After four years and three seasons, Hulu’s hit show Tell Me Lies came to a screeching halt on Feb. 17 with a finale that was nothing short of dramatic.
The enthralling college drama grabbed the eyes of five million viewers on its season three premiere at the beginning of January.
However, when the season began, most had no idea that it would be the last.
Communications senior Clara Bommelje didn’t get the memo until halfway through the season when her roommate discovered that showrunner and writer Megan Oppenheimer would be concluding the show.
“I feel like that wasn't really well communicated,” Bommelje said. “I was like, ‘How are we wrapping up, the teacher's story, Amanda, Stephen, the tape, like, what are we doing?’ So, it was interesting to figure out that we were just gonna be done.”
For a show with so many twists and turns, viewers worried how such a complex story could be wrapped up in so few episodes. Kinesiology sophomore Jordan Scharf expected another season.
“I was texting my friends, I was like, ‘This episode's gonna have to be like three hours long for them to be able to show us everything,’” Scharf said. “But they ended up tying it together pretty well at the end. Even though that episode was like only an hour, I like the ending.”
On theme for the complicated dynamics that comprised the main friend group, Britney Spears’ "Toxic" played just after character Stephen DeMarco, portrayed by Jackson White, had his tell all moment and revealed everyone’s lies over the show’s seven year time frame and each relationship unraveled in seconds.
The entire show takes place in dual timelines of the friend group's college days beginning in 2007 and ending at the 2015 wedding weekend between the characters Bree and Evan, played by Catherine Missal and Branden Cook, leaving viewers with many unanswered questions about how characters and dynamics went from point A to point B.
Even until the final ten minutes of the series, many loose ends still needed to be tied. At which point, Stephen grabbed the microphone.
“My roommate and I were watching [the finale], and we were like, ‘There's not much time left, how are we going to wrap everything up? Like, what are we doing?’” Bommelje said. “And then everything just blew up in like seven minutes and we were like, ‘Oh my god. This is it.’”
After his efforts to burn all of their other relationships to the ground, Stephen created the perfect opportunity to throw himself at his on-again off-again girlfriend Lucy, portrayed by Grace Van Patten, and take the viewers for one last ride in their perplexing relationship.
“I think when Lucy left with Stephen, I was like, ‘Okay, Bree is telling her, she's self-aware, she's not going to leave with him,’" Bommelje said. “And she gets in the car and you're like, ‘Oh my god, I thought we just went over this.’”
After watching their emotional and often toxic affair develop throughout the length of the show, fans were left feeling all kinds of ways about Lucy’s decision to leave the wedding with Stephen. Before fans had the time to make their minds, Stephen leaves Lucy stranded at a gas station to conclude the series and seemingly their relationship.
“I thought that it ended on a good note,” Scharf said. “But also, I feel like it ended with Stephen winning. I felt very manipulated at the end, I was feeling it through the TV. He just left her there, but also, she needs to be free. She needs to have her own life without all that because they're all so toxic and awful. She's not the best person either, but, she needed to be without them.”
The use of dual timelines showed drastic changes in characters that are slowly explained throughout the course of the series.
“Lucy, throughout season one, she was great, she was so happy,” Scharf said. “And then she went downhill, like, steep drop. She was just so sad. Then I think by the end, you could see how much she had changed, just like the light came back into her face once Stephen left.”
Final scenes displayed the development of the characters, or the lack thereof.
“The drama was never ending,” journalism freshman Clare McHalpine said. “None of the characters really developed through their never ending toxicity [with] each other, their relationships.”
Each character tells their fair share of lies but some liars cause more harm than others.
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“I [liked] the villain aspect between Stephen and Lucy,” McHalpine said. “Those two [it] just feels like you're never going to stop hating either one.”
The main relationship bearing the brunt of the hate from fans on the internet, made room for other couples to become crowd favorites in the third season.
“I want Bree and Wrigley to get married,” Scharf said. “My favorite part, though, was Diana and Pippa. I love them.”
Despite watching them spend the first two seasons paired off with other people, when fans sensed a spark between Bree and Wrigley in the season three premiere, most got right on board. So after their affair was revealed at Bree and Evan’s wedding, it was unclear if Bree and Wrigley ended up together, leaving many wanting more.
“When Evan was yelling at [Wrigley] and [Bree and Wrigley] were kind of like smiling at each other, it's kind of inferred that, there's still something there,” Bommelje said. “But I feel like it would have been nice to maybe have gotten a flash forward of, like: are Bree and Evan still together? Did she go off with Wrigley? Because we kind of just got stuck left at the wedding. It's inferred to the audience that the wedding's probably off and she's probably with Wrigley now ... as a Bree and Wrigley stan, I want to know.”
However, as the show delved deeper into dynamics of side characters, the main plot of the book it is based on got muddled. Carola Lovering’s 2018 novel Tell Me Lies centers more on Lucy and Steven's relationship and Lucy’s eating disorder which is not present in the show.
Bommelje began watching the show after recommending the book to her roommate who then told her about the series. After seeing both forms of the story, she decided she is still more of a book person.
“I think [the book] is a very clear plot line and it mostly follows Stephen and Lucy, whereas the series kind of follows a little bit of everybody,” Bommelje said. “A lot of the show is dramatized and some of the people that couple up doesn't happen in the book. But the book is a little more toxic, Stephen's pretty evil in the book. It goes into like their cycle a little bit more of screwing each other over, getting back together. Also, Lucy’s [eating disorder], that's like a huge part of her personality and why Stephen likes her because she's so small and perfect and young and pretty. And so that was like, wasn't referenced at all in the series, which was interesting to me because that was a huge thing in the book.”
