Baby Reindeer and The Messages With Misspelled Words

 

“Don thnk I’ll stop, Baby Reindeer…”

 

     A mentally-ill woman stalking a mentally-disturbed man.

     That’s the premise of Netflix’s new hit limited series, Baby Reindeer, which I’ve just finished watching. It has seven episodes. The show is based on the show’s main actor’s real-life experiences, who was stalked and harassed by a woman much older than him, almost double his age. The female stalker in the series is a former lawyer and has been jailed for stalking and harassing other people, while the stalkee is a bartender and a struggling comedian who hides something dark and traumatic in his past.

     It’s a painful and difficult watch so I wouldn’t recommend it; I didn’t really like it, it’s just that I have this sense of duty of finishing everything I’ve started. Lol.  The main character’s bad decision after bad decision (I told you he’s disturbed) would stress and exasperate you.

     Anyway, the topic of stalking has been beaten to death by many movies and TV shows, relaying a single message: stalking is bad.

     It isn’t really bad if your style of stalking is just visiting someone’s social media account frequently but quietly. It’s also isn’t bad to occasionally like or comment on their posts, unless they explicitly have told you to stay away from their social media accounts and to stop liking or commenting on their posts, especially if the post is already twelve years old; then, you must go back to just being pathetic, er, I mean, quiet and stealthy, like a ninja.

     What is bad and would give your stalkee the strong urge to call the cops on you is when you start harassing them, like sending them multitude of unwelcome messages every day (the stalker on Baby Reindeer would send her stalkee hundreds of emails a day) and regularly showing up outside their house or the building where they work or following them wherever they go or monitoring them (the stalker on Baby Reindeer shows up every day at the bar where the stalkee works before it could even open and would stay there until closing hours ordering  only a glass of drink—she is jobless).

     Trivia 1: The stalker on the show always misspells some words on her emails.

     Trivia 2: The show’s lead actor’s real-life stalker sent him 41,071 emails, 350 hours’ worth of voice mails, 744 tweets, 46 Facebook messages, 106 pages of letters, and lots of gifts.

     Trivia 3: The title of the show came from the show's stalker’s favorite stuffed toy, a baby reindeer, when she was a child.

     So if a new acquaintance whom you dislike starts calling you Baby Teddy Bear and writes you messages with misspelled words—run!