Imagine learning just hours before watching a season finale that it’s actually the series finale.
It’s a different gut punch than finding out about a show cancellation after you’ve already digested its end.
Suddenly, the finale has added expectations and pressure because you now know this is it. There’s nothing coming along in a few months or a few years to help fix anything that may be broken.
Tell Me Lies is now a series we have to talk about in the past tense, as the season three finale served as the last episode ever.
And what an episode it was.
The entirety of Tell Me Lies has revolved around secrets and reveals.
This past season was the most popular yet, with audiences more invested than ever in gathering all the various clues and tidbits over the years to piece together the tangled web of dysfunction that enveloped a bunch of college students.
This final season felt like they were building to some reveals, but that there were still some mysteries they’d leave dangling out there to explore in future seasons.
And the thing is, that did happen!
But we’ll never get the answers to those questions because the show is over.
The finale wasn’t a bad episode of television at all.
It did a decent job of hitting the major plot points that have been lingering since the very beginning, such as what happened to Lucy sophomore year and how the night of the wedding ended.
But for a series that dealt with some serious subject matters, like trauma, sexual assault, emotional abuse, and manipulation, just to name a few, the series finale didn’t truly punish anyone.
It also took a comedic way out at the end, which was entertaining but felt a bit out of place.
Stephen DeMarco may go down in television history as one of the worst characters ever, in sheer terms of his evilness.
And while it was probably wishful thinking to believe Stephen would face true consequences for his years of inflicting torture on people in the past and future, the end still left me unprepared.
You may be thinking, “But Whitney! Wrigley got him kicked out of Yale. Isn’t that a consequence?”
Sure, but the 2015 Stephen seems to have done okay for himself.
So while he didn’t get to live out his Yale dreams, he presumably still landed on his feet.
He was free to terrorize his “friends,” which he took great pleasure in doing during his mic drop moment that was just another manipulative tactic to hurt people and ruin lives for the sheer fun of it.
It wasn’t surprising that Stephen would callously dump Lydia, ruin Bree and Lucy’s relationship, and Evan and Wrigley’s, because Stephen’s in the business of making everyone around him as miserable as he is.
But it was surprising that the series played it for laughs, with “Toxic” as the soundtrack, while Bree threw cake at Stephen and told him to see a therapist.
Considering how heavy the episode and the entire series were, maybe the idea was to lessen some of that heaviness by ending on a lighter note.
However, instead of feeling cathartic, it felt like the series was just having a laugh.
Evan running headfirst into a multi-tiered cake may have been meme-worthy, but it didn’t feel like proper closure.
We never saw Bree and Evan have a genuine conversation after all those revelations.
And we also didn’t get anything between Bree and Wrigley — arguably the best thing to come out of the show — outside of some soft smiles that hint at a positive future but don’t outright confirm it.
Again, on paper, the finale answered a lot of the major questions.
And all the dominoes that Stephen set up years in advance fell right into his lap. It allowed him to have his big moment, setting up the ultimate knockout by once again manipulating Lucy into leaving Bree once and for all.
Was it realistic? I guess you could say that.
Real life means messy people continuing to be messy and making piss poor decisions even when they know better.
Lucy trusting Stephen one more time, only for him to leave her in the middle of nowhere, was about as true to realism as it gets.
Because in all these years, and even with the truth at her feet, she was unable to get Stephen out from under her skin.
So, Stephen was never dismantled in the end. Maybe he was embarrassed for a spell, but never truly stopped.
The people he hurt never got justice; instead, they just walked away exhausted.
And maybe that was the point all along.
Maybe Tell Me Lies was never about getting justice (I’m looking at you, Oliver), but instead a vehicle to show the vicious cycles of humanity.
How some people never change, some wounds are never to heal, and sometimes the villain doesn’t die at the end of the movie.
Instead, he convinces their ex-girlfriend to run away with him before leaving her and her purse in the dust.
Maybe that’s honest, but that doesn’t mean it’s satisfying.
Had this just been the season finale, I think my immediate reaction would have been one of reluctant acceptance, but also hope.
The series finale was discomforting for me because I knew there would be no payoff.
I still wanted to learn and see so much with these characters. Alas, it wasn’t meant to be.
And that’s why the gut punch will linger for a while.
If we can take anything away from Tell Me Lies, it may be that sometimes the worst people don’t get what they deserve; instead, they just keep going.
And now, so do we.
Onto the next sexy, filthy, dramatic, and messy group of characters that make us feel all the emotions like compelling television should do.
Can you believe it’s all over like that?
I’m sure you guys all have a lot of thoughts about the series finale and the series in general, so please let me know in the comments below how you felt about it!
You can watch all three seasons of Tell Me Lies on Hulu.
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