Lie To Me, The Complete Final Season

LIE TO ME, SEASON 3 (DVD)
20th Century Fox Home Ent.

Release date:January 9th, 2012
Certificate: 15
Running time: 546 minutes

Created by: Samuel Baum

Cast: Tim Roth, Kelli Williams, Brendan Hines, Monica Raymund, Hayley McFarland, Jennifer Marsala, Shoshannah Stern, Monique Curnen

Let’s be honest for a minute, how often do you lie? Be really honest, not to me, but to yourself, you won’t get in trouble, I promise. Maybe I’m lying. The truth is, we all lie, even when we say we don’t lie. “I’m on my way” when you haven’t even left the house yet. “It wasn’t me” you say when the photocopier gets jammed with your non-work related documents.

From sweet little lies to big fat ones, we all do it. You’d be surprised by the number of them you tell each day, not just with the words that come of your mouth, but with the expressions your face makes and the way your body behaves.

Deception expert Dr Cal Lightman (Tim Roth) is then someone you really wouldn’t want to meet on a day when you’re lying through your teeth for whatever reason. He can fish out even the smallest lie in your words, face and the way your body changes when you tell a lie. We try to tell our bodies to do everything they can to sell or hide a lie, but they betray us with little “tells”, such as suddenly scratching our necks, raising our eyebrows, breaking eye contact or the way our voices change ever so slightly.

Lightman, and his team, Dr. Gillian Foster (Kelli Williams ), Eli Loker (Brendan Hines) and Ria Torres (Monica Raymund), can also detect how you’re really feeling in situations when you’re trying to hide it the most. Feelings of guilt, anger, hatred, regret, shame, happiness and love are visible to them when to us they would go unnoticed.

These are highly valuable skills they use in their work. They’re usually employed by law enforcement or wealthy clients to investigate cases ranging from murder, insurance fraud, healthcare violations, robbery and kidnapping.

Season 3, the final season, was really the one where I realised how much I loved the show. Having seen a handful of episodes from the first and second seasons on television, Lightman always struck me as someone I really wouldn’t want to meet. Not just because he would pull out of me every lie I’ve ever told, including the one about how I really broke my arm when I was 7 years old, but he would just be really irritating.

We know he’s smart, but worst of all, he knows it too, and he uses that to his advantage, always gaining the upper hand and turning every meeting into a confrontation where he intimidates and provokes his prey. Sometimes for the sheer sport of it, nothing else.

The season opens with In the Red where we see Lightman joining in a bank robbery but we soon learn that he plans to sabotage the heist from the inside and is working it from an angle. As the episodes progress we see more of his relationship at home with his daughter, Emily (Hayley McFarland), which is in stark contrast to his relationship with Foster, Loker, Torres.

Lightman is far less antagonistic with Emily than with anyone else, sometimes even needing a cuddle when he gets home. It’s this softer side to him and his instinct to protect his child which helps explain why he is the way he is. I began to get more and more enthralled by his past as well and the experience of his mother’s suicide and growing up with an abusive father.

There are also instances where he takes on cases purely because he wants to help a child. In The Royal We he immediately spots a teenage girl at a beauty pageant who gets off on the suffering of others while in Rebound he helps a boy whose mother has been the victim of a con-man.

Like Grissom in CSI: Crime Scene Investigation, Lightman is eccentric but brilliant in what he does. Maybe not always with the people around him, but certainly with those he’s closest to and seeing that part of him, together with the applied psychology of Lie To Me is what made Season 3 a must-watch. It’s a show that came to an end far too soon for those of us who prefer meatier stories with great actors, and that’s no lie.