Tell Me Lies Season 3 Ending Explained: What Happens To Lucy And Stephen?

The wedding isn't exactly going as planned, so stop reading right now if you haven't watched the season 3 finale of "Tell Me Lies," which is titled "Are You Happy Now, That I'm on My Knees?" Spoilers ahead!

Was there any other way for the third season of "Tell Me Lies" to end, really? As the wedding between Bree (Cat Missal) and Evan (Branden Cook) concludes in utter disaster, we end up back with our main toxic couple in the show's 2015 timeline: the unbelievably misguided Lucy Albright, played by Grace van Patten, and her on-again, off-again paramour Stephen DeMarco, a sociopath played winningly by Jackson White. Lucy and Stephen leave the wedding together after a huge reveal leaves the show's central friend group in tatters ... but where do they go from there?

Well, that's certainly an interesting question — and if you're a longtime fan of the series, adapted by showrunner Meaghan Oppenheimer and based on the novel of the same name by Carola Lovering, you probably could've guessed how Stephen handles this new development. ("Tell Me Lies" largely diverges from its source material after season 1, it should be said, expanding the universe.) As the doomed couple drives away from the wedding — only because Stephen urges Lucy to go with him, assuring her that she has nobody else left in her life — they stop for gas. When Lucy goes into the station to get them some coffees, she finds herself stranded and Stephen gone ... with just her purse left on the ground. 

So, what does Lucy do? She laughs, and the season ends (and, as Oppenheimer has now confirmed, the rest of the show along with it). But how does Lucy end her story in the 2009 timeline covering her experiences at Baird College?

Content Warning: This slide mentions sexual assault.

As you know if you're familiar with "Tell Me Lies," half the action takes place around that 2015 wedding, and the other timeline shows us Lucy, Bree, Stephen, Evan, and their friends — including Pippa (Sonia Mena), Diana (Alicia Crowder), and Wrigley (Spencer House), just to identify some of the other major players — while they're at the fictional Baird College in upstate New York. I wouldn't say things are going great for Lucy in 2015. In the lead-up to the explosive finale in that timeline, she secretly hooks up with Stephen — even though he's engaged to her former best friend Lydia (Natalee Linez) — and is just as shocked as anybody else when, at the wedding, Stephen reveals that Bree is the one who released Lucy's tape at Baird in 2009.

Wait, what tape? Well, earlier in season 3, Stephen — who knew a different secret about Lucy, specifically that Evan cheated on Bree with her — convinced Lucy to film a tape revealing that she lied about being sexually assaulted. The young man Lucy accused — Chris, Lydia's younger brother played by Jacob Rodriguez — did sexually assault Pippa, but she doesn't want to come forward, so Lucy lied and said she was the victim. This damaging tape was released to all of Baird, ultimately getting Lucy expelled ... and even though everyone always believed Stephen was behind its release, Bree was actually the mastermind, since she was looking for revenge after finding out about Lucy and Evan's illicit night together.

To call Lucy "down on her luck" in both timelines is an understatement ... and par for the course for this messy character as "Tell Me Lies" wraps up.

Stephen blowing up their shared friend group and begging Lucy to leave with him — only for him to cruelly ditch her in the middle of nowhere — is kind of a perfect ending for "Tell Me Lies." As it turns out, Meaghan Oppenheimer agrees.

"After three amazing seasons of 'Tell Me Lies,' [the season 3 finale] will be the series finale," Oppenheimer wrote on Instagram. "This was always the ending my writing team and I had in mind, and we are insanely proud of it." She added that while the "incredible response" to season 3 led to her and her fellow creatives exploring the possibility of more seasons, they ultimately "felt [the show] had reached its natural conclusion." 

"My main goal has always been to protect the quality of the show and give you the best experience I can give you," she continued. "And so, while it is bittersweet to leave something that has been such a happy experience, I am very grateful that we are able to tell a complete story with an intentional ending — a privilege very few shows get. Thank you for loving our show. We are excited to bring you more stories in the near future."

As for what happens next in-universe? Well, in the 2015 timeline, Evan is now aware that Bree and Wrigley have been having an affair for months. I can only assume that means the marriage will be annulled, and those two wild kids can finally ride off into the sunset together and join the show's only other happy and functional couple, Pippa and Diana. Lucy, meanwhile, is seemingly always ready to be drawn back into Stephen's web, so who knows if this latest lesson will stick?

"Tell Me Lies" is streaming on Hulu.