‘Tell Me Lies’ Season 2 Episode 5 Recap: Tricks and Treats

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On this week’s episode of Tell Me Lies , we start to see the beginnings of the rift between Lydia (Natalee Linez) and Lucy (Grace van Patten), and the development of Pippa (Sonia Mena) and Diana’s (Alicia Crowder) affection for one another. And then there’s Bree (Cat Missal), whose affair with Oliver (Tom Ellis) grows more unsettling by the second because, c’mon, there can be no happy ending here. But then again, this isn’t a show known for its happy endings.

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It’s Halloween weekend, and Lydia, who was once Lucy’s closest friend (since kindergarten!) comes for a visit to Baird, and it’s a complete disaster. Lydia has heard tell of Stephen’s (Jackson White) awful treatment of Lucy, but she’s never met him before.

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Fueled by the truth serum known as PBR, Lydia approaches Stephen at a Halloween party where he’s one of those boring people who wears a skeleton shirt and calls it a costume. Lydia tells him off for being a scumbag to Lucy in front of Diana and Stephen’s teenage sister Sadie, who is also in for the weekend, and gets in a solid dig when she tells him, “After everything Lucy said about you being a cheating sociopath who terrorizes girls, I’d have thought you might at least be better looking. But you look like a fucking thumb.”

This forces Stephen and Diana to explain to Sadie that Lucy’s “crazy,” which they re-confirm when Lucy – who really wants no part in any of this but finds herself getting sucked back into drama because she has to defend her reputation – tells Sadie that Stephen is a manipulative life-ruiner. Thumbs…down?

The one positive to come out of that is that it seems like Diana is starting to see this too. She’s not actively distancing herself from Stephen, but she’s getting good at giving him wary, suspicious looks. Also, the fact that she didn’t pass the LSAT and Stephen did messes with their plans to both go to Yale Law together, and honestly, it’s setting Diana up for success. By success, of course, I mean a life far from Stephen. Diana has several run-ins with Pippa throughout the episode, and it’s clear that they’re both starting to realize that their friend groups are not really doing anything for them. Pippa has started to realize that Diana’s maybe not so bad and actually does want whats best for her, whether it’s with Wrigley’s football team not harassing Pippa, or offering support after her assault.

After the Halloween party, Lydia learns that a girl named Caitie (the one who wrote the poem about the parakeet in Lucy and Bree’s writing class) is accusing her brother Chris of rape. Lucy, at first dismissive of Caitie, calls her crazy because she wrote a bad poem, but when she learns that Caitie is accusing Chris of the very thing he did to Pippa , she tells Lydia that she thinks they shouldn’t be so quick to brush off Caitie’s accusations. Lydia’s visit (and Sadie DeMarco’s for that matter) are forcing these sisters to hear terrible things about their brothers, and neither of them is capable of hearing it.

For once on this show, the truth is really out there, but literally no one wants to hear it, and everyone blames Lucy for all the bad things. I’ve said it before, but we might as well just rename this show Gaslighting Lucy . Lydia is obviously furious with Lucy for even suggesting Chris is capable of rape, and the situation is made worse when Lydia runs into her future fiance Stephen on campus and he unloads every bad thing Lucy ever said – in confidence – about Lydia to him. Now Lydia’s questioning whether Lucy is a friend at all – do we think this is what Lydia will “never forgive” Lucy for?

I’ve always thought Baird College campus was a bad-decision vortex and everyone who enters becomes incapable of honesty and good judgment, but it turns out that that behavior seeps off campus too. Oliver, a grown man risking his marriage and career to sleep with a 20-year-old, takes Bree away for a weekend in Rhinebeck to a hotel so they can finally spend a night together, and the whole thing is solidifying my feelings that this relationship is less, “Yassss, Bree!” and more “EW, Oliver!”

The illicit but happy couple head to a bar before a night together in their hotel room, and you’ve gotta love the bartender who scrutinizes Bree’s fake ID knowing exactly what is happening between professor and student.

There’s friction during their drinks though, when Bree lets it slip that Lucy (who Oliver also refers to as “not too solid” and by that he means “crazy,” the catch-all term here for anyone who’s going through some shit) knows about them. Oliver is rightfully upset because, blah blah blah, his whole life is in jeopardy because he wants to screw around with a student. I think we probably all thought Oliver was hot and dangerous at first, but now that Bree, who has spent most of her life powerless and vulnerable, is making herself even more powerless and vulnerable simply by being with him, it feels especially icky. They bicker about this and decide to head out.

Of all the truth bombs dropped during this episode, perhaps my most favorite of delivered by the bartender as they’re leaving, who tells Oliver, “Next time, take her somewhere that doesn’t card.” This prompts Oliver to go Alpha-creep and kiss Bree passionately while looking at the bartender to prove a point that, I dunno, he doesn’t give a f—?, but Bree realizes that it’s a power move, and maybe Oliver is really good at power moves. I hate that this show can’t let anyone have anything nice.

By the end of the episode, Lucy’s reputation appears to have been successfully smeared, with Stephen giving Lydia reasons to question her friendship with Lucy, and explaining to his sister Sadie all the reasons that Lucy is unstable. Stephen’s one weak spot in life is his sister, the only person who shared the same awful home life and is trying to overcome it, just like him. But when Lucy sends Sadie the voicemail Stephen left her that day, in which he calls her crazy, forgettable, and a c—t, Sadie is shook.

“You do not understand the full context!” Stephen tells his sister, who accuses him of acting just like their mother. That might be the harshest insult of all, but worse still is the fact that Sadie is disappointed and even scared of her brother, who might not be the saint she thought he was after all.

Liz Kocan is a pop culture writer living in Massachusetts. Her biggest claim to fame is the time she won on the game show Chain Reaction .

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