Tell Me Lies
As I Climb Onto Your Back, I Will Promise Not to Sting
Season 3
Episode 7
Editor’s Rating
It brings me no pleasure to report that Pippa has turned to the dark side.
Photo: Ian Watson/Disney
The Overton window for evil on Tell Me Lies has shifted to such a degree that one leaves “I Will Promise Not to Sting” feeling almost positively about Stephen. One has simply grown so accustomed to his cruelty that, in an episode with so many other people acting on their worst impulses, Stephen stands out for momentarily acting on a good one. And then one shakes one’s head and snaps out of it and remembers that Stephen is still the source of all evil.
Wrigley and Bree start strong. The episode opens immediately post-kiss, where they are already deciding to break up with their respective partners, wait a respectful length of time, then start living the rest of their lives as two people in love. This would have gone great if it weren’t for their own personalities, which Pippa and Evan are all too willing to take advantage of.
Lucy’s real flaw is and always has been a lack of capacity for forethought. I do not usually support Lucy making decisions or taking action of any sort, because it only results in harm to herself and others. But there is only so long a person can be expected to live like this. Lucy needs to get that tape back. Diana isn’t wrong telling Lucy to wait it out, but let’s remember that when Diana needed to get out from under Stephen’s thumb, she orchestrated their breakup by preying on his own narcissism in an elaborate ruse. Lucy is far less skilled at mind games than Diana because Diana is smarter than her, but that’s not Lucy’s fault. Lucy’s plan is a little crude and does not account for enough contingencies, but I respect her need to make it.
Roughly, here is what Lucy has laid out.
- Get Evan on board. There’s no way out of this without Stephen telling Bree the truth: that Lucy is the “random” girl Evan cheated on her with. But Lucy and Evan might still get away with it if they just commit to straight denials. It’s a strategy that has been used to bury sex scandals since at least Henry VIII. Why shouldn’t it work for them?
- Get back together with Stephen. If Lucy tells Stephen all the things he wants to hear — Stephen is her only genuine relationship, she chooses him over Bree, she was equally at fault for their breakup, etc. — he will take her back. Hopefully, this will give her enough leverage to get her incriminating tape back.
- ???
- Profit.
Steps 1 and 2 go well enough. Stephen agrees that if they are back together and Bree is told the truth, he would be okay giving Lucy the video. This is when they reach an impasse. Lucy’s plan only works if Stephen is the one to tell Bree, but Stephen will only agree to the deal if Lucy is the one to tell her. Like everything else in this episode, it all falls apart at Bree’s photography exhibit. Stephen overhears Lucy telling Mary, “Bree is the best person I’ve ever met,” and becomes enraged and decides Lucy must tell Bree immediately. Lucy cracks and says, “Just give me the tape, and I’ll tell her,” thus giving away the whole game.
At least Lucy recognizes when she has no cards left to play. Eventually, she trudges back to Stephen’s and begs him to just release the video because that would be better than living under the sword of Damocles. For whatever reason, this works. Stephen gives her the thumb drive, promises he hasn’t made copies, and Lucy skips back to her dorm on cloud nine.
Meanwhile, Bree doesn’t even realize that Evan is already in the process of ruining everything. I hope that Bree runs away with Wrigley immediately after her wedding because I no longer believe that Evan deserves to be happy. Let’s run through Evan’s moves this episode, shall we?
First, he demands an audience with Professor Creep because he needs to stop Bree from leaving him, and Oliver has the cheat codes. This is so outrageous that even Creepy Professor Oliver McCreepenstein, a middle-aged married man currently seducing his 17-year-old student, is aghast. “You want to know how to fuck with her head?” Oliver asks incredulously. But he still gives him the cheat codes. Oliver counsels Evan that Bree is very frightened and craves stability. “If she feels like she needs you, she won’t push you away,” he says.
I need the men reading this recap to answer me honestly: Is this how men become like this? Some older creep takes you aside and teaches you how to manipulate your girlfriends like a narcissistic abuse apprenticeship program? If the Wrigley on Evan’s shoulder had won the day, Evan might have interpreted this advice differently. But Evan has long since shut that guy up and decides to do what Stephen would do instead. His next maneuver is to stave off Bree’s impending dumping with a shit-eating grin and insist on personally picking Mary up from the train station. Because if Mary comes to Bree’s photography exhibit and it goes well, the divide between mother and daughter might start to heal, in turn healing some of Bree’s trauma and abandonment issues. And Evan is smart enough to know that a healed Bree will have absolutely no need for his pathetic, sweaty ass. So he deliberately gets Mary drunk in order to sabotage her relationship with Bree.
I’m going to say that again. Evan takes Mary — who he knows has a drinking problem — to a bar, before the exhibit, in order to present his girlfriend with a sloshed, slurring mom because he knows what an enormous and triggering disappointment this will be for her. Then he lies and says Mary was like this when he picked her up. Ladies and gentlemen, we have a new Big Bad in the Tell Me Lies universe.
We also have a new little bad, and it brings me no pleasure to report to you that it is Pippa. It is time to accept the truth that has been staring us in the face for some time now. Pippa is selfish, and she’s a bit of a brat. The entire time that Pippa has been cheating on Wrigley with Diana, I have not discerned even a twinge of guilt in her face or in her manner. I invite you to contrast this with Wrigley, that absolute mensch, who feels so guilty about kissing Bree exactly once that he goes directly from Bree to Pippa’s dorm to tell her, as gently as he can, that they are just friends.
Much as it pains me to side with the guy in a breakup, here is where we are. Pippa doesn’t really want Wrigley. We know it. Wrigley knows it. Pippa knows it. And yet she is indignant to discover that Wrigley doesn’t want her either. This is where I begin rapidly losing sympathy for Pippa. She cannot get over her wounded ego for two seconds to recognize that she can now get everything she wants without hurting anybody’s feelings — the kind of miracle cheating girlfriends dream of. Unfortunately, I did not realize the extent to which Pippa doesn’t really care about other people’s feelings. Not even Diana’s, apparently, because she marches right over there and expects Diana to throw her a pity party. (Diana, who does care about other people’s feelings, tries her best.) We are at a point where Diana, the third party in the Great Coconut Bra Dumping of 2008, is a little shocked at Pippa’s indifference to Lucy’s suffering at the hands of Stephen.
Diana is excited to tell Pippa about getting into Stanford, and Pippa’s honest-to-goodness response is, “But what about me?” I mean! The gall! Diana is going to Stanford for several reasons, among them the several thousand miles it puts between herself and Stephen. To Pippa, this just means that Diana doesn’t love her. “Maybe you don’t care about me as much as you cared about him,” Pippa moans, leaving Diana with no choice but to break up with her on the spot. All of this self-indulgent whining, by the way, is going on while Pippa is supposed to be supporting Bree at her photography exhibit.
I’m sure it is rough to get dumped by two people in a single day, but that only happens when you date two people at once. It certainly does not give Pippa the right to summon her now ex-boyfriend with a tearful phone call that includes the line, “If you care about me at all,” to ease her own feelings of rejection. But this is what she does. Worse, she coerces Wrigley into sex he does not want to have. Wrigley is not entirely blameless. His white knight complex could use some reigning in, and he did not have to acquiesce, but there are ways people can make saying no more difficult than it should be, and Pippa knows that.
The next morning, all three of our girls had gathered to process their feelings. Lucy is euphoric about her new freedom and tells her friends for the very first time (not in detail, obviously) that Stephen had been holding something over her, but now it is gone. Bree is ready to go to war: “I actually want to harm him.” Pippa is more upset that nobody has gone after Stephen than she is by what Stephen did to Lucy because, as we’ve recently learned, Pippa is kind of an asshole. Pippa doesn’t know that Bree and Wrigley are a thing, but the way she starts bragging about her possible UTI, I almost believe she did know, and this was calculated to cause hurt.
The revelation that Pippa and Wrigley had sex last night sends Bree running to the bathroom to sob as quietly as she can. She gets one “I love you” text from Evan, and that clinches it. Marianne said it’s better to be with someone who loves you more than you love them. Oliver said Bree would choose Evan as long as he seemed like the safe choice. It is amazing how many times, and in how many creative ways, Oliver and Marianne have been able to ruin Bree’s life.
In the last moments of the episode, Bree, from Evan’s apartment, gets a Facebook notification. For whatever reason, it has taken someone almost a year to upload photos from the Hawaiian party, and in the background, barely clear enough to see, are Evan and Lucy moments away from that fateful hookup.
• I don’t know what’s causing Lucy’s ominous memory loss, but it’s probably something Stephen did, right?
• Lucy has just learned she got into a study abroad program. So, it’s all coming up Lucy, which means she is due for a traumatic letdown at any moment.
• I’ll only say this for Pippa. I think she’s capable of enough self-reflection to deserve Diana by 2015, even if not in 2009.
• Guys, I don’t think Bree is going to be spending her summer at the Shore with Mary.
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