Tell Me Lies Showrunner Meaghan Oppenheimer Breaks Down Season 3 Ending [Exclusive] – SlashFilm

Don’t get in that car if you haven’t watched “Are You Happy Now, That I’m on My Knees?” — the season 3 finale of “Tell Me Lies.” Spoilers ahead!

When I first watched “Are You Happy Now, That I’m on My Knees?” (the final chapter of the third season of Meaghan Oppenheimer’s steamy, drama-filled Hulu series “Tell Me Lies”), I found myself talking to the television in the episode’s closing moments. As the show’s central toxic couple, Lucy Albright (Grace van Patten) and Stephen DeMarco (Jackson White), drive away from the doomed wedding ceremony of their friends Bree and Evan, played by Cat Missal and Branden Cook, the two stop to get gas. Lucy, elated despite Stephen only getting her into the car in the first place by telling her that all of her friends hate her and he’s all she has left, goes inside to get coffees. That’s when I started muttering, “He’s going to leave her there.”

I was right. He does leave her there, punctuated with a perfect needle drop (a female-fronted cover of “Such Great Heights” by The Postal Service). I spoke to Oppenheimer about this, and she said she’d always envisioned this bitter ending:

“I mean, that was the ending I’d always imagined in terms of these two timelines culminating together. And that ending at the gas station, it was funny because I had the idea of something … Sometimes I’ll get an image for something, but I won’t know what the exact story is. And so I was explaining to the writers, I was like, ‘I just want something where he just abandons her in the middle of nowhere, not this, but as if he literally leaves her by the side of the road.'”

Something particularly “funny” about this bleak ending — which is, frankly, made funny in the moment when an exhausted and presumably exasperated Lucy bursts out laughing as she realizes that Stephen abandoned her in the middle of nowhere — is that Meaghan Oppenheimer envisioned it, only for her writers to say, “Yeah, just do that.”

As Oppenheimer told me of her writers, “And they were like, ‘He could just literally leave her by the side of the road.’ And so it was funny, but I wanted the, for me, I talked a lot about the story of the scorpion and the frog.” 

For the uninitiated, the scorpion and the frog refers to a folktale where a scorpion asks for a frog’s help in crossing a river, promising the amphibian that he won’t sting or hurt the frog in any way. Of course, though, the scorpion stings the frog. That’s his nature; it’s what scorpions do. In that same way, Stephen will quite literally never change.

Even as Jackson White’s performance as Stephen gets deeper and more nuanced in season 3 (and if there was any justice in the world, the guy would surely secure an Emmy nomination for his turn this season), Stephen himself remains completely irredeemable. It’s entirely possible that he’s soulless, and Lucy? She knows that. Still, she keeps sticking her hand on the stove burners when it comes to Stephen, and as usual, she pays the price. As far as Oppenheimer is concerned, Stephen’s never going to change, but that doesn’t make the story stagnant — far from it, in fact.

As Meaghan Oppenheimer told me, this moment between Stephen and Lucy — which, again, involves him stranding her at a remote gas station — is vital, because it might actually help Lucy understand that Stephen will always behave this way. To quote her directly:

“Yeah, so that’s it for me. It’s the question of, is he going to change? Is he going to be better? Is he going to not hurt her this time? And the question is, of course he’s going to because he can’t help himself because this is who he is, and I think Lucy needed to learn that finally. But yeah, it was really fun. Coming up with that last scene was really, really fun.”

Speaking as a fan of the show, this scene was almost as fun to watch as it apparently was for Oppenheimer to write. Not only is Grace van Patten incredibly good without any lines (the way she bursts into laughter is absolutely perfect), but the moment feels earned, strange as that sounds. If Oppenheimer keeps expanding the world created by Carola Lovering in her original “Tell Me Lies” novel (perhaps in a spin-off, now that it’s confirmed that the main show is ending with season 3), we might get to see if Lucy and Stephen’s dark, twisted story continues any further. In the meantime, you can stream all of “Tell Me Lies” on Hulu and follow along with Lucy and Stephen’s toxic bond from the very beginning.