‘Tell Me Lies’ Season 2 Episode 2 Recap: Doing The British Thing

The first time I heard the lyric “I’m so depressed, I act like it’s my birthday” from Taylor Swift’s “I Can Do It With A Broken Heart,” my interpretation of it was not about trying to make yourself less depressed by pretending its your birthday, but rather, the way that your birthday can actually be depressing and not live up to your expectations. I’m pretty certain that’s not how Taylor meant for it to be interpreted, but (my version) reminded me of Bree’s disappointing birthday party at the beginning of Tell Me Lies Episode 2. Everything’s going great and everyone is there to celebrate you until something goes wrong and your day completely sucks.

As Bree is trying to celebrate another trip around the sun, her girls Lucy and Pippa get her a great gift, a trio of sweatshirts emblazoned with the word “PUSWA” – a private joke they share about the French pronunciation of the word “pussy.”

It’s a good gift, personal and meaningful, one that totally gets who Bree is. On the other hand, her boyfriend Evan gets her the earrings Elizabeth Taylor wore in the White Diamonds commercial, so ornate and ostentatious and not who she is, that she has to fake her gratitude and it causes a fight.

As Bree leaves the bar, she runs into Oliver, the professor she met at Marianne’s poetry reading (who is married to Marianne, but that doesn’t stop him from flirting with Bree). Wearing both her PUSWA sweatshirt and her diamond earrings, Oliver is intrigued by *gestures* all of this, and Brie explains she was escaping her own birthday after fighting with Evan about the earrings. Oliver tenderly removes an earring from her ear in a move far more erotic and intimate than sex, and when Bree reveals this to Lucy and Pippa they joke, “Oh my God, you’re pregnant!” Bree resents the fact that she’s giving off “Don’t Stand So Close To Me” vibes without even trying, but you can tell she’s also very much into the effect she has on Oliver.

But Bree’s relationship with Evan is flailing even without Oliver’s interference. Evan received some unsolicited advice from Stephen who tells him to come clean about cheating on Bree, and Evan FOR SOME REASON does just that. He omits the part about how it was with Lucy, but he admits to Bree that his weird behavior, the diamond earrings, all of it has been to compensate for the fact that he had a drunken hookup with some “random” girl. Bree accurately accuses him of gaslighting her for the summer and convincing her that she was the one being weird and asks him for some time apart. I mean, maybe this was the right thing for Evan to do, but following Stephen’s advice is the wrong thing to do in general and obviously Evan’s partial honesty didn’t go as planned.

When Bree tells Pippa and Lucy that Evan cheated, hilariously Lucy’s very first question is “Did he say with who?” because the WHO is HER. Way to be inconspicuous, Lucy. While Pippa tells Bree that they should all stay in and have a supportive girls night, Bree insists that Lucy and Pippa go to a party while she stays in… only she doesn’t stay in, she goes to the bar where the professors hang out so she can look for Oliver. For better or worse, she finds him. “I think it’s very important that we both acknowledge that you came here looking for me,” he tells her, which is true, but she sarcastically shakes her head and says no, adding that she’s there because she’s had the worst day she’s had in a decade, referring to her difficult childhood, and he buys her a drink.

The chemistry between the two is wild, but their conversation stays relatively chaste… until it’s time to leave. Oliver knows that this is a dangerous situation to be in, right there on the edge of cheating, so he calls Bree a cab. As they wait outside for it, she delicately kisses both of his cheeks. He pulls back, telling her he will not kiss her, not on the lips anyway, and she tells him she’s just “doing the British thing… It doesn’t count.” You know, double cheek kisses, you’d give your grandma double cheek kisses, it’s no big thing.

From there, they do the British thing all over each others’ faces and, uh, is it getting hot in here? Bree thinks so. They say goodbye, but it leaves Bree wanting more, so she takes the cab straight to Evan’s and rips his clothes off before she even gets through the door. They spend the night together, but the next morning, Bree tells Evan that he’s not the only one who cheated, she tells him she slept with someone, too. He flips out, unsure if he can forgive her. And that’s when she tells him she’s lying, she never slept with anyone, and that was a test he failed. But now that she knows how he’d react, she dumps him.

At the party where Pippa and Lucy had been spending their night, Lucy flirts with Leo all while Pippa’s been sucking face with Chris, Lydia’s brother who’s a freshman. While she’s looking for a bathroom, Diana stumbles into a room where she finds Pippa half-dressed and seemingly drugged, and Chris shocked to see her. Diana gets Lucy and they carry Pippa home, where Diana tells Lucy what she saw. It’s the first time the two share a Bechdel Test-passing scene where they are not talking about Stephen, but rather, about another woman, one who they came together to help.

When Pippa comes to, Lucy tells her she thinks something bad might have happened in that room with Chris, and Pippa goes into a state of shock and denial. She refuses to acknowledge that she might have been raped by Chris, even saying that since she was making out with him that night, her body was essentially fair game. She forbids Lucy to tell anyone what happened, including Bree.

Unfortunately for Lucy, her day gets worse when she realizes literally every man is terrible. While she and Leo are grabbing coffee in the morning, she accidentally spills hers on some big, brusque dude who starts screaming at her. As she grabs napkins, the dude and Leo start to yell and out of nowhere, Leo gets aggro and head butts the guy in the face. Lucy runs out and, hopefully, never looks back.

When she arrives to class, she gets another unwelcome surprise… her new TA for the semester is Stephen, whose smug, 5 o’clock-shadowed smirk creeps across his face when he sees her. If this show is supposed to be a manifesto about how society would be better off if it only consisted of people with PUSWA, it’s doing a great job.

Bree, having just broken up with Evan, realizes that British greetings aren’t terribly satisfying, so she races across campus to find Oliver. He opens up the door to his office, she races in, and gives him a very French hello. He doesn’t refuse.

So much to unpack. Literally so much new trauma and so many bad decisions that will come back to haunt everyone. As Stephen said in the previous episode, college is for making bad decisions, but this is a whole ‘nother level.

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.