Lucy Isn’t Perfect, But She Isn’t The Problem In Tell Me Lies Season 2

The tagline for Tell Me Lies, Hulu’s series about a toxic relationship, is "You never forget your worst." And, as Season 2 reveals, chances are that’s because they probably won’t let you. 

This is the situation that Lucy Albright (Grace Van Patten) finds herself in during the sophomore season of the hit series. Back for her junior year at Baird College, Lucy has one thing on her mind: avoid her ex Stephen DeMarco (Jackson White). ICYMI, Stephen is toxic AF, having manipulated Lucy throughout her freshman year, cheating on her repeatedly and pulling her into helping him cover up his role in a death, only to unceremoniously dump her at the end of the school year to get back with his ex (all while Lucy was donning a coconut bra and grass skirt, no less). In short: He’s a grade A jerk. 

Which is why it should be the easiest thing for her to completely ice him out, right? If your immediate answer is heck yes, then you’ve obviously never dealt with a toxic f*ckboy before. Try as she might, Lucy is not able to escape him — or the impact that his behavior and the dynamic of their relationship instilled in her. 

“I really believe that Lucy is trying as hard as she can, without being as honest as possible and apologizing to her friends and coming clean, to make up for [her behavior in Season 1],” Grace Van Patten tells Refinery29. “I just don’t think that she fully knows how to do it.” 

When we encounter Lucy this season, she’s on a mission to put her friendships first, an intentional decision by creator and showrunner Meaghan Oppenheimer, in response to the audience being understandably upset with Lucy’s actions last season. (For a refresher: She ditched her friends for him, straight up lied to them about their relationship, and slept with her friend’s boyfriend.) While Oppenheimer wanted to continue Lucy’s “flawed journey,” she tells Refinery29, “I did want her to try to redeem herself a little bit, and I wanted to see a little bit more of her heart and her love for her friends.”

Despite wanting a drama-free year, it’s not long before Lucy is sucked back into a familiar cycle — and Stephen’s orbit. “Even though they’re no longer together, they’re still engaging in a way that’s toxic,” Van Patten says. “It’s clear that [Lucy’s] not fully ready to let go after telling herself over and over again that she’s okay, she quickly realizes that she is still infatuated with him.” And in the way they operated as a couple.

Stephen’s insidious impact really comes to a head around Thanksgiving during a heated confrontation with Stephen’s former girlfriend Diana (Alicia Crowder). While we won’t spill the details (we’ll just say there’s a slap involved), Lucy is faced with the harsh reality that not only has she not fully moved on and healed from Stephen, she might be more like him than she wants to acknowledge. 

For Van Patten, this moment encapsulates the heartbreaking reality of Lucy’s situation. “Lucy wants to be over him so bad. She wants to move on but can’t; he’s so engraved in her at this point,” Van Patten says. There are a few reasons for this beyond just Stephen, including her complicated past traumas with her mother’s infidelity and the death of her dad, all of which left Lucy looking for something to fill the hole she was feeling. “[Stephen] came around at the perfect time when she was starting a new chapter of her life and trying to reinvent herself,” Van Patten says. “She had never met anybody like Stephen. She had never been attracted and sexually awakened by anybody like she had with Stephen, and she really mistook that for love and desire; it just sunk its teeth into her.” 

This ambiguity is what makes it difficult to classify Lucy as either a victim or a villain because that dichotomy is too black and white. “[Lucy] is a young girl who is very inexperienced, and I think she’s dealing with someone who is extremely skilled at deception and manipulation,” Oppenheimer says. “And I think that when you’re with someone that toxic, it is contagious. Part of the reason she’s unable to escape that toxicity is not because she’s not a good person, but because she hasn’t actually dealt with what is broken. She thinks she’s gotten better by avoiding him, but she hasn’t really dealt with the trauma that has happened.”

It can be hard to break a habit, which is what Stephen is. The only way out, Van Patten notes, and what will really be healing, is complete physical distance — something Lucy can’t seem to get because she’s still in the thick of it, not to mention still attending school with him.

And the scary part of this dynamic is that, try as they might, Lucy and her friends may never be able to escape Stephen’s impact and toxicity. In a flash forward to 2015, eight years after we see the friends in college, Stephen is still up to his old — and kind of scary — tricks. “He’s so the one-track mind,” Jackson White tells Refinery29. “He has a goal in mind. He wants to kind of bulldoze everything to get there.” And he’ll keep bulldozing, and knocking down anyone who gets in his way, as long as they stick around.