Baby Reindeer Has Made the Most Boring Thing in the World Absolutely Electrifying

Never before have I had occasion to describe a capitalization mistake as riveting, but I’m going to go ahead and call it: The second episode of Baby Reindeer, Netflix’s hit miniseries about the relationship between a man and his stalker, contains the most thrilling failure to render an uppercase letter I’ve ever seen. In the show, bits of text occasionally flash between scenes, excerpts from the typo-laden, bizarre emails that a disturbed woman named Martha (played by Jessica Gunning) writes to the object of her obsession, a bartender named Donny (played by Richard Gadd, also the show’s creator). And though it’s easy to miss the first time you watch—I certainly did—the moment when Martha accidentally ends one of them with “sent from my iphone” at the bottom of it marks an important turning point in the series.

What could possibly be thrilling about “sent from my iphone”? Eagle-eyed, or perhaps just iOS-literate, readers will notice that this signature conventionally starts with a big S and incorporates a capital P in “iphone.” If you know this, it’s because this phrase has been a common presence in emails for years, meant to alert recipients that an email was written on a mobile phone and is therefore more likely to be terse or contain spelling errors. Why changing the capitalization is so noteworthy is going to take another minute to explain, though.

When we first meet her, Martha comes across as sympathetic and harmless-seeming in person, but her darker side emerges in the tidal wave of erratic emails she begins sending Donny. It’s hard to say what sticks out more, their rampant misspellings or their alarming content: “I need a ncie boy totake care of me, he who look likea baby reindeer,” she writes in an early one. An episode or two into Baby Reindeer, some viewers may have found themselves confused, as I did, about why all of these missives end with a “Sent from my iPhone.” As Donny notes almost immediately after Martha starts spamming his inbox, she doesn’t have an iPhone. The text appears letter by letter on screen, as if it’s being typed out then and there, for both the body of the messages and the “Sent from my iPhone” bit. Typing out the signature initially struck me as a poorly thought out creative choice: When you have the signature feature turned on for writing emails on your phone, the whole point is that it appears automatically rather than needing to be typed each time.

It took me a few episodes to realize that, far from being poorly thought out, these signatures were a brilliant character detail. The words in “Sent from my iPhone” appear letter by letter because they represent Martha typing them out every time, whether on her computer or non-iPhone mobile device, all because she wants other people to see her as somebody who owns an iPhone. Appearances are important to Martha: The first time they meet, she introduces herself to Donny as a lawyer, and she brags about all the important politicians she works with. He figures out pretty quickly that this can’t be true—why can’t she afford a drink then?—but Martha is committed to the bit. Pretending that she owns the most status-y phone out there is an extension of Martha’s vision of herself as a slick, successful person who definitely isn’t an out-of-control stalker. When “Sent from my iPhone” first became commonplace, some people saw it as a humblebrag, and for Martha at least, it’s retained that meaning.

How can a person’s mind be so addled that they’re writing emails that contain unsettling phrases like “i lvoes you wickle reindee forevrs in my hearts,” as Martha does, but at the same time lucid enough to care about maintaining the pretense of iPhone ownership? Such is the strength of Martha’s delusion. Even as she’s creeping Donny out and threatening him, some part of her thinks she’s maintaining a veneer of normalness, that everything’s fine and dandy.

It doesn’t take long for Martha’s iPhone façade to slip. When she doesn’t capitalize the S for the first time in the signature, it’s a hint that her demons are becoming harder to ignore. After the first subtle lowercase gaffe in Episode 2, these mistyped signatures get more obvious, becoming both more glaring and more frequent and the words seemingly devolving right along with Martha’s mental state: a “sent from mmy iPhone” here, a “sent from my ihpon” there. Each instance is as darkly funny as it is sad, and these blunders became my favorite little touch in a show that is not short on evocative details.

I called the first “sent from my iphone” the most thrilling capitalization mistake I’ve ever seen, and I stand by that—it’s especially so when you go back and spot it, lingering there inconspicuously before things really go off the rails. But the show’s single best typo might come in Episode 3, when Martha ends an email with, simply, “iphoen.” It’s a moment of pure rage: Martha has spotted Donny spending time with a woman who isn’t her, and before erupting into a violent outburst, she sends him an email: “wer u with someone jus ther?” followed by a line break and that lone “iphoen.” I find this image—of a furious Martha dashing off an unhinged email, but remembering to amend a typo-mangled “iphoen” to it, as if that’ll solve everything—oddly touching. It’s a typo, but it’s also a moving portrait of mental illness, which is not something most typos can claim. Ironically, “Sent from my iPhone” tells you almost nothing about a person anymore, but “iphoen” speaks volumes.