bonus content: martin mertens

i can’t plausibly claim this is an actual newsletter so i’m calling it bonus content as if it is in any sense a ‘bonus’ for anybody reading it

martin gets rescued

i’m back in the middle of a horrid grinding obsession with adventure time. i know, i know, when am i not, but like, for real, it’s intense and A Lot and i feel bad about continually messaging unsuspecting friends about it so instead i’m sending it in an email to dozens of people. 

anyway so the harm i am inflicting on you today, dear reader, is an overly involved post about martin mertens, noted deadbeat dad/head trauma-sufferer. not sure why exactly finding out every detail about finn’s dad is the outlet for this particular period of special interesting or how we got to this point, but it is and we did and we’re gonna have to make our peace with it.

martin is first properly introduced in season six’s ‘escape from the citadel’. he is, and this is important, a fucking arsehole. just the worst piece of shit. finn goes to the citadel, a prison for those who have committed the galaxy’s most heinous crimes, to try to find his father, who he assumes is probably a guard. he quickly realises his dad is in fact imprisoned there, apparently after trying to con one too many people. after finn frees him, he doesn’t seem really to remember that he has a son, and when he tries to imitate affection for finn, it’s only to manipulate him. trying to escape the citadel and his son, he manages to lose finn’s arm for him. not a great set of first impressions to give your son, all told!

this sets the pattern. in future episodes, martin is consistently shallow and manipulative and entirely focused on moving on to whatever’s next (‘you burn enough bridges,’ he tells finn, ‘the only direction to move is forward’). in the process, he causes profound harm for multiple people who just try to help him out, including both his actual son and the surrogate son/rebel leader he calls ‘martin 2’. at one point — while he’s trying to convince finn he’s not a horrible person — he spins an obviously improvised tale when asked to explain where he’s been finn’s entire life:

haha, whoops. okay, uh, long story short - you were born on a… boat… i guess. like a banana boat. in the middle of the ocean. so… all kinds of stuff tried to eat you. whales, and fish. squids. uh, there was a tiger. and seaweeds. the sea’s… weeds. your mom was… okay? i don’t know. talking about it stresses me out. maybe later. so one day, i got called on a dangerous mission. more like, a dangerous life choice. two roads diverging in the night and all that. and i… couldn’t bring you along. i always planned to come back for you, but i didn’t. that’s… true!

then, a mystical comet whose relevance to the show’s world i absolutely refuse to get sidetracked by comes along and offers finn (and then martin) a chance to leave this mortal world behind and enter a new plane of existence. obviously martin accepts. obviously he leaves behind his son, who accepts at this point that ‘there’s no changing you, i guess.’ obviously he’s that person. adventure time rarely goes for unreconstructed villains, but martin just seems like a genuinely bad person.

except, adventure time rarely goes for unreconstructed villains. in ‘min and marty’, part of the incredible islands miniseries, the show suddenly offers us an entirely new angle on martin. the previous episode, ‘hide and seek’, it had been revealed that martin had originally been a ‘hider’, someone who tried to escape the island outposts which were the sole holdout of humanity in the world of adventure time. (there’s a whole system of ‘seekers’ employed to keep people on the island, as well as a robot colossus ‘guardian’ to help. let’s move quickly past the moral/political implications of this.) he seemed yet again to just want to escape. ‘ah,’ we thought, naively, ‘this tracks with his character. always trying to get out.’

and then ‘min and marty’ happens. first of all, it’s revealed that martin’s not a hider, just a conman trying to profit (in the form of cool gadgets, his only* vice) from hiders before ratting them out. still pretty shitty, but differently shitty. then, we see the unexpected. he changes. he falls in love with a doctor called minerva, and they have a kid. he gets a stable job as a barber. they get a house together (which, incidentally, is on stilts, on an island, and has bananas growing by it.) he stays at home playing with finn and ordering min takeaway for when she gets back from working late. he loves his family, he loves his home.

martin, min, and finn in one of the most gorgeous frames from adventure time

then, someone he’d scammed comes back seeking revenge (with her pet tiger), and he flees to a raft with finn, planning to sail around the island and escape his pursuers. he’s about to text min to let her know what happened, when a storm hits and the guardian rises out of the ocean. 

‘the guardian?’ he cries. ‘no! i’m not trying to leave!’

(this line is just a punch in the gut every single time. to hear that coming from martin is just so outside everything we expected from this character, such a painful reminder of how much he had changed by the time we first saw him.)

then he gets up, says ‘i’ll be back for you’ to finn, and attacks the guardian, and somehow wins despite risking near-certain death. but his son’s already drifted out to sea and so does he, before he’s rescued by a boat while nursing a head wound. he never returns. it’s possible he doesn’t even remember.

this story ends with minerva sat looking out to a sea which she assumes she's lost her husband and son to, and just saying 'i don't understand'. but martin goes on to leave earth, continue grifting in space (his greed for gadgets unabated), before he eventually gets imprisoned. and then this whole story starts over.

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so that’s enough exposition. now allow me to express in no particular order my soulscreams about martin mertens:

as cruelly pointed out by this reddit post, which quite frankly had no reason to do what it did to me, minerva never knows that martin didn’t want to leave; martin didn’t tell finn, and had died/ascended/whatever by the time finn meets his mum. the knowledge that martin hadn’t abandoned minerva was totally lost. 

when she’d first met martin she was worried he was a hider, and he’d proved her wrong. or had he just manipulated her? had he just taken their son and run? was that who he always was? was that what they always were?

again as my enemy /u/casualtea96 suggests, we can read martin’s later actions in light of this story. when he doesn’t return, maybe he chooses to assume the best, that finn got reunited with minerva and they lived happily ever after and etc. but he feels like he can’t go back anymore, so he just works to put as much distance as he can between himself and what he left behind. and then he meets finn, and he realises it wasn’t true, neither of them made it back. how do you deal with that? how do you accept the son you’d spent a decade praying was safely with your wife back into your life? how can you ever stay in one place?

when he crashes on earth at one point, he’s desperate to leave as quickly as possible. he calls the escape pod he tries to make ‘the minnie’, for his wife who he still loves and whose memory he will never truly escape.

when he tells finn what happened, he tells him the truth (or a garbled version of it). even he’s surprised that he does so. but it’s not enough.

when finn asks him again to explain, he’s right when he tells him that ‘no answer i give you will be satisfying.’ it’s been too long. there’s nothing which can make up for that loss.

when he’s offered a chance to leave behind all this loss and memory and pain he accepts it. wouldn’t you?

it’s possible that he doesn’t really remember his home, but he obviously still feels the pain of losing it.

this isn’t really connected to anything but inexplicably, the boat that martin gets rescued by is the pirate boat tree trunks (noted namesake of this newsletter) briefly sailed on in ‘ring of fire’.

‘min and marty’ is one of the only flashbacks in the show which isn’t directly experienced by a character. it doesn’t redeem martin for any other character, just us.

for all that the show gives us answers about martin’s life, there are massive gaps. it’s been confirmed by the showrunners that martin ended up in the citadel after one too many cons, but who did he actually con? what was he doing? and how did he end up in space in the first place?

the show directly links images of him sitting with finn as a baby with shots from when he’s telling finn about his past. because it hates us.

martin for some reason resembles the biggest bad in adventure time, GOLB, both in appearance and action. there might be a whole subterranean Thing connecting GOLB (as originator of catalyst comets?) with martin with finn (the spawn of a catalyst comet). who the fuck knows anymore.

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this is all to say — i don’t know, really. that martin is secretly one of the show’s most tragic characters? that adventure time has a remarkable capacity to provide these hidden details, to link lore and character beats and lines across seasons to provide slowburn resolution? that it’s just as willing to leave gaps and question marks and unconfirmed connections entirely unresolved, both to give people like me things to obsess over and to give the sense that this is a world you can never quite pin down or ever fully figure out? that there’s a genuine compassion in its absolute unwillingness to ever have a purely Bad character? that the show is bafflingly adept at emotionally manipulating me, ellie? 

all of these things, obviously. i don’t know. i could talk about this show forever, and probably will. it’s just stunning. i’m somehow always slightly surprised by how clever it is, how generous it is, how interesting it is. just how fucking good it is. 

i guess that’s the thing with this show. it really genuinely is bizarrely good, in a way which shows a combination of care and creativity that is shared by essentially no other tv. it explores themes which are generally the preserve of substantially more adult fiction, but in a way which doesn’t lose any subtlety or importance. it takes its audience and characters seriously, turns its world into something you can get lost inside. and martin mertens is a great demonstration of that, tying together all these strands of lore and plot and character and turning it into a real, heartbreaking release. i love his story an awful lot.

i’m sorry for inflicting it on you.