Tell Me Lies Season 3 Finale: Who Leaked Lucy's Tape

Don't pick up that video camera and make any life-altering confessions if you haven't watched the season 3 finale of "Tell Me Lies," "Are You Happy Now, That I'm on My Knees?" Massive spoilers lie ahead!

Throughout season 3 of "Tell Me Lies," the adaptation of Carola Lovering's novel focusing on toxic relationships that was adapted for Hulu by showrunner Meaghan Oppenheimer, there's a dark storm cloud hanging over Lucy, the protagonist played by Grace van Patten. That storm, specifically, concerns a reputation-destroying tape she made confessing that she lied about being sexually assaulted, and she only records this admission at the behest of her ex-boyfriend, Stephen DeMarco (Jackson White), so that he doesn't reveal a different horrible thing she did. 

In the season 3 episode "Repent," Stephen threatens to tell Lucy's best friend Bree (Cat Missal) that Bree's boyfriend Evan (Branden Cook) cheated on Bree with Lucy. (Yes, the people on this show do weave quite a tangled web.) Desperate to protect Bree and keep this secret, Lucy starts bargaining with Stephen, offering him a different damaging secret. What she provides is this: When her and Bree's best friend Pippa (Sonia Mena) was sexually assaulted by their fellow student Chris (Jacob Rodriguez), Lucy, hoping to bring Chris to justice, "helped" Pippa by lying and saying Chris assaulted her instead.

Stephen gets Lucy to confess to this on camera as leverage, but when the tape goes viral at their fictional school Baird College, she assumes Stephen released it. Actually, he didn't; the culprit is Bree, who found the footage on an SD card in Lucy's belongings and made it public. So, why did Bree do this?

The fascinating thing about Bree on "Tell Me Lies" is that, by all appearances, she's the "innocent" of the group. By that, I mean that when she gets to college, she's less experienced with boys than her friends like Lucy and Pippa and is a bit reserved; plus, throughout the show, we learn that Bree lived in some extremely difficult foster homes as a child. (I won't get too much into this, but her wayward mother, played by Emily Meade, shows up in season 3, and it gives us further insight into Bree's determination to prove herself.) Still, Bree does questionable and even bad things just like her toxic buddies. Throughout season 2, she has an affair with married Baird professor Oliver (Tom Ellis) — though that's more his fault than hers, to be sure — and in season 3, she has an emotional affair with Evan's best friend Wrigley (Spencer House) that turns physical shortly before her wedding.

The point is, while Bree doesn't fully explain why she chose to release Lucy's video out into the world, we can figure it out for ourselves. Not only is Bree angry at Lucy for sleeping with her boyfriend, but there's also a distinct sense that, as someone who's had a rough-and-tumble life, she's simply sick of watching Lucy waltz away from behaving badly completely unscathed.

Obviously, the reveal that Bree is responsible for a video that got Lucy expelled from college is a huge reveal, and it's pretty bad timing, as far as Bree is concerned, that Stephen figures all of this out at her lavish wedding. So, how does the situation unfold from there?

"Tell Me Lies" is told across two timelines: one in 2009, while the gang is still at Baird, and one in 2015 as they attend Bree and Evan's doomed wedding. In both timelines, reveals related to this cursed video absolutely shatter Lucy's life as she knows it. Back in 2009, as the video goes viral on campus, Lucy is unceremoniously called into the office of the dean and told that she's being expelled, and when she tries to seek solace with her recent hookup (Bree's foster care buddy Alex, played by Costa D'Angelo), he brutally rebuffs her. As Lucy, in a state of shock, tearfully leaves Baird, the saddest person who watches her go is Bree, presumably regretting her rash decision to share the video at all.

In 2015, though, the bombshell is even bigger ... especially because Stephen, who never leaves any stone unturned, also tells the people remaining at the end of the ceremony that Bree and Wrigley have been having an affair. As Bree's shiny new marriage crumbles at her feet, she begs Lucy to understand, but Lucy, swayed once again by Stephen's manipulations, agrees to leave with her ex-boyfriend.

Clearly, the fallout from this video is enormous ... and if showrunner Meaghan Oppenheimer keeps expanding the world of "Tell Me Lies" with some kind of spin-off (now that she's confirmed the main show is ending with season 3), we'll hopefully get to see it continue to unfold.

All three seasons of "Tell Me Lies" are now streaming on Hulu.