Well, Simon isn’t dead.
Apparently Hanneke only whacked him over the head and left him floating in the pool after discovering he’d gotten Wolf mixed up in whatever the hell was happening at that warehouse.
Considering where The Perfect Lie Season 1 Episode 2 left us, I’ll take it.
But The Perfect Lie Season 1 Episode 3: “Simon” does something considerably more interesting than adding another body to the Dinner Club. It starts showing us what happens when all the secrets these people have been keeping can no longer stay neatly separated.
And holy hell, there are a lot of them.
Simon has his little steroid empire. Karen’s career implosion is finally becoming public. Hanneke knows things about Evert that nobody else seems to know — although whether her version of events bears any resemblance to reality is another question. Patricia is a hell of a lot more calculating than she initially appeared.
And apparently Michel has something going on too. Because of course he does.
At this point, I’d be more shocked if one of these people had absolutely nothing to hide.
Everybody’s Secrets Are Starting to Collide
Simon gets the spotlight this time around, and we finally find out what he’s been doing behind Evert’s back at Gym by the Sea.
Steroids. Lots and lots of steroids.
He’s bringing them in internationally, hiding the operation inside the gym and laundering enough money through the business that the accountant starts wondering what the f*ck is going on.
Simon responds to this potential problem with the brilliant strategy of firing the accountant. Nothing suspicious about that, Simon, is there?
The bigger problem is Evert.
Evert wasn’t involved. He didn’t even know what his business partner was doing, and before his death, he was beginning to realize something wasn’t right.
That immediately gives Simon a possible motive. Except I don’t really believe Simon killed him.
Not yet anyway.
The scene that changed it for me was Simon alone with Evert’s casket. He starts to open it and can’t bring himself to look inside.
For all the shady shit Simon is doing, that moment feels real. Evert wasn’t simply the guy whose name was attached to Simon’s legitimate business while Simon ran drugs through the back door. He was his friend.
That’s one of the things The Perfect Lie continues to do well. Everybody is suspicious without automatically turning everybody into a villain.
Simon can love Evert and still betray him. Karen can love Michel and still want Simon.Hanneke can genuinely grieve Evert while simultaneously making his death all about herself.
These people aren’t hiding one giant secret. They’re lying in layers.
Hanneke Is Becoming Her Own Version of the Truth
Episode 2 made me understand Hanneke better. Episode 3 made me want somebody to tell her to shut the f*ck up. Preferably Babette.
And thankfully, Babette pretty much does.
Hanneke cannot stop inserting herself into everybody else’s life. She’s digging at Karen, questioning Simon, hovering around Babette and even trying to tell Michel what he should say at Evert’s cremation.
Lady, Evert was not your husband.
Except I’m increasingly convinced that somewhere in Hanneke’s head, he practically was.
She tells everyone Evert couldn’t stand being married to Babette, wanted a divorce and was terrified Babette would take the children away. That’s not what I heard in Episode 2.
What I heard was Babette wanting out and Evert losing his shit over the possibility of losing his children. That’s an important distinction because Hanneke doesn’t necessarily have to be deliberately lying.
She may genuinely believe her version.
She’s taken Evert’s unhappy marriage, her own miserable relationship with Ivo, Evert’s rejection of her and whatever private conversations she had with him and turned them into a story where she understood Evert better than anybody else did.
She even admits she found him a lawyer before Babette could get one. Holy Hell, woman.
Then there’s still that voicemail offering to help Evert “get rid of” Babette. I haven’t forgotten that.
And I definitely haven’t forgotten that Babette and the kids had drugs in their systems when the house burned — or the fact that Evert and Babette’s son is strangely disconnected in every single episode.
So when Hanneke starts insisting Evert wouldn’t have set that fire, I’m not dismissing her. I just don’t trust why she’s so sure.
Karen and Simon Are About to Make a Terrible Decision
Karen’s mystery finally starts coming apart too.
We’ve known since the premiere that something happened at work. We’ve watched her dodge Michel’s questions, feed everyone vague bullshit and act like somebody simply decided they didn’t like her.
Now an article accuses her of being a tyrant who created a culture of fear. Well. That’s a little more serious than somebody didn’t like me because I wasn’t nice, Karen.
And I like that the show doesn’t immediately tell us whether the accusations are completely true, exaggerated or only part of what happened.
Karen’s reaction is enough. She’s spiraling.
There’s a nice visual running through the episode with Karen and the beach. Earlier she’s running beside the water while everything in her life is starting to close in. Later the weather has turned, the waves are angry and she strips off her clothes and swims straight out into them.
It reminded me of the way Last Seen used the beach and waves around Ian, almost reflecting everything churning inside him.
And who happens to find Karen out there? Simon. Of course.
These two have been heading toward each other since the premiere, but I think I understand Karen’s attraction to him better now.
Simon doesn’t judge her.
He doesn’t push her to explain the article. He doesn’t interrogate her about what happened. If she wants to tell him, fine. If she doesn’t, that’s fine too.
Michel can’t really give her that because Michel is her husband. Her unemployment and whatever happens next affect him too. He has every reason to want answers.
Simon doesn’t need anything from Karen. At least not anything involving her career.
So she asks him what he thinks of her. He thinks she’s sexy. Oh, FFS. There it is.
Karen is vulnerable. Simon’s marriage isn’t exactly looking wonderful either, and Patricia has her own strange way of manipulating him through sex whenever she wants something.
These two are absolutely going to fuck. I’m not even asking if anymore. I’m wondering how spectacularly they’re going to f*ck everything else up when they do.
The Timeline Is Still Driving Me a Little Crazy
If there’s one thing keeping The Perfect Lie from completely clicking for me, it’s still the timeline.
I understand why the show is structured this way. We’re essentially getting pieces of everyone’s story through the investigation, with the past and present gradually revealing what happened before and after Evert’s death.
The problem is that sometimes I spend too much time trying to figure out when the hell I am.
Karen gets information about the newspaper article. Then we’re somewhere else. Simon is being questioned. Then we’re back before Evert died. Then we’re around the cremation. Then we’re somewhere around another event we’ve already seen from a different perspective.
And occasionally I’m sitting there thinking: Wait. Has Hanneke already hit Simon at this point? That’s not the kind of confusion a mystery necessarily wants.
But here’s the weird thing. I still don’t care enough for it to become a real problem.
Because the character relationships themselves are getting clearer even while the chronology sometimes isn’t.
I understand why Hanneke behaves the way she does. I understand why Karen is drawn to Simon. I understand why Evert was starting to distrust him. I understand why Simon is becoming paranoid.
And I understand that almost every one of these people knows one piece of somebody else’s secret without anybody having the whole picture.
That’s keeping me hooked.
And Now Michel?
Then we get Michel.
Poor Michel has spent most of this thing looking like the relatively normal husband who moved to Bergen and accidentally found himself living in the middle of Desperate Housewives: Dutch Edition.
Apparently that was too much to hope for.
After Hanneke’s latest blowup, Michel asks Simon whether she knows. Knows WHAT?
Then Hanneke goes into the pool house and writes a message on Evert’s casket: Dear Evert. The truth will come out.
Michel sees it later. And the look on his face isn’t Hanneke is being f*cking weird again. He’s disturbed, like very disturbed as in he thinks everything is going to come crashing down sooner rather than later.
So now I have to wonder what Michel knows too.
Maybe it has something to do with Simon. Maybe it has something to do with Evert. Maybe it’s something completely different because God knows this show isn’t suffering from a shortage of secrets.
But that ending gets right to what I liked most about “Simon.” Every time the show appears to answer something, it quietly moves suspicion somewhere else.
We learn what’s happening at Simon’s gym, but that raises questions about what Evert discovered. We learn what’s happening with Karen’s career, but that pushes her toward Simon. We learn more about Hanneke’s involvement in Evert’s marriage, but I’m trusting her version of events less, not more.
And just when Michel looks like the guy standing outside all this bullshit, the show gives him one look that says: Nope. He’s in it too.
🔥 The Verdict: WATCHABLE
The Perfect Lie keeps getting messier, and that’s exactly what’s keeping me hooked.
“Simon” isn’t as much about solving Evert’s death as it is about showing how impossible that’s going to be when every person surrounding him was hiding something.
And those secrets aren’t staying separate anymore. They’re crashing into marriages, friendships, businesses and each other.
The shifting timeline still occasionally makes me stop and figure out where the hell we are, and I wish the show were a little cleaner about that. But it hasn’t crossed the line from confusing and interesting into confusing and annoying.
Not yet.
Because three episodes in, I still don’t know whether Evert really set that fire. I don’t know why Babette and the kids had drugs in their systems.
I don’t know what Hanneke actually knows versus what Hanneke has convinced herself she knows. I don’t know how much Evert discovered about Simon.
And now apparently Michel has something to hide too.
Everybody in this Dinner Club has a secret. Eventually, one of them is going to get somebody killed. Assuming one of them hasn’t already.
Read All Our The Perfect Lie Season 1 Coverage
- The Perfect Lie S1E1: Karen
- The Perfect Lie S1E2: Hanneke
- The Perfect Lie S1E3: Simon
- The Perfect Lie S1E4: Michel
- The Perfect Lie S1E5: Patricia
- The Perfect Lie S1E6: Babette
- The Perfect Lie S1E7: Ivo
