Warning: This post contains spoilers for the Tell Me Lies Season 3 finale.
Bree (Catherine Missal) stands by a window, smoking on the night of her engagement party when the love of her life walks into her room. It’s not her fiancé, Evan (Branden Cook), but Wrigley (Spencer House), the man she actually wants. The opening scene of the Tell Me Lies series finale is a slow fuse: two people who once said “pretty big things” to each other and then spent years pretending they hadn’t. When Wrigley jokes she could always ditch the engagement and date him instead, Bree’s face doesn’t register amusement; it registers recognition.
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Across three seasons, Meaghan Oppenheimer’s Hulu series has charted the particular wreckage that unfolds when young people lie to protect themselves, to win, and to avoid facing who they really are—and wind up destroying each other instead. At the center are Lucy (Grace Van Patten), a college student drawn into an on-again, off-again relationship with Stephen (Jackson White), a charismatic upperclassman still entangled with Diana (Alicia Crowder). What starts as an intense college romance quickly becomes more corrosive: a cycle of lies, secrets, manipulation, and overlapping betrayals that radiates outward through their entire friend group at the fictional Baird College.
The Season 3 finale, which also serves as the show’s final episode, moves between the final days of sophomore year at Baird in 2009 and Bree and Evan’s wedding in 2015. It is the series’ most ambitious hour, detonating nearly every secret the show has been carrying while asking an uncomfortable question: not whether the truth comes out, but who pays when it does.
Oppenheimer says she talked with the show’s writers extensively about inevitability and consequences as the season’s guiding themes. “I wanted the ending to be one that when you look back on it, you’re like, oh, of course, that’s what happened,” she says. But she also wanted the finale to be in on its own dark joke. The show’s tone, she explains, works best “as if there’s an evil god watching our characters and laughing at all of their decisions.”
When the walls close in
The 2009 timeline finds the friends scattered across separate crises. Lucy is feeling relieved after Stephen returned her confession tape in the previous episode. In the tape, which Stephen convinced her to record and then used against her as blackmail, Lucy admits that she falsely accused another student, Chris, of sexual assault. Chris assaulted her friend Pippa; by making up her own allegation, Lucy explains that she thought Chris could still be held accountable.
But Lucy’s reprieve is brief when she learns how much harm Stephen has continued to cause. In the finale, she learns from Diana that she won’t be attending Yale Law—not because she wasn’t accepted, but because Stephen also was.
“It’s just not worth it,” Diana says, choosing Stanford instead. Stephen doesn’t need to lift a finger to alter someone’s future. His presence alone does the work.
Oppenheimer sees Diana’s choice as a window into the lasting disruption narcissistic people leave behind. “Diana has really realized that in order to win, you have to stop playing the game,” she says. “That’s the only way to get away from someone like this.”
Lucy does the opposite. Finding a photo of Stephen at the Yale celebration on social media, she walks over and tries to warn a Yale representative that he’s dangerous—that he was present when Macy (Lily McInerny) died. Stephen crosses the room, intercepts, and smoothly dismisses her as having an “episode.” The rep excuses herself; in the hallway, Stephen congratulates Lucy. “That might have been the stupidest thing you’ve ever done,” he says.
The scene is excruciating because both things are true at once: Lucy is telling the truth about a dangerous person, and she is making it nearly impossible for anyone to believe her. But Oppenheimer sees the act as fundamentally selfless—Lucy has the tape back and could walk away, but seeing Diana cry makes that impossible. “She goes from a place of heart, even when it’s misguided,” she says. “I think that moment really shows that she has a really good heart.”
Van Patten sees the pattern more starkly. “Lucy’s fatal flaw is that she always thinks she’s winning until she’s really not,” she says. “You see her realize that in the last episode—and she still does not accept that.”
The cruelest room
Bree, meanwhile, walks into an ambush. Summoned to a campus building by her mother, she finds Oliver (Tom Ellis), the Baird professor with whom she had an affair, along with his wife Marianne (Gabriella Pession), and Amanda (Iris Apatow), another student. Instead of accountability, they offer revisionist history: Bree’s affair with Oliver never happened. She imagined it. Amanda, who also had an affair with Oliver, backs up the lie without flinching. “It never happened,” she says.
Oliver, who has never sent Bree anything incriminating. He was careful about that—and Marianne wields the threat of academic punishment like a scalpel. But the deeper wound comes after Bree storms out. When she asks her mother Mary (Emily Meade) why she didn’t defend her, Mary says she’s trying to stop Bree from making a mess of herself. “Sometimes we like to make up stories that sound nice,” Mary tells her daughter.
It’s devastating because the one person who should know Bree best—her own mother—chooses the comfortable narrative over the painful truth. Bree names it with startling precision: “They brought you here to make a point: that if I came forward and told the truth, no one would believe me—not even my own mother.”
For Oppenheimer, the sequence was about dramatizing how isolation reshapes what a person does next. “I needed her to have all of her other options for safety taken away from her,” she says.
Everyone’s secrets, no one’s safety
From there, the episode reveals a cascade of confessions: each one sincere, each one landing wrong. Lucy finds Pippa (Sonia Mena) and, seeking solidarity, confesses she slept with Evan after the Hawaiian party. Pippa’s response is cutting: “You’re pathetic and weak.” In a separate scene, Pippa comes out to Wrigley and tells him about Stephen sending Diana’s nude photos to her father. “I know you guys all make excuses for each other, and I really wish you wouldn’t,” she says. “You don’t do anything. No one does anything.”
Wrigley listens and, for perhaps the first time in the series, he does something: he reports Stephen to Yale.
Then, Lucy’s confession tape surfaces on campus without warning. She spots it playing on a classmate’s laptop, then on another student’s screen, and the panic is immediate. When she confronts Stephen, he turns the accusation back with chilling ease: “I guess you decided to release it yourself. Lucy, you’ve been losing your mind lately.” It’s the show’s sharpest portrait of how manipulation works: not through force, but through the steady erosion of someone’s ability to trust their own memory. Lucy’s options narrow to nothing after Alex (Costa D’Angelo), her one remaining refuge, turns her away. Bree, sitting on Alex’s sofa inside, stays hidden.
Lucy is expelled. When she mentions the study-abroad writing program she’d been planning on, the Dean corrects her: “That’s a Baird program, and you are no longer a student with Baird.” Lucy keeps talking about going home for “a little bit,” as if the future she planned is still available to her. Van Patten describes her as “kind of floating through the whole finale,” never quite grasping the scale of what’s closing in on her.
Later, in the hallway of Bree’s dorm room, Bree hugs Lucy and tells her she loves her. Then she closes the door, and confronts Evan about sleeping with Lucy. Instead of exposing the truth, she decides to bury it. “She’s been punished enough,” Bree says. “So you and I, we’re not telling anyone about this. No one. Not even Lucy.” It’s a decision that looks like mercy but functions as leverage: Bree now holds a secret over Evan that will shape their entire relationship all the way to the altar.
Meanwhile, Stephen’s Yale acceptance is rescinded after the school receives Wrigley’s report about his severe online harassment, including the distribution of pornographic material. In the next scene, Wrigley walks in looking like a man who has just done something difficult and necessary. “Today broke me,” he tells Evan. Behind her closed door, Bree takes out the data card with Lucy’s confession and crushes it with a stapler.
Oppenheimer says she deliberately wanted justice to feel “incomplete”—not always “perfect.” “I think that’s how it is in real life,” she adds. Rescinding Stephen’s admissions offer was less about punishment and more about honoring Diana: one of the show’s writers argued that it wasn’t fair for Diana not to get to attend Yale after everything she’d endured. Oppenheimer agreed.
The wedding goes nuclear
Six years later, the 2015 timeline catches fire. The reception is winding down when a newly single Stephen sidles up to Bree. He’s figured out she already knew about Lucy and Evan. Then he pieces together something bigger: Bree was the one who released Lucy’s confession tape—the one that got Lucy expelled, the one everyone blamed on Stephen for six years. When he brings it up, Bree pauses a beat too long. “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” she says.
White describes Stephen in that instant as almost electrified by the realization. “When he gets the final piece of the puzzle, he connects the dots all at once, and impulsively unloads it,” he says. Stephen takes the microphone and detonates nearly every secret in the room. As Britney Spears’ “Toxic” floods the speakers, the room erupts. “He can’t help the compulsion to burn it all down,” White adds. “This is a narcissistic character who almost doesn’t have a choice. It’s in him.”
Oppenheimer adds that Stephen is fueled by years of resentment. “He’s trying to say to them, you’re all just as bad as I am,” she says. It’s less a confession than a leveling device—an attempt to drag everyone down to his moral altitude. But it’s also personal: Stephen never forgave Lucy for choosing Bree over him, and the chance to destroy Bree was irresistible. He doesn’t step forward to unburden himself; he steps forward to make sure no one leaves the room cleaner than he is. If he can’t be innocent, no one gets to be.
Lucy confronts Bree about the tape. “It was impulsive, and insane, and I’ve regretted it for six years,” Bree says. Then Stephen reappears. He’s leaving. Will Lucy come with him? Bree pleads with her not to go. “If you can’t see that, then I can’t fucking help you,” Bree says. “But this is your last chance to make a decision that isn’t completely embarrassing.” Stephen counters: “None of these people are going to respect you after today, so I’m sort of all you’ve got left.”
A different kind of ending
Outside the venue, Lucy talks to Stephen through the car window. “You just want to win, though,” she says. “You just want me to choose you over everybody else. Then once you have me, you’re going to f-ck me over, because that’s who you are.”
She says she hates him. Then she gets in the car. They drive off as the early sun rises. The tragedy isn’t that she doesn’t see him clearly. It’s that she does—and goes anyway. Clarity doesn’t undo attachment; it only makes the choice conscious.
Van Patten sees the choice as Lucy seizing one last opening. “After Steven blows up a bunch of relationships, she’s very vulnerable in that moment, and that’s when she’s most susceptible to going back to him,” she says. “She’s giving it one last shot, one last chance.” But if Lucy’s friend group hadn’t just exploded, she wouldn’t have gotten in. “I don’t think that Lucy is a person who knows that she can just rely on herself,” Oppenheimer adds.
White, who believes Stephen acted on impulse, is unequivocal about how his character feels in that moment. “He definitely feels like he won,” he says.
They stop for gas. Lucy offers to grab coffee. When she walks out, Stephen and his car are gone—her purse dumped on the ground beside a gas pump. White says the abandonment was impulsive but also years in the making. “This group was nothing to him anymore, because he couldn’t get anything else out of them,” he adds.
Lucy sets down the coffee. She walks to the side of the road. An uptempo cover of “Such Great Heights” begins to build. Then she does something she has never done after Stephen has hurt her: she laughs. Not bitterly, not hysterically—openly, with the sound of someone arriving at a recognition both painful and clarifying. The camera holds on her face. She tilts her head toward the sky.
Lucy’s laughter in the moment is the only possible honest reaction. “She finally sees how absurd and ridiculous this situation is,” says Van Patten. It’s true clarity for the first time. “All the lies came out, all the secrets came out, and she’s still alive,” adds Oppenheimer. “She’s still ultimately going to be okay.”
Stephen has won again, in the way he always does: he got the girl to choose him, then proved she shouldn’t have. But the finale’s final image suggests his victory cost him the only leverage he ever had; his hold is broken. Power that relies on repetition collapses when the pattern is named.
“I’d like to think that was the final thing she needed to move on,” Van Patten says. “He just gave me the answer.” White agrees. “I think he’s relinquished his power,” he adds. “I think he’s decided to finally let go.”
A series in full
Ending Tell Me Lies here—at a gas station, Lucy by herself—is a fitting final note for a show that wore the clothes of a love story but was always about something harsher. “It’s really a story about emotional abuse,” Oppenheimer explains. She describes the central dynamic as a kind of chemical reaction: what happens when two people carry wounds that interlock in the worst possible way. “If we meet anyone at the wrong time when we have a certain wound that is not healed in us, we can fall victim to a terrible dynamic,” she adds.
The show never asked whether Lucy loved Stephen; it asked why that love felt indistinguishable from harm. Across three seasons, it tracked how charisma can masquerade as destiny, the way attachment can feel like fate when it is really repetition. At the core was a deceptively simple question: What happens to a group of friends when there is one poisonous dynamic at the center of it? The answer, the show suggests, is that everyone reorganizes themselves around it: protecting it, denying it, or being reshaped by it.
Stephen’s arc, seen whole, is different. He didn’t evolve; he sharpened into the coldest version of himself. From the night he left Macy in the car wreckage to the morning he left Lucy at the pump, his logic never changed: control the narrative, then exit. Intimacy was never about connection for him; it was leverage. He knows he causes harm, but he lacks the capacity to feel what that harm means—and in Season 3, he sensed the gap.
Reflecting on the show’s run, White says the writing let him find the human being inside the monster: someone who “really doesn’t know how to move through his life without hurting people,” even though he believes “he really wants to.” “I got to play a human being, which is all I ever want to do,” White continues. “He’s been funny, he’s been charming, and he’s been horrible.” That tension—between the person Stephen might have been and the person he couldn’t stop being—is what fueled the show.
Oppenheimer is proudest of the community the show created: viewers who recognized themselves in it. The biggest revelation for her over the course of the series was how some viewers responded to Lucy with judgment instead of empathy—a reaction that mirrored exactly how the characters treat her onscreen. And she’s proud of Wrigley’s small act of accountability in a story otherwise defined by evasion. “Whenever it cut to Wrigley, and we realized he’s the one who called Yale [to report Stephen], it made me cry,” she says.
Lucy’s laughter at the gas station in the finale is the sound of her cruel education reaching its end—not a triumphant ending, but a necessary one. She can see Stephen now; she can see Bree, too, and all the ways love and betrayal grew tangled inside the same friendships. White calls the show a “cautionary tale” whose message is simple. “The only way to break the cycle is to walk away,” he adds.
Filming the finale’s last scene on location in Toronto hit differently for Van Patten, who says she felt a mix of adrenaline and butterflies. “It felt like we were filming a movie or a different show,” she says. Looking back now, she hopes the series she anchored keeps doing what it’s already done. “Women have come up to us and said that the show has helped them get out of a toxic situation,” she continues. “I just hope it continues to do that, to inspire people to see it from a different perspective and know they don’t deserve that.”
For a series built on deception, Tell Me Lies ends with the rarest thing it ever offered: an honest image. Lucy alone at the side of a road, the sun still rising, no one telling her what to feel or even who to be. She spent three seasons learning, at terrible cost, that the people who know us best can also be the ones who harm us most. The hardest lesson wasn’t that Stephen was cruel; it was that cruelty once felt like home. With Lucy’s laughter carrying into the amber morning light, the road ahead feels, for the first time, less like abandonment than possibility.
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