Well, holy shit.
After six episodes of affairs, betrayals, drug dealing, suspicious phone messages, and enough lies to keep an entire police department employed, The Perfect Lie finally gives us some answers.
And I have to hand it to this series. For all my complaining about the confusing timelines and trying to remember who the hell knew what, Season 1 Episode 7: “Ivo,” pulls together an astonishing amount of information without making the previous episodes feel like a waste of time.
Remember when I couldn’t figure out who Ivo was? Now he’s the one helping put the entire mess together.
But just when I thought the series was going to wrap everything up, it delivered an ending that had me yelling at the television.
Netflix, we need to talk.
The Dinner Club Finally Gets Its Due
Let’s start with one of the funniest moments of the entire series.
Karen’s decision to talk to the police in Episode 6 has consequences almost immediately. A heavily armed police unit storms Simon and Patricia’s house, catching Simon sitting on the toilet with his pants down and Patricia preparing to take a bath.
Talk about being caught with your pants down. Literally.
It’s a rather poetic introduction to an episode about people who have spent the entire season desperately hiding what they’ve been doing.
Simon and Patricia aren’t the only ones feeling the heat. The police are also investigating the gym and the warehouse connected to the drug operation. Karen’s statement has put a whole lot of people in uncomfortable positions, including Michel.
He’s terrified that Simon will implicate him in the money laundering, and Karen’s sudden enthusiasm for honesty isn’t helping. He packs a bag and gets out.
I can’t say I blame him for being furious, although Michel certainly isn’t innocent in any of this.
But here’s what continues to bother me about Karen. Even now, she seems incapable of accepting responsibility for the destruction she’s helped bring down on her family.
She can confess, cry, blame somebody else, and decide she’s finally going to tell the truth. But she still manages to make practically everything about herself.
And the worst part is that she’s dragged Michel and Sophie into a world they wanted no part of in the first place.
Ivo Has Secrets, Too. But He’s Also Been Paying Attention.
Of all the characters to carry the final episode, Ivo wouldn’t have been my first guess.
He’s spent much of the season hovering around the edges of everybody else’s problems. Hanneke’s husband. The man whose marriage was falling apart. The guy I initially had trouble keeping straight from all the other Dinner Club husbands.
Turns out he has a secret of his own.
Ivo is gay and has been concealing his relationships with men while trying to maintain the appearance of a happy marriage to Hanneke.
Suddenly, his earlier behavior makes considerably more sense, particularly that uncomfortable conversation in Episode 2 when he tells Hanneke he isn’t attracted to her.
But what makes Ivo important isn’t simply the revelation about his sexuality. It’s what he knows about Evert and Babette, and Babette knows something about him, too.
She has evidence of his encounters at the gym and uses it to threaten him, because it seems blackmail is another recreational activity among these people.
Yet Ivo has heard something that makes Babette considerably more dangerous than the frightened, abandoned wife we’ve been watching.
Evert recorded their arguments, and in one of those recordings, Babette threatens to slit Hanneke’s throat.
Remember how suspicious Hanneke’s friendship with Evert looked? How Babette kept insisting her husband was having an affair? Well, it turns out the situation was considerably uglier than that.
And Ivo, despite having spent the season protecting his own secret, might be one of the few people capable of connecting the pieces.
There’s a line about how one little lie leads to another until you can’t distinguish what’s true anymore. Kind of like this series, except now, for the first time, the truth is actually coming into focus.
Babette Was Never the Helpless Victim We Thought She Was
I’ve been questioning Babette for several episodes, particularly after learning that Evert had been recording their conversations because he was afraid of her, but I didn’t expect the extent of what she was capable of.
The finale reveals that Evert wasn’t planning to reconcile with Babette. He wanted out of their marriage, and Babette couldn’t accept it.
She had become obsessed with the idea that Evert and Hanneke were involved, despite Evert’s insistence that they weren’t having an affair, and all those strange details we’ve watched over the season suddenly take on a completely different meaning.
Remember Beau’s behavior? How withdrawn he seemed, how Babette constantly snapped at him, and how uncomfortable he appeared around his own mother?
Those weren’t random little moments thrown in to make the children part of the story.
And remember the drugs found in everyone’s systems after the fire? Now we know why.
Babette drugged the family, including Evert and the children, before setting the house on fire. Her intention wasn’t simply to frighten Evert into changing his mind about their marriage. She was prepared to kill herself and take her family with her.
Together forever. Holy hell.
What makes the revelation so effective is that the series doesn’t suddenly invent a different Babette for the finale. We’ve been watching this woman unravel for weeks. We’ve seen how she manipulates people, how she uses other people’s secrets, and how desperately she tries to control what everyone believes about her marriage.
The clues were there. We just didn’t have the full picture.
And Beau’s connection to all of this also becomes much more clear, in almost a shocking kind of way.
We learn he didn’t drink the milk his mother gave him. He survived long enough to witness the fire and discover the phone Evert had used to record what happened.
That phone becomes the thing Babette can’t afford to let anyone hear.
Suddenly, the child who seemed so detached throughout the series becomes one of the most important people in the entire story.
That’s clever writing.
The Timeline From Hell Finally Pays Off
I’ve complained repeatedly about The Perfect Lie jumping backward and forward through the same events. There were times when I genuinely couldn’t tell whether a conversation happened before or after something we’d already seen.
But this finale made me appreciate what the writers were doing.
Each episode gave us another person’s version of events, and each version changed the meaning of something we’d already witnessed.
We saw Evert through Babette’s accusations. We saw Hanneke through other people’s suspicions. We watched Patricia manipulate a situation without understanding everything that had happened before she became involved.
And Karen? We’ve spent practically the entire season watching her convince herself that her lies were somehow different from everybody else’s.
By the time Beau’s phone reveals what happened on the night of the fire, those scattered scenes finally fit together.
The recording and the flashbacks work particularly well because we’re learning the truth alongside Karen while watching the events unfold.
We finally understand why Evert was afraid. We understand why Beau was behaving so strangely. And we understand that Babette was never simply reacting to an unhappy marriage — she was dangerous all along.
The final confrontation with Karen only reinforces that. Even when the evidence is right in front of her, Babette insists the fire was an accident and tries to regain control. And when that doesn’t work, she turns violent.
After all the misdirection involving Patricia and Simon, the truth about Evert’s death is horrifyingly domestic.
It wasn’t some elaborate international criminal conspiracy. It was Babette refusing to let her husband leave.
And I loved how the series brought us to that revelation.
And Just When We Think It’s Over…
But despite all that twisty fun, I do have a problem.
The finale jumps ahead several months. Karen and Michel appear to be finding their way back toward each other, Simon and Patricia are back in the picture, and Babette is denying responsibility for what happened to Hanneke, because that’s the one mystery we still haven’t solved.
We know who started the fire. But who attacked Hanneke?
And for all the answers we’ve finally received, I still want to know exactly what happened to her.
Then Hanneke begins waking from her coma. FINALLY.
Karen rushes off to get the doctor, and I’m thinking we’re about to get the last piece of this ridiculous puzzle.
Instead, the same black-hooded figure that was under the pier watching Simon and Karen back in Episode 4 enters Hanneke’s room with a heart-shaped balloon, and…that’s it. THAT’S THE END?
After seven episodes of trying to untangle this mess, we’re left with another mystery. Really?
But that cliffhanger is one hell of a way to end a season, especially after spending the entire finale demonstrating how carefully everything had been constructed. The only problem is that Netflix isn’t exactly known for speedy renewals or getting subsequent seasons into production. Who the hell wants to wait one, two, or three years to find out what happens?
🔥 Our Verdict: WATCHABLE
There’s no two ways about it. The Perfect Lie is FIRE.
I’ve been irritated, confused, suspicious of practically everybody, and occasionally ready to reach through the television and shake Karen, but I was never bored (except for a little bit in the first episode.)
What impresses me most is how the series takes events we’ve already watched and makes us reconsider them once we learn what was happening behind the scenes.
The structure actually reminds me of Dept. Q, particularly the way its opening episode uses the Merritt and Morck timelines to change our understanding of events as more information comes to light.
The Perfect Lie takes that approach across an entire season.
Was the timeline confusing? Absolutely. Did I spend more time than I wanted trying to remember who was married to whom and which version of events I was watching? You bet.
But the payoff was worth it.
Babette’s story was particularly well handled, and I loved how the finale used Ivo and Beau to expose the truth without making their earlier appearances feel irrelevant.
I still don’t like Karen. I don’t trust her. And I don’t think she’s learned nearly as much about honesty as she believes she has.
But I’ll gladly watch her make more terrible decisions if it means getting another season.
Because that ending?
NETFLIX, YOU CANNOT LEAVE ME HANGING LIKE THAT. Season 2. Now. Please.
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
