‘Tell Me Lies’ Season 3, Episode 5 Recap – The Dysfunction Is At An All Time High

Well, yikes. Just in case you thought Tell Me Lies wasn’t uncomfortable enough to watch already, Episode 5 of Season 3, rather fetchingly titled “I’d Like to Hold Her Head Underwater”, takes things up a notch. There’s a suggestion that Pippa may have been lying about Chris assaulting her, Stephen’s on a revenge mission, everyone’s cheating on everyone else — or at the very least thinking about it — and Lucy’s bedroom proclivities are even more worrying than we imagined. Seriously, we’re rapidly running out of people to root for. Only Wrigley is really holding on, and even he’s on the cusp of crossing a major line.

There’s nothing from the 2015 timeline this week, which is perhaps just as well, since all the implications about Wrigley and Bree are enough to sustain us for now, especially since a good chunk of this episode is about properly contextualising that new development. But this is also one of those hours that thrives more on implication, suggesting a few things that are even worse than what we thought we knew, without really committing to much in the way of overt drama. That’s coming later, though, I feel sure.

Diana Is Stephen’s Kryptonite

Let’s start with Stephen, who doesn’t get a great deal of overt villainy this week, but several things happen to him that are pretty humiliating, and his being embarrassed is rather enjoyable to me.

Firstly, he gets into Yale, which is good news, but nobody’s interested in celebrating with him. He tells Wrigley about it and tries to strongarm him into a night out, but when he later recruits Evan for the same, he claims that Wrigley practically begged him to celebrate. He’s such a loser. The celebratory drinks go off the rails pretty quickly since Stephen tries to force everyone back to his dorm, where Drew died. Wrigley calling Stephen’s living situation out for being deeply weird is legitimately the first time the thought has ever occurred to him. You’re supposed to hate Stephen, obviously, but don’t let that distract you from how brilliant Jackson White is in this role.

But Stephen is no match for Diana. She also got accepted to Yale Law, so when he later, smugly tries to gloat about his own acceptance to her, she happily drops the bombshell that she lied about failing the LSAT just to get rid of him. She isn’t even going to bother going to Yale, since she can get into any Ivy League school in the country. Stephen, aghast, asks if she’d really be willing to change the trajectory of her entire life just to avoid him, and she happily admits that she would. Just like she happily aborted his baby, as promised.

Stephen’s only recourse is going below the belt. Towards the end of the episode, we see him attach a bunch of nudes to an email. Now, you’ll have to forgive me here, since Disney screeners are annoyingly low-quality and heavily watermarked, so I genuinely couldn’t tell if these were the nudes that Molly mentioned having sent to Evan earlier — that he claimed to have deleted — or whether they’re nudes of Diana. They certainly look like Diana, but I can’t be sure. Let me know in the comments.

Chris Might Be Innocent?

For a long time, we’ve been operating on the assumption — understandably, since it was heavily implied — that Chris sexually assaulted Pippa and Katie. We know that Lucy has been lying about being one of his victims, and that Stephen has proof of this deception, but we also know that Lucy only made that claim to protect Pippa, which means that on the list of dodgy things Lucy has done, it’s basically right at the bottom. We also know that Pippa has been consistently reluctant to address the issue at all and has repeatedly talked people out of talking to Lucy about it; we assumed to avoid having to dredge up any trauma.

However, at a pool party in the middle of Tell Me Lies Season 3, Episode 5, Chris swims up to Lucy to ask her why she’s lying about him. He also claims to have “hooked up with” Pippa, so she’ll be able to vouch for him. I know abusers tend to be delusional, but would anyone be this stupid if he were guilty? We’re clearly supposed to be entertaining the idea that he’s not.

This is implied more strongly later, when Pippa is hanging out with Diana and gets a call — from Chris. She rejects it and blocks his number, making up some excuse to Diana. Again, why would Chris be calling Pippa if he was guilty? Why wasn’t his number blocked in the first place? Something isn’t adding up. It’s almost as if Lucy’s implication that he assaulted Pippa was the first he was hearing of it…

Lucy Has Issues

Lucy’s general underlying sense of psychopathy has never really been a secret, but it’s increasingly coming to the fore in the absence of Stephen. Now, you could make the case that any deeply weird behaviours she exhibits are nonetheless a consequence of Stephen’s abuse, but she wasn’t exactly even keel to begin with, and the show has pretty consistently implied that they’re basically as bad as each other.

Unfortunately for Lucy, her allegations against Chris are getting around. When Alex hears about them, it upsets their entire dynamic, since Lucy was just using him for rough, demeaning sex, and now he doesn’t feel comfortable doing that because he thinks it’s an outgrowth of some deeply held trauma over an assault that never even happened.

Lucy visits Alex later and tries to reassure him that she’s into the rough stuff in a totally healthy and non-creepy way, but he’s still awkward about it, so he tries to show her the value of genuine, garden-variety intimacy, which she finds visibly boring. After, she returns to her dorm and masturbates to the voicemail of Stephen verbally abusing her, the one she forwarded to Sadie. Like I said at the top — Yikes!

Swimming Lessons

Purely by coincidence — neither of them is going to the pool party — Wrigley and Bree end up on a road trip. He initially thinks he’s dropping her off at the station, but she’s really travelling to New Jersey for a rendezvous with her mother. Wrigley, being a nice guy, agrees to take her, even though it’s a three-hour trip, and he offers her support throughout the entire experience.

Bree’s interactions with her mother — who was in custody of her for much less than the scant year Bree thought she was — seem to go quite well, but I’m not so sure. Bree seems to want the connection much more than her mom does, and any future promises of reunions and overnight stays are almost certain to blow up in her face. But we’ll cross that bridge when we come to it, I guess.

Nevertheless, Bree’s pretty satisfied. When she and Wrigley return to campus, he decides to teach her how to swim, since it’s one of the things her troubled childhood meant she never learned how to do, and naturally, this experience involves some intimacy and, inevitably, a very awkward almost-kiss before the two of them scurry back to their respective dorms in shame. Later, when Wrigley arrives to pick Pippa up, Bree wildly overcompensates by announcing that she and Evan are back together, which they had earlier decided to keep a secret. Sure, that would have been impossible anyway, since Stephen found out, but either way, it’s clearly an overreaction. Based on what we’ve seen in the 2015 timeline, though, Wrigley being with Pippa and Bree being with Evan doesn’t put either of them off each other.

And we’re barely halfway through!