Tell Me Lies Season 1 finale's twist is still the best moment of the Hulu drama - thanks to Lydia's big reveal

Your favorite toxic couple is gearing up for another tumultuous chapter as Hulu’s drama series Tell Me Lies returns for its third season, premiering on January 13.

The series, based on Carola Lovering's eponymous 2018 novel, follows the complicated and decades-spanning relationship between Lucy Albright (Grace Van Patten) and Stephen DeMarco (Jackson White). The series cuts back and forth between two timelines, one set during the characters' college years (2008) and another in 2015, showing them as adults.

Over two seasons, Tell Me Lies follows the turbulent relationship between Lucy and Stephen, who first met as college students in the fictional Baird College. After a string of lies, betrayals and deceit, the couple reconnected at Bree and Evan's engagement party, seven years later, in the Season 1 finale. However, the big reveal that Stephen is engaged to Lucy's former best friend, Lydia Montgomery (Natalee Linez), changed the couple's dynamic forever.

Let's unpack this Tell Me Lies Season 1 finale twist.

Unpacking the big Lydia reveal in the Tell Me Lies Season 1 finale

While Tell Me Lies has never shied away from bold twists, which usually create havoc and chaos in its characters' lives, the Lydia reveal in the Season 1 finale was even shocking to Carola Lovering fans as they did not see it coming.

As the third chapter of Hulu's drama series is fast approaching, fans can't help but look back at this jaw-dropping twist that changed everything for Lucy and Stephen. Since the show has a way of keeping its fans guessing till the last minute, they are fishing for clues and decoding the truth about Stephen and Lydia's relationship, which was shockingly revealed in the Tell Me Lies Season 1 finale.

The final moments of Season 1 Episode 10 titled "The Bedrooms of Our Friends" took place in the present timeline, at Evan and Bree's engagement party, teased in the Pilot episode. While the lead toxic couple finds their way back to one another after spending years apart, Lucy learns that her ex-boyfriend is engaged to someone else, probably Diana.

This is where Tell Me Lies had Lucy and all of us, as Stephen's fiancée is slowly revealed to the world, who is not Diana but Lucy's former best friend, Lydia. While the truth about Stephen's engagement was harsh enough, Lydia's reveal is brutal and so Stephen-coded. Like the big manipulator he is, he barks back at his ex for sleeping with Evan behind his back by showing up with her former best friend, the best revenge sequence on the show to date.

Lydia's reveal changed the fate of Lucy and Stephen's relationship in Tell Me Lies

Fans were visibly shocked to discover Stephen's fiancée, as she was his ex-girlfriend's best friend. While "The Bedrooms of Our Friends" painfully left the reason behind Lucy and Lydia's falling out in suspense, Tell Me Lies Season 2 delivered some much-needed answers. A flashback sequence in the sophomore season revealed how Stephen met Lydia for the first time at a Halloween party in college, but the latter despised her best friend's current boyfriend.

However, things took a turn for the worse in Lydia and Lucy's relationship when the latter wrongfully accused Lydia's brother Chris of r*ping her. While Chris had s*xually assaulted many women, including Pippa, Lucy paints one of the incidents as hers and publicly blames Chris, driving a wedge between the besties.

While the details about Lydia and Lucy's fractured friendship and the former's relationship with Stephen were shocking, Tell Me Lies fans are convinced that the relationship is fake and likely a means to get back at Lucy.

Since Stephen is notorious for his manipulative streak and his inability to move past a grudge (something the Season 2 finale makes abundantly clear) his relationship with Lydia feels less like romance and more like a calculated move. He may be using her as a means to quietly settle an old score with his ex, who once slept with Evan back in college.

However, when asked in an interview with Decider, Jackson White gave a rather neutral answer and refused to spill the beans about his relationship with Lydia for the upcoming Tell Me Lies season:

''Gosh, it’s hard to say. I think he genuinely finds something he loves or admires in the people he’s dating, but there’s like this certain layer — maybe that’s even part of the manipulation, is he’s manipulating himself. He’s so deep, man. He’s so messed up. So I feel like, it’s probably both.”

Tune in to the Tell Me Lies Season 3 premiere on Hulu on January 13 to discover the aftermath of Stephen's wedding gift to Bree and the truth about his complicated relationships with both Lydia and Lucy.

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