Summary
Tell Me Lies is back for Season 3 and, at least in “You F*cked It, Friend”, is just as scream-inducingly infuriating as it was in Season 2.
I’m firmly of the belief that Tell Me Lies is the most infuriating show on television, a distinction which evidently still applies in Season 3, since ten minutes into the premiere, I was ready to punch my TV. Episode 1, “You F*cked It, Friend”, is just about everything you want from these demented, self-destructive characters, full of sex, drugs, lies, and a truly sinister undercurrent that you can’t ever quite escape. There have perhaps been more salacious episodes, but few that work as such a cogent mission statement. The gang is back at Baird, and it’s all going to go badly, badly wrong.
It’s also probably going to go wrong in the 2015 timeline, for what that’s worth. You’ll recall that in the Season 2 finale, Stephen, after presumably a whole seven years, dropped the bombshell to Bree that her fiancé, Evan, slept with Lucy back in college. He’s extremely confident that this is going to derail the nuptials, and the opening scene here suggests it might. Bree is visibly shaken up. When Lucy tries to talk to her, she says that she’s a terrible person, probably the worst she knows, but then we zip back to the college timeline — 2009, this time — and don’t return to the wedding until later. We’ll get to that.
Back on Campus
And we’re back. A good chunk of “You F*cked It, Friend” is about establishing what everyone has been up to over the summer break, since most of what they were doing is an outgrowth of how things ended back at school. In short: Nobody has gotten over any of that stuff, at all, but here are some specifics for good measure.
Bree and Lucy
Bree has spent the summer with Lucy, attempting to get over her relationship with Oliver, which turned out to be a crazy Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?-style open marriage palaver. Bree doesn’t have a great deal to do in this episode — she’ll come up again when we talk about Wrigley — but virtually all of it pertains to Oliver. She’s worried about seeing him in the corridors; she sees him flirting with another student and starts following the student, that sort of thing.
Lucy, meanwhile, is officially back with Stephen, though all of her friends are rightly sceptical of this. Lucy thinks that there’s nothing Stephen can do to surprise her at this point and is fairly certain things are going to be different this time, which she’s clearly dead wrong about.
Stephen and Evan
Stephen spent a chunk of the summer with his brother and finished the rest of it off in Evan’s empty dorm. Remember, last season, Evan confessed to Stephen that Lucy was the woman he cheated on Bree with, and Stephen is, needless to say, not over this at all. To Evan, he makes a super performative deal out of still working through it, and then offers to wash the “few dishes” he left in the sink before he leaves. Evan, out of politeness, tells him not to bother, then discovers his kitchen looks like a bomb has gone off in it.
I hate Stephen. So, so much.
Wrigley and Pippa
Wrigley is still reeling from Drew’s death and the guilt he feels about it, and Pippa has spent the summer with him and his family, helping them through it. Pippa and Wrigley are officially back together, even though Pippa is still primarily focused on Diana, and everyone is extremely awkward around Wrigley because they don’t know how to approach his grief.
It probably says a lot that despite these circumstances, Wrigley is still the only character who seems like a legitimately nice guy.
Stephen Makes My Skin Crawl
Of course, Tell Me Lies Season 3, Episode 1 contains a party scene — the first of the semester, no less — and to celebrate, everyone decides to take molly. Yes, this is a deeply terrible idea, especially for someone like Wrigley, which Diana doesn’t neglect to mention to Pippa. But she’s trying to be there for Wrigley by not babying him, so even though she advises him to stick to booze, she also decides to go home to bed so she’s not complicit. As it happens, Wrigley had already taken the tablet before she even spoke to him.
But it isn’t Wrigley anyone needed to worry about. It is, of course, Stephen who sees the whole thing as an opportunity, only pretending to take his tablet so he can remain even-keel enough to interrogate Lucy later that night. This backfires on Stephen quite considerably, since when he’s trying to trick her into confessing by pretending he doesn’t want any more secrets between them — I threw up in my mouth at around this point — Lucy reveals one of the things she has been keeping back. And it was that time she asked Leo to choke her, which made her wonder if she was fundamentally disgusting at her core. Not exactly what Stephen wanted to hear.
But consider this from Lucy’s point of view. This is someone absolutely out of her mind on ecstasy, and she still lies about Evan. That’s a manipulator on a grandmaster level. It’s instinctive.
As for Wrigley, he just walks Bree home and has a nice conversation with her in a bus stop about how he’s coping with Drew’s death, and how he can tell his whole family blames him, making him feel like he lost everyone, not just his brother. Bree reveals that she doesn’t have anything to do with her own parents, since her mother was only 14 when she had her, and her father was too old to be having a baby with a 14-year-old (this statement is a bit inscrutable, since any age is too old to be having a baby with a 14-year-old, but whatever.) It’s a nice, unusually open conversation, this, and both of them enjoy it enough to pass out in that bus stop. The next morning, they agree not to mention it to anyone for the sake of optics.
Loose Lips
During the bus stop conversation, Bree tells Wrigley about sleeping with an older married man — though she doesn’t identify him — and the next morning, Wrigley accidentally lets slip to Evan about the married bit, which he wasn’t aware of. Now, Evan is wondering about his future as a finance major, and he later goes to see Oliver for a brief conversation about his potential options. I genuinely can’t remember if Evan suspects Oliver and is trying to make a point here or if this is just a coincidence, but either way, Oliver rather smugly tells him to drink some electrolytes and have a think about his own life.
Pippa also goes to see Diana, ostensibly on the back of their discussion about Wrigley the night before, but she also inadvertently tells her that she can’t stop thinking about her and that probably shouldn’t be the case, considering she’s got a boyfriend. Diana understandably doesn’t know how to respond to this, but considering the 2015 timeline, she must come around to the idea.
Meanwhile, Stephen, with his molly plan having failed spectacularly, confronts Lucy outright about Evan. She begs for forgiveness, so of course, he theatrically holds it over her, even though he has known this since the previous semester. Oh, and on the subject of Lucy — and plot turns brought about by idle gossiping — she’s called into the dean’s office for a brief chat about the accusation she made about Chris. If you remember, this was to validate Pippa’s claims that he tried to assault her, which he did, but Lucy obviously doesn’t want to pursue the accusation officially at all.
‘Til Death Do Us Part
When we return to the 2015 timeline at the end of Tell Me Lies Season 3, Episode 1, the expectation is that the whole thing is going to blow up. Perhaps the biggest turnaround of this entire premiere is that it doesn’t, much to Stephen’s obvious disappointment.
But Bree and Evan exchanging vows doesn’t remove any of the lingering mystery. What was Bree’s statement to Lucy about? What’s going to happen with Lucy and Stephen in the present day? What will Stephen do next to get what he perceives to be his revenge against Evan?
I think the weird thing about the “present day” plot is the idea of a marriage hinging on a one-night stand from almost a decade prior. But that’s out of the way now, so we’re going to have to come up with another way to justify the inclusion of these segments. Let’s see what Tell Me Lies comes up with.
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