One episode of TMA that I will NEVER be able to shut up about is 170 (Recollection). The first episode that made me properly cry! Not only is it a beautiful exploration of Martin as a character, but humanity in general.
The light, innocent, childish small talk that Martin offers to the tape recorder. He tries so hard to keep it comforted, welcome in his home, looked after. It’d be wrong of course, to ignore it, even in his despair; others should always be put first.
Through tangled, rambling sentences, Martin manages to always explain away his own emotions, actions… To be visibly uncomfortable, unwelcoming, is wrong. He offers up his life, details of his existence, but talks them into offhanded mentions.
The subtle embarrassment he has for himself; a hallmark of much of English society. Everyone must be a self contained functioning person, lest they risk being ‘odd’, 'troubled’, perhaps even 'disruptive’.
And as Martin’s inhibitions fade, as his memories of everything grow dim, his instinctual desperation shows so painfully through. Desperately reaching for answers, as a child desperately holds their hand out for an absent parent.
Martin never had a safe person to reach for, someone always there for him. His father gone before he really knew who he was, his mother infinitely distainful… This abandonment mirrored by Jon’s absence that floats into his mind in phases.
And even to be denied the pain, to forget what you were crying about, there’s something terrible about it. Feeling the lump in your throat, the tears on your cheeks, but never really being sure why they were there, if they even are.
And the chairs. To be denied the simple comfort of a soft place to rest.
Martin’s eventual return to his duties, caring for his mother, the subtle falsified joy he finds in it, and his decline into self hatred, blame. How easy it is for him to find his way back to a place of insecurity even when he has nothing to grasp onto.
And how strong he stays. How ready he is to shoulder the blame, to carry on, to be there for anyone who might need him, anything. It’s all outside, and when he falls deeper into the fog his internal, pressed down emotions spill out.
All of Martin’s fears come from a place of worrying he isn’t enough, and this domain reduces him to a state where he is nothing; and yet, he prevails.
I finally convinced my little brother to watch the final episodes of the magnus archives, and here is a record of his reactions:
(for context I showed him the end of 38- end of 39, he has listened to a couple of episodes before this but isn’t really into podcasts!)
-after hearing only the intro: “I’m gonna write a magnus archives fanfic in morse code and it’s gonna be 30k words and I’m gonna release it as an audio recording. I don’t know anything about the magnus archives but I’ll figure it out.”
-when Jon reads ‘the fingernails were too dirty’ he looked at his fingers and scoffed.
- When Jon hits the spider he said “what did you try to kill it with, an axe? Man saw a spider and pulled at the m2 browning.”
-“what are they running from, the spider?” (this made me laugh for obvious reasons)
-start of 39-
-“he sounds like John clease! Wait his name is actually Jon?” - upon hearing Jon shouting
-“his microphone clipped…” after the tape recorder clicked off and on again.
-after Jon told Martin the worms were just parasites he said “you don’t know… You don’t know anything…. You don’t know if they have consciousness or not…”
-“that’s not a number Martin!” when Martin said there were too many worms
-“Jon’s always on the job, man. He’s a sigma.”
-“what do you mean? Worms are very responsive to fire alarms. They’re very intelligent things, they’d hear it and think "oh I need to evacuate now” - after Elias said the fire alarm was a good move.
-“yeah most walls are meant to be solid.” - after Tim broke through the wall
-“'it’s because the windows covered in worms’ is never a sentence I thought I’d hear!”
-“I feel like Martin’s the type of guy that would spell it 'Low Fi’”
-sasha spoke about being a practical researcher and he said “as opposed to an unpractical researcher?”
-“have you ever heard that one Metallica song about being a table?” - when sasha sees the table
-“Not! Sasha? That’s a command. /spawn sasha… Sasha clipped through the world.”
-“legs do that you know.” when Jon says his leg slowed him down.
-after the episode finished he paused for a minute and then just said “she says 'ahhh’ for so long it sounds like she’s greeting someone named 'khvist’, like, "ah! Khvist!”
Jon’s coma had such an effect on the course of everyone involved, but nobody more than Martin. The fact that he was there so often for someone who would never remember means their relationship could never truly be equal.
As is human nature, whether or not there is any fact, we must imagine that those unable to communicate with us are somehow doing it. Martin spent at least 4 months at Jon’s bedside, talking to him, seeing him, loving him.
But Jon never had that chance.
Martin was able to love Jon for so much longer than Jon was able to love him. Their passion is equal by the time they express it but it is undeniable that Martin has known that love for longer.
Jon, though he would always come to love Martin, did not have that same preparation. Being met by the love of someone who has been committed to you truly, especially after they’ve withheld the truth of it, is overwhelming.
The very nature of their love is a fight; finding it was a fight, as was admitting it. Through their love they fought the end of our world, and a love that is not a fight would never have been able to withstand that. They fought for their love, and in the end it destroyed them.
Being stabbed is often seen as sexy, romantic, and clean. It’s not, and it’s definitely not the kind of death you’d want to give to somebody you love. But it’s not like Martin had a choice there in that room, with one way to save everyone, to stop everything; and it’s not like Jon had any other option.
Physically, stabbing someone isn’t difficult if your knife is relatively sharp; but you still have to press through fat, muscle, tendons, organs. Whether it’s psychological or genuinely feeling your knife tear in, you’ll know what you’re stabbing through.
Psychology, stabbing someone is a different story. To stab anyone takes a tremendous amount of effort, generally the human brain isn’t predisposed to such a level of violence. But to stab someone you love, rupture their body with intent to end their life? It’s excruciating.
Being stabbed isn’t as painful as you’d think. At first. It’s often compared to the feeling of being punched; the shock eats away at the initial nerve response. But realising you’re horribly, critically injured? That’s what really hurts. Feeling your blood spill out, knowing that the organs that give you life have been pierced, made obsolete. Knowing that everything you love may be over soon.
You begin to feel cold, fast. With an injury like that your body knows it’s failing, and sends all the blood to the heart and brain, hoping to keep you awake long enough to get help; the body doesn’t want you to die comfortably, it wants you to live. Cold hands, cold feet, cold face, shivering, and without hope. Can you imagine holding someone you love, bleeding and shaking from your actions. What could make that bearable?
They say that animals know when they’re going to die, when they’re beyond the point of healing; this, to a human, is possible, but so wildly ignored. You cannot ignore this wisdom when your blood is spilling onto the floor and your vision is growing dark.
Holding a person going through this, even if they say nothing, is to know the thoughts that race through their mind. The tension in their body as the shock reaches its climax, their desperation to survive peaking. The gradual loss of tension as they submit to their fate, and the eventual crushing weight of their unconscious body; the knowledge that you tore the life out of somebody. Your somebody.
Maybe it’s a good thing Martin didn’t make it out of the archives, because facing all that is incompatible with moving forward.