You F*cked It, Friend / We Can’t Help It If We Are a Problem / Repent
Season 3
Episodes 1 – 3
Editor’s Rating
4 stars
****
Stephen blackmails Lucy and remains the undisputed villain of the series — so why does he get to give the rehearsal-dinner toast?
Photo: Ian Watson/Disney
This recap covers episodes 1-3: “You F*cked It, Friend,” “We Can’t Help It If We Are a Problem,” and “Repent.”
Hello, all! Welcome to our new weekly recaps of Tell Me Lies, a show about horrible people doing horrible things to one another that somehow ends with everyone in the same bridal party in 2015. How this group of college friends developed their clearly off dynamic is Tell Me Lies’s central mystery, with Lucy and Stephen’s toxic relationship at the center. It begins when the two meet at Baird College in 2007, merge their friend groups, and have sex so good that it takes Lucy an entire year to realize that Stephen’s manipulations are destroying everyone’s lives.
Some find it hard to enjoy a show unless there is at least one likable character, but I disagree. I like a show where everyone behaves so badly all of the time that I can freely pick and choose who to root for without worrying so much about who cheated on who first or who did what to cover up for their boyfriend killing a girl during Welcome Week. But if we are keeping score, at the top of season three, Pippa has been the least despicable, while Stephen remains himself.
To recap: Wrigley has accidentally killed his brother with painkillers. Bree has just gotten out of her confusing affair with the unethically ethically nonmonogamous professor. Diana has evil-masterminded her breakup with Stephen. Lucy lied that Chris had sexually assaulted her to protect Pippa. And Evan made the catastrophically stupid decision to confess to sleeping with Lucy to Stephen. None of which has been resolved by the time of Evan and Bree’s wedding in 2015.
Stephen has yet to do anything even remotely redeemable, so I wonder how he managed to score an invite to this wedding. If even his bros are sick of his shenanigans in 2009, why is he being allowed to give a toast at the rehearsal dinner in 2015? They should have him arrested. We know that Stephen hasn’t actually changed a bit, because, moments before Bree is supposed to walk down the aisle, Stephen sends her his secret recording of Evan’s confession from seven years ago. But instead of calling the wedding off and telling Lucy she’s dead to her, Bree tells Lucy that she — as in Bree — is the horrible person. In this group, this could only mean one of two things: Either Bree has committed manslaughter or she’s been having an affair with one of their friends.
But that is a 2015 problem. In January 2009, Bree got both bangs and a bob post-breakup, a clear signal that she is not in a healthy place when it comes to her skeevy professor ex. It’s hard to claim you have a new lease on life when you’re abusing the sanctity of the women’s bathroom to befriend Professor Oliver’s latest conquest, which is what Bree does. The latest girl is a timid 18-year-old with an eating disorder, and Bree wonders if she was also this vulnerable when her affair with Oliver started. Maybe that’s why he chose her to begin with. Eventually, Bree blasts the girl with a hypocritical, if technically correct, speech that sleeping with a middle-aged married man is gross and embarrassing and shouldn’t be talked about.
That said, it is hard to stay mad at Bree. Bree is the kind of friend who saves Lucy at karaoke when Lucy’s toxic boyfriend leaves her to sing an embarrassing duet by herself. And she is the only person to ask Lucy, as she runs to her next emotional abuse session with Stephen, “Is it worth it?”
Only Bree knows intuitively how to give Wrigley the emotional support he needs without suffocating him. In the wake of his brother’s death, Wrigley has also gotten a haircut as well as a slight personality upgrade and profound depression. He now jokes darkly about his suicidal ideation, which Pippa is determined to keep him from acting upon. At the first party of the semester — for which there is a nonspecific “decade” theme — the gang buys MDMA from Bree’s former foster brother, Alex, in an attempt to lighten the mood. But Wrigley is so depressed that he is immune to its effects. It is only when he, dressed in fur-trimmed suede, and Bree, in rainbow sequins, are sitting at a bus stop on their way back to the dorms that he begins to open up. And Bree is so sweet and understanding that he begins to feel a little something, maybe. Then they fall asleep at the bus stop. It’s all very Skins coded.
Wrigley and Pippa are fully back together, by the way, which is only an issue because Pippa and Diana have finally acted on their attraction to each other. It begins, as all great romances do in Tell Me Lies, with Pippa crashing out at Diana because she can’t get her out of her head. Later, Diana suggests, “Maybe we should, like, kiss?” And they do! If this show were not a case study in moral relativism, I would be a little appalled at Pippa for cheating on her grieving boyfriend. But this romance is so incongruently wholesome that I can’t bring myself to blame her. Someone around here has to be a little bit happy.
Of all the bad times being had, Evan’s is relatively mild. He found out that his econ professor is the older married guy who’d been sleeping with Bree, his one true love, which was a bummer. He is also living under Stephen’s constant threat to tell Bree about Lucy, but that’s kinda just life with Stephen. At least he has rich parents who can pay Stephen off with boarding-school tuition for his sister. It’s only $28,000 a year, after all.
Like Evan, Lucy feels the need to protect Bree at all costs, but she doesn’t have boarding-school tuition. All she has to pay Stephen off with is her dignity.
Obviously, Stephen is not content to simply sulk about the fact that Evan and Lucy once had sex. First, he tries to use Lucy being high on molly to coerce a confession out of her. Do you find any of my friends attractive? Come on, tell the truth. She says “no,” she only loves Stephen, which is a failure of the test, so the psychological punishments continue. After her panic attack (“Does my tongue look weird!”), Lucy has to confront Stephen about why he keeps treating her like shit. God, it’s all so depressing, but here we go.
Stephen’s argument is that he gave Lucy every opportunity to tell him the truth about Evan, but she didn’t, and he simply can’t get over that betrayal. Lucy’s argument is that Stephen does not have normal reactions to confessions like that because he is a monster. He says he’d be willing to forgive her on one condition: that she tells Bree that she had sex with Evan. In a moment of lucidity, she refuses. “That’s not forgiveness, it’s punishment,” she says. Plus, it never would have happened if Stephen hadn’t left her at the Hawaiian party. She yells, “You left me in a fucking coconut bra! A fucking coconut bra!” This is an excellent point. Telling Bree at this point wouldn’t just hurt Lucy, it would hurt Bree, and Lucy can’t do that. Does that mean she’s choosing Bree over Stephen? Yes, in fact. If Stephen is going to make Lucy choose between them, she chooses Bree. They break up again. Let’s hear it for the power of female friendship! Temporarily, at least.
Everyone is relieved that Lucy and Stephen have broken up, and Lucy is naïve enough to think she can hook up with Bree’s hot, drug-dealing, grad-student foster brother at the Après-Ski party and everything will be fine. It’s not. For one thing, Lucy can’t even get off anymore without being actively demeaned. And have we forgotten that, unless it’s a girl he killed drunk driving, Stephen has never let anything lie. He successfully lures Lucy back to his dorm by making successive, ominous calls to Bree. Lucy demands to know what he’s doing. He says he’s going to tell Bree that she fucked Evan. Lucy insists that Bree would never survive that kind of devastation, so there must be something else Stephen can do that would hurt and humiliate her without making Bree the collateral damage.
Does Lucy honestly think that, after all that Bree has been through in her life, including whatever the horrific thing in foster care was, she wouldn’t be able to survive her ex-ex-boyfriend cheating with her best friend? Maybe it’s Lucy’s terrible judgment. Perhaps it’s genuine masochism. It’s almost certainly a trauma response, and probably all of the above. Whatever the reason, Lucy is suddenly eagerly brainstorming ways to help Stephen destroy her life. They decide Lucy should confess, on videotape, to lying about being raped by Lydia’s brother, Chris. Stephen scripts and directs the video, in which Lucy says she lied about the assault in order to get attention for herself. Then he tucks the disc away for future use. It’s only getting darker from here, folks.
• Diana is pregnant, which I desperately hope is taken care of posthaste.
• At one point, we left Stephen harassing Lucy’s ex-boyfriend Max at the bar, but no word yet on how the interaction ended. All we know for sure, thanks to a flash-forward, is that he isn’t dead.
• Wrigley and Bree are getting awfully close lately, and I don’t know how to feel about that.
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