"The Stranger": More Questions than Answers

I didn’t really know what to expect from the new Netflix release, The Stranger. I was aware that it was an adaptation of Harlan Coben’s eponymous crime thriller but never having read the book, I was sufficiently in the dark before delving into the miniseries.

At first glance, I loved the show. Or, rather, I loved the aesthetics of the show. Scenes were set against these incredible backdrops that seemed almost too perfect to be real. There were immaculately mowed lawns, modern decor mixed with a twinge of the quirky, and pops of bright color and deep saturation that gave the murky British scenery the life it was missing.

It was almost as if I was looking at a real-life representation of The Picture of Dorian Gray; on the outside, these settings appeared beautiful - ethereal even - but inside, there were secrets that rotted and festered until they ate the place - and all within - whole.

Despite the “to die for” ambience, the plot left a lot to be desired with massive holes that needed filling in order for the story to make any sort of sense towards its conclusion. I’ve rounded up just a few of the questions that lingered on my mind while I aimlessly attempted to find resolution where there wasn’t any...

Who bit the alpaca’s leg?

Never in my life did I think I would actually write “Who bit the alpaca’s leg?” and want a serious answer. But really, who did it?! We know that Mike was the one that stole the alpaca and walked it into town as if the two were best buds, only to feel that the animal suddenly took on a carnal desire to eat him. Yet as far as we’re aware, that situation only resulted in Mike shovel-decapitating the poor creature’s head. There was no further mention of him then deciding to chow down on its dead carcass.

According to DS Griffin and DC Ross, the bite marks were notable for “the absence of a left bicuspid” in whomever was doing the munching. However, this little tidbit ended up being quite pointless as they never expanded on whether Mike had all his teeth or if there was, perhaps, another person involved that he couldn’t recall since he was off his face on MDMA. Either way, do we really wanna know who did it? That’s a hard pass from me.

Why did Corinne fake her pregnancy instead of doing literally anything else to get Adam’s attention?

Corinne being confronted on her fake pregnancy

This just never made any sense to me. If you suspected that your husband’s attention was elsewhere, what would you do? I don’t think faking a pregnancy even makes my Top 10. I would think the logical solution would be to talk to him first but, hey, that’s just me.

This miniseries seemed to cast light on a lot of mental-health related issues, such as why one would even consider faking a pregnancy or, furthermore, try to poison one’s own child as a form of Munchausen syndrome by proxy as Olivia’s mom did. I couldn’t help but watch these scenarios play out on screen and think “Jesus, how is any of this possible?!” Well, it’s not. Everything was just a little too far fetched to be believable, even when based on a fiction novel.

**If DS Griffin stowed Katz’s gun back in the loft after he had already been arrested, how was she going to prove that he shot Tripp?**

After Adam took Katz’s gun from the loft where he was arrested, he then used it to kill his neighbor/frenemy, Tripp, after discovering his involvement in Corinne’s death. When DS Griffin discovered Adam next to both his wife’s and Tripp’s dead bodies, she helped him stage the crime scene to look as though it had been Katz that shot Tripp. She then wiped the gun and placed it back at the loft to be found by the police and used in Katz’s trial. However, rigor mortis would have indicated that Tripp had died after Katz had already been arrested. So how were they going to frame him if he couldn’t possibly have been the one to shoot Tripp in the forest?

If Adam and Chris had grown up on the same street, wouldn’t they have known each other, even in passing?

Adam and Chris about to meet for the first time

Although there was a definite age gap between Adam and Chris, wouldn’t Adam have at least known her in some respect? They had grown up on the same street, known the same people, been cut from the same cloth - literally.

At the very least, Martin would have had photos of Chris around his house for Adam to have seen when he came over to discuss case business. It just seemed like too much of a stretch to be feasible that they wouldn’t have known each other, at least in passing.

How did Katz get ahold of Corinne’s old key fob from school if it had been defunct for over a year?

When Katz killed Heidi, he staged the crime scene so that it appeared that Corinne had at least been present when she was murdered. To do so, he left behind Corinne’s old key fob from school. But where did he get it? And why Corinne? None of it added up. Even the key fob was dated (the school had phased them out a year prior), so it wouldn’t have made any sense for Corinne to have been using it or to have had it on her person if she was present at the murder (which she wasn’t).

How did Katz know Chris and Ingrid had approached Heidi if she never reported it to the police?

Heidi confronting her daughter over her online activities

When Chris and Ingrid approached Heidi and demanded £10,000 in exchange for not disclosing her daughter’s online sugar daddy activities, Heidi went straight to her daughter and not to the police. In fact, the whole thing was quite clandestine; even Heidi’s husband didn’t know about it! So how did Katz become privy to the exchange?

DC Griffin would have been the first person Heidi would have gone to if she wanted the law involved, but that never happened. It remains a mystery how Katz was aware of Heidi being blackmailed...

What was the purpose of having Ingrid Prisby be a part of the “stranger” scheme if Chris is the one that did it all?

Towards the beginning of the season, there was mention of Ingrid Prisby (Chris’ right hand) previously working at an Internet startup which, at first, I took as a sign that she’d stolen some sort of super secret algorithm that allowed access to people’s personal digital profiles. However, as it turned out, there wasn’t a whole lot of purpose behind her character because it seems that Chris did most of the heavy lifting when it came to the investigative research on her targets.

There never was any sort of program that allowed unadulterated access to someone’s private life online. That leaves me to wonder, what did Ingrid really do, apart from driving the getaway car and occasionally tasering someone to protect Chris?

If Chris was such a technical wiz, why was she working at a cinema?

Seeing Chris’ impressive computer setup had me puzzled over why she would need to work in a cinema if she was really as gifted with technology as she seemed and could probably do whatever she wanted in life. We knew from Ingrid Prisby that they’d collected (I guess “scammed” is a better term) enough money to buy a “beach bar,” so why work in a cinema?

Chris doesn’t really strike me as the type to sit through Bridesmaids with all her gal-pals, so she’s not there purely for the cinematic experience. And in the end, it was working at the cinema that allowed Adam to find her based on pay records. Not the best move, in my opinion.

How would Corinne have known Olivia’s mom was poisoning her?

When Mike, Thomas, and Daisy went to see Olivia, they were met by her lying (not to mention conniving) mom. When Thomas pressed to talk to her, Olivia’s mom snapped and said “What is with you and your mother sticking your noses into our business?” We later find out that Olivia’s mom had been pumping her full of rat poison in a twisted version of Munchausen syndrome by proxy, but how in God’s name would Corinne have known that? And if she somehow did find out, there’s no way that she would have just approached the mother without reporting it to the proper authorities first. None of this scenario made a lick of sense to me.

So you see, even though the imagery was downright stunning and the scenes were mouthwateringly staged, it wasn’t enough to distract from the fact that the storyline of The Stranger was lacking, well, any kind of sense! So many questions, so few answers. I’m not sure if there will be a second season but let’s hope that, if there is, someone on payroll gets tasked with the job of keeping track of those pesky loose ends.