter into laughter. As a cover of The Postal Service classic “Such Great Heights” plays over the scene, she throws her head back and looks into the sun. Of course, Lucy did what she always did; of course, Stephen repaid her in kind.
Is the Tell Me Lies finale a good ending to the show?
In the comments sections of Reddit and TikTok, a common refrain from fans was: Stephen DeMarco deserves to be punished. Some fans called for jail. Some fans called for death. (It was giving the You dilemma.) But Tell Me Lies was never going to be a show about punishing Stephen.
Instead, it's a sort of twisted coming of age story about realizing the amount of control you can exert on other people's lives, and on your own. Stephen (and later, Evan to some extent) uses manipulation as a tool to control emotional attachment, to hurt and abuse others so they can't do the same to you. Pippa and Diana realize they actually can just remove themselves from some of these situations; they escape the friend group together, fully secure in the fact that they're free. Wrigley and Bree can choose to go after what they actually want, instead of seeking security or stability in other people.
We are repeatedly reminded in the final episode that some men never face the consequences they deserve. There might never be true justice for the people who deliberately seek to harm or manipulate you. But sometimes, you can snag a little bit of revenge. And when you can't, when manipulative people do what they have always done, and when you find yourself returning to your old toxic patterns, you kind of just have to laugh.
