Fix Me Up, Girl
Season 3
Episode 4
Editor’s Rating
3 stars
***
Between the Wrigley reveal and Pippa and Diana’s secret romance, I am officially shipping the cheaters.
Photo: Ian Watson/Disney
What’s really been getting me lately about Tell Me Lies is the way the show makes you root for the cheaters. You know who I’m shipping right now? Pippa and Diana. You know who I’m no longer shipping? Bree and Evan. Wrigley is the one man left in the Tell Me Lies universe who doesn’t deserve immediate jail, and the big reveal at the end of “Fix Me Up, Girl” is that he’s the one blowing up Bree’s phone on her wedding day because they’ve been having an affair. Whether this is just an emotional thing or a full-blown affair remains to be discovered.
Which brings me to a very important question: What kind of moron leaves their password-unprotected phone with an incriminating call log on it right next to the group’s pet psychopath, Stephen DeMarco? We still don’t know exactly why Stephen is trying to sabotage this wedding, only that Wrigley and his big, dumb, longing looks on the dance floor have just given him the tools to do it. The thing is, I don’t even know why I’m still so against Stephen’s sabotage because clearly Bree and Wrigley have some kind of star-crossed situation going on. All I know is that Stephen is a handmaid of Satan, so whatever he is up to, it must be bad.
Back in 2009, Professor Creep has just told Bree she is needy, insecure, and desperate for validation, probably because of all the neglect and abuse she suffered as a child. Now, back in her dorm room, Wrigley assures her that nobody thinks that, least of all Evan, who is still obsessed with her. His brother Drew also had a major thing for her, Wrigley adds, because all girls want when they’re feeling this way is a list of everyone who has had a crush on them. Wrigley does not add that he too is kind of obsessed with Bree, but we can all see it. Just look at how excited he is for her photography project. He wants her to take his picture and add it to her portfolio, which she solemnly does. When you’re 20 years old, is there any purer expression of love? You’ve seen Titanic, right?
But Bree doesn’t know this; she knows only that Wrigley is still her best friend’s boyfriend. Her takeaway is that Evan isn’t so bad compared with Oliver, so she takes Evan back — unknowingly setting them all up for heartbreak in 2015. Meanwhile, Pippa and Diana finally consummate their illicit romance in a tender, consent-conscious sex scene that leaves everyone satisfied and emotionally fulfilled. None of this is technically aboveboard, but these dirty little cheaters are the entire heart and soul of this show right now. Everything else is pretty much abject misery, which leaves me clinging to pure nostalgia for brief moments of joy.
For instance, the RA ushering Lucy to the dean’s office, for the first of what will surely be many agonizing meetings about campus sexual assault, wore her hair in an almost biblically accurate poof. Until now, not one piece of modern media set in this era has had the courage to Bumpit. Everyone knows lacy camis have always been cute and low-rise flares come and go with the tides; there is no bravery in sourcing these items for your millennial college show. But if costume designers really mean business about the year 2009, they should be twisting the top pieces of these people’s hair into little poofs and securing them with a minimum of 15 bobby pins. If I had my druthers, Lucy’s hair would be perpetually poofed, but I’m thrilled to see any poof at all.
Okay, yeah, I’m spending more time on ten seconds of background hairstyle than on the entire Alex subplot, but that’s only because the Alex subplot — Lucy has developed a humiliation kink and now she and Alex have depressing sex in parking lots — makes me sad. If we don’t seize these bright moments when we can, we’re left with nothing but a weekly seminar on coercive control. To wit, other than the Bree + Wrigley (Brigley) reveal, the major development this week is Stephen using an actual victim of rape as a torture device against Lucy because he “loves” her. Think of my poof fixation as a way to self-soothe.
Last semester, the administration dropped Caitie’s sexual-assault case against Chris because there was no evidence and no other victims had come forward. This semester, someone (Stephen, we assume) has told Caitie that Lucy is another victim. The administration’s response is to waylay Lucy in the hall and drag her unprepared into a surprise meeting with the dean, Caitie, and Baird’s second-creepiest professor, Marianne, to discuss coming forward with her (false) allegation of rape. At least Lucy gets to deliver a sick burn to Marianne: “You should be worried about all the girls on campus who have been traumatized by your husband because he’s a fucking creep.” Preach, Mama.
To follow it up, someone (again, almost certainly Stephen) has made a “Chris Is a Rapist” Facebook group naming both Caitie and Lucy as victims. Now, Bree and everyone else think Lucy was raped by Chris, which she wasn’t, and Stephen has his hostage video of Lucy saying she made it all up, which she did, but not for the reasons she has been coerced into stating in the video. With nowhere else to turn, Lucy makes the best decision she’s made in years and calls Diana.
Diana knows the basics — that Lucy lied about being raped because Pippa didn’t want to come forward and that Stephen is depraved — but this is the first time she’s hearing about the video. First of all, she wants to know why in the ever-living fuck Lucy would do something like that; Lucy explains that Stephen is holding something worse over her head. “Worse than lying about sexual assault?” It sounds so silly when you put it like that, doesn’t it? But Lucy says kinda, and Diana’s like, I’m not covering up any more murders. For a clusterfuck of this size, Diana’s advice to Lucy is pretty straightforward: “You should just stop making decisions.”
Diana is correct, but that doesn’t make Lucy entirely wrong when she says, “With Stephen, there are only bad choices.” I have watched a lot of shows about vampires, serial killers, and fascist regimes in my day, and none of them comes close to Stephen’s reign of terror. The mind control Stephen exerts over Lucy isn’t supernatural, but it is real. Diana knows this better than anyone because she also lives in fear of Stephen at this very moment.
We learned last week that Diana is pregnant and, as I’d hoped, she’s scheduling that abortion for as soon as humanly possible. Her one error is treating it like the undramatic inconvenience it is, out loud, to a girl with low self-esteem. “Being a woman is a prison,” says Diana, who has been reading some feminist blogs, I imagine. Molly, Evan’s consolation pus-wah, has no idea what Diana means by that, but she does know what the word abortion means. Molly takes this information directly to Evan, who immediately reports back to Stephen — so now we know Molly and Evan both suck. Telling Stephen is obviously never the right thing to do, but Evan wouldn’t know that because so far only Lucy and Diana have suffered the consequences of his big mouth.
Stephen gets all purple-faced and mad, growling that he should have been consulted! Wrigley, who has also been reading the feminist blogs, says, “What would she consult you about?” Stephen shouts something about “rights” and “my baby, too,” and Wrigley’s like, “Your what?” Evan is suddenly a men’s-rights activist and agrees with Stephen, but Wrigley thinks this whole conversation is bullshit. Stephen storms off to harass Diana, telling Pippa about the pregnancy as he leaves, just out of spite.
When Stephen does come huffing and puffing to Diana’s door, she doesn’t bother with a “My body, my choice” argument because Stephen doesn’t care about her bodily autonomy, or autonomy in general. Instead, she says, “I am so excited to abort your baby. It’s gonna be the highlight of my fucking year.” This leaves Stephen skulking away to plot his revenge some other way. I can only imagine the horrors he has in store.
• Sadie calls Stephen to let him know her tuition went through, and he responds like a divorced dad who just missed his past three weekends. She’s still having none of it, so good for her.
• I just know Bree chose “Fade Into You” for her first dance because she saw it on Gilmore Girls.
• Just like I know for a fact that Evan loves Joe Rogan in 2026.
• Stringing Max along was definitely not the most shameful thing Lucy did last year, but it is the thing she confesses to Alex as foreplay.
• Max appears unharmed, by the way.
• There has to be at least one additional victim of Chris’s on this campus. There must be.
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