Just when you thought Baby Reindeer couldn’t get more intense, it goes and ups the ante. We open episode three fresh off Donny’s sexual assault. He has taken pains to shut himself off from the world, blocking Martha on Facebook and stepping away from the pub for a few weeks, hoping, he says, that if he “disappeared long enough she might get bored.” It doesn’t work, of course: Not only does she seemingly keep ample track of his whereabouts the whole time, but she’s always on his mind. He smells her neck sweat in his sleep and obsesses over why he just froze and let it happen. (This is a common account from sexual-assault survivors.) He says the whole experience left him feeling like less of a human, and you really have to feel for him in a lot of ways.
Yet what Donny did to Teri in the previous episode — stepping off the train when she asked for a kiss — is also scumbag behavior. He knows it, and she knows it too. When he shows up at her house to apologize, she gives him the business, peppering him with questions about his real identity and asking if he just dated her for a laugh. It makes you feel extra awful about what he did to Teri because he isn’t just fucking with her romantically; he’s also fucking with her sense of self as both a desirable, lovable human being and, specifically, a trans woman. Donny’s actions are making Teri second-guess herself, and that’s what makes his actions so reprehensible.
To Donny’s credit, after leaving Teri’s house, he updates his dating profile, adding his real name and his job, “comedian.” (Quotation marks his.) Unfortunately, just after this step in the right direction, he’s hit with a bit of whiplash as — surprise, surprise! — Martha has sneakily joined his landlord’s (Keely’s mom!) cooking group, passing herself off as Sheila, a friendly lawyer. Fuck, fuck, fuck!
As the cooking night winds down and Liz gets a little into her cups, she invites “Sheila” to spend the night lest she have to drive home late. Martha/Sheila accepts, and while Liz is on a quest for blankets, Donny confronts her. She has no business being in his house, not just because it obviously puts him in danger and crosses his personal boundaries but because it fucks up his entire living situation. We get a little backstory about how he came to live in Liz’s house — a blend of a fallen-apart relationship, a dead son, and a big jacket — but he clearly cares about Liz. And he should because she’s giving him a free fucking place to live in a very expensive major city, which makes you wonder where all his money goes from working, but that’s another story.
Anyway, Donny drives Martha away with some police-based threats, which he, of course, doesn’t act on FOR NO REASON, and upon arriving in his room, finds that Martha has left him a photo of herself in lingerie. Classic Martha.
What follows is both disturbing and sad as Martha takes up on the bus bench outside Liz’s house. She’s there day and night, which has to make you think about every other person in the neighborhood seeing her and wondering what the heck is going on, but apparently, the rest of London is fine with weird shit because only Donny seems freaked out by this.
All of this is complicated by Keely’s coming home to live for a bit — a perfect Hollywood confluence of events — and telling Donny that his girlfriend really has to stop harassing her on Facebook. Instantly, you know it’s Martha, though Keely lays the blame at Donny’s feet, saying, “You love drama. Anything to take you away from the stasis that is your life.” That line feels somewhat important as it’s a little insight into Donny’s general instability and lack of drive, which you have to think is tied back to whatever happened to him as a younger man. (Or child? Please not as a kid.)
Week after week, Martha is on the bench and Donny ignores her. One day, she’s just broken. She becomes seemingly comatose, like a psych patient in a movie staring at a wall, whether from being cold or being deranged. Donny reacts by having sympathy for Martha and driving her home, where he pokes around while making her a cup of tea. I don’t know if this move is incredibly kind of him, because even stalkers are people too, or if it’s incredibly stupid. Would it have killed him to call an ambulance and let them deal with it?
When Donny drops off Martha, he seems to realize (“JUST NOW?” I scream …) that Martha does actually think there’s something between them in real life. He tries to end it softly, laying down some lines about how they’ve had a perfect fairy tale and, if she can let it go, they’ll have the perfect fairy-tale ending. But you know that’s not going to happen, not just because it’s Martha but because it’s just episode three.
That being said, Donny doesn’t see her again until his comedy show, which Teri and her naysaying friends also visit. She’s there to watch him crash and burn, which, good for her, and he quickly does — only to turn things around with some hacky, very not-real jokes about his inability to give a fictional girlfriend an orgasm and other boring dude stuff. I don’t know Richard Gadd’s work (the actor-creator behind Baby Reindeer), but I’m wondering about the origins of this kind of material. Part of me kind of understands where he’s coming from reference-wise, pulling from Borscht Belt comedians and ’80s and ’90s brick-wall performers. That being said, comedy is at its best when it’s true, at least in some sense. That’s why Gadd’s Baby Reindeer landed, I think, and why his whole plaid-suit-and-props bit just isn’t. Maybe that’s the point, though: He needed to find and accept himself before he became famous.
Just when Donny’s comedy seems to be going well, though, Martha shows up. She’s there not just to sing but to profess her love. When Donny tries to push back, calling her a “random stranger” before telling the crowd she’s his stalker, she seems to recoil in recognition and remembrance, presumably because that’s why she went to jail in the first place. She kicks back, asking why he poked around her house (a fact, I should note, she can’t prove and he could easily refute) and why he sent her an email asking for anal. (Touché, Martha. You got him there.) Eventually, she gets kicked out, screaming and wailing the whole way, and Donny sets about tanking and then tearing up a dressing room.
After he and Teri beat it out of the club, worried that Martha will see them together, they duck into a pub. Things seem to be going well, with Teri telling Donny she can’t get past what he did but is happy to use it as the baseline of their arguments from here on out. (She’s such a joy, for real. Donny, Teri is too good for you.)
That’s when things go very, very awry. Martha is suddenly there, summoning up her Chris Farley–“Lay off me I’m starving” voice to ask, “WHO’S THE SKANK?” Teri tries to play it cool and reasonably, as you would think a therapist might, but can you argue with someone who doesn’t live in reality? The answer, it turns out, is no. Martha quickly takes issue not just with Teri being with Donny but with her background. (Nava Mau, who plays Teri, is mostly from America, so Martha’s “I’d sink their boats on the horizon” seems like a bit of an overreaction, TBH. You came at us first, England!) That’s when Teri has enough, telling Donny to get Martha to leave, and that’s when Martha goes absolutely apeshit. She attacks Teri, pulling out clumps of hair and scratching and punching her face. Donny and another guy manage to pull Martha off, and as they do, she tells Teri, “You look like a man,” which has to be hurtful to Teri on so many levels. Donny rips into Martha before she’s ejected from the pub, but his inaction has begun to hurt the people he cares about; while it’s mostly Martha’s fault that Teri has been hurt, you have to think it’s more than a little bit Donny’s fault as well. I’m not the biggest advocate of calling the police, especially when mental illness is involved, but in this case, I think we can all agree that something — literally anything! — has to be done before someone ends up not just hurt but dead.
Reindeer Tales
• I had to look up what “abseiling” was. If you also don’t know, please, let this link enlighten you.
• Why does Martha have so many cell phones in her kitchen drawer? Is it a sign that she’s a hoarder, or is it much more devious? Also, kudos to that production designer because I have to imagine it’s one thing to make a nice, normal apartment but it’s a whole other thing to design a disgusting, sticky-looking nightmare.
