‘Tell Me Lies’ Season 3, Episode 7 Recap – Everyone Is Deeply Awful

Yeah, yeah, I know. Tell Me Lies is about highly dysfunctional people doing deeply deplorable things. Always has been. But even by those standards, Season 3 has done its best to up the ante, and Episode 7 in particular plays out like some sort of challenge. It’s like every character — even the precious few we like a bit — is trying to make the worst decisions possible at any given opportunity. Everyone’s having a villain arc at the same time. There are simply no saving graces.

“I Will Promise Not to Sting” doesn’t provide any new information or illuminating turns. It just ties everything we already knew into even more worryingly intricate knots. There are a few lingering questions about the precise direction all this might take to get us to the 2015 timeline, which is once again absent entirely here, but for the most part, things are going precisely how we expected them to, which is very, very badly. Even revelatively unproblematic figures like Wrigley and, to some extent, Evan are showing very alarming signs. It’s all just a big mess.

Let’s unpack it.

Wrigley and Bree, Sitting in a Tree

Let me just be the first to say that whatever is going on between Wrigley and Bree, at its core, it feels like the most genuine relationship in the show’s history. That might be because it has been built not on physical intimacy but on mutual trust and openness. Either way, thanks to the 2015 timeline, we already know it ends relatively disastrously, and we begin to head in that direction here. After their unexpected smooch, both are trying to figure out how to proceed. Wrigley decides he’s going to break up with Pippa, and Bree thinks she’s going to break up with Evan, but for various circumstances, the latter doesn’t quite end up happening.

Wrigley does break up with Pippa, though. He’s right in his justifications that they seem more like best friends, and she hasn’t exactly shown much interest in him lately, but she doesn’t take it especially well, which is a bit hypocritical considering she’s actively cheating on him. Still, she does later confess this to Diana, but she also manages to mess that relationship up by getting a bit pushy about Diana’s future. In the span of one evening, Pippa is dumped twice.

She doesn’t take this well either and immediately turns to Wrigley for support. She basically begs him to sleep with her, and while he’s clearly not that into it, he nevertheless does the deed. Naturally, Pippa mentions this in front of Bree the next morning, which causes her to reconcile with Evan out of jealousy and hide out at his apartment, where she snoops through his laptop and phone while he’s in the shower and seems to put two and two together regarding him and Lucy. Now, that would explain why she wasn’t especially shocked by Stephen’s “bombshell” at the wedding, and it would also work as a roundabout justification for her continuing to cheat on Evan with Wrigley throughout their time together.

Evan Is Much More Sinister Than We Thought

Knowing he upset Bree in the previous episode, Evan decides to seek some advice on how best to win her back. And who does he go to for that advice? Oliver! Yes, in a remarkable turn, Evan asks Bree’s much older abuser how best to control her. And he thinks this is a nice gesture!

Anyway, Oliver advises him that Bree is very frightened and timid and needs to need him, so Evan should make himself indispensable to her. When Evan later offers to pick Bree’s mom up from the station, it seems like he’s just being helpful. But when he takes Bree’s alcoholic mother out for a drink first, and then lies to Bree when she turns up at the photography exhibit drunk, it becomes clear that Evan is just as batshit bonkers as everyone else in this show.

Lucy Has A Plan

Lucy finally starts getting proactive in Tell Me Lies Season 3, Episode 7. First, she approaches Teagan and tells her that Stephen’s a lunatic, then she goes to Evan and tells him that she’s relatively sure Stephen is going to tell Bree about their one-night stand. She swears him into agreement that both of them will completely deny it, and since Stephen has no proof and Bree already hates him, that should smother his efforts in the crib.

Lucy then goes to Stephen himself and gaslights him into believing that there’s a chance of them getting back together. She’s even willing to tell everyone about her and Evan, but only if he agrees to stop holding the confession tape over her head. She dresses it up a bit prettier than that, but that’s the gist. And Stephen, unable to resist being the only person in Lucy’s life who can tolerate her, and thus her becoming his full-time plaything, seems to be going along with the idea.

But, of course, Stephen wants Lucy to tell Bree at her photography exhibit, just to add insult to injury. This comes about because he hears Lucy riding for Bree to her drunk mom, which is contrary to what she said earlier to him about not really wanting to put Bree first anymore. Lucy overplays her hand about wanting the tape, and Stephen realises what she’s up to (if he didn’t already). He promises her she’ll never get the recording.

Lucy’s Last Resort (And Possible Breakdown)

At a loss, Lucy once again returns to Stephen in floods of tears and just straight-up begs him to see the recording. He plays it for her, with the same line about wanting attention being rewound again and again, and Lucy tells him to just release it and get it over with. Now, I can’t quite tell whether this is Lucy being very smart, taking some of Stephen’s power away by embracing what he perceives to be her worst-case scenario, or whether part of her bizarre self-loathing pathology means that on some level she’d kind of like being outed as a liar and hated by everyone anyway. Unexpectedly, though, Stephen is a bit thrown by this approach and simply hands Lucy the recording, with a reassurance — as difficult as it is to believe — that he never made a copy.

Again, I don’t know what to think. Is this a rare moment of empathy from Stephen? Or is he — much more likely — playing a more sinister long game to allow Lucy to believe she’s off the hook just to hurt her more cruelly in the future? It could be either, but is probably the latter. And what’s up with Lucy’s headspace? Towards the end of the episode, she runs into Teagan again, and gives her the same warning she gave her earlier, having forgotten about the prior exchange completely. Huh.

We’ve got one more episode to find out what’s going on here. But I think, realistically, we’ve probably got a whole other season after that.