The Martin Theory

Hello, I've been having too much free time lately and this show has me thinking about it for the last couple months. I usually don't do much theory crafting since I don't usually get to follow shows as they release, but From has caught my attention in a way that really made me want to try and guess what would happen in the final season, and considering I caught up with it before it's release, I think it's a reasonable point to believe we might have enough clues to make a guess as to what's going on. I know many people don't really think the show will answer all questions or have a satisfying ending, personally I'm choosing to have faith that things will be properly adressed and as such am having fun speculating, if they don't or I end up getting anything wrong, welp, the fun is in the process. I'm not sure reddit is the best place to post this, but I have no clue where else it could be. I have this one theory about Martin, some stuff written about what I believe is the early timeline of the show and a wild shot at what I think is the main plot that's going to be solved in the last season. I might post everything if there's any interest, but for now this will be just the Martin Theory since it would be way too long of a post.

1. Who, What and Why is Martin

Well, starting off what we all know, Martin is the seemingly very unlucky old dude Boyd meets in the dungeon-like space he arrives at after going through a faraway tree in the earlier seasons. He's the one to call Boyd up the well, he's chained in there and begs Boyd to kill him. We will go through their interaction in detail later on, but for now this is just one of two major moments involving Martin, with the second being in season 3, when Julie utilizes her storywalking to go into the Dungeon and Martin gets her to throw the rope down to help Boyd. These two interactions are riddled with clues about Martin's story although I believe they are also designed to be a bit deceptive to the viewer at first watch, so it's important to dissect them, and by going by that process I think we can get to a decent guess as to what role Martin has played/is yet to play in the show.

Now, the first very important thing I'd like to point out in the interaction between Boyd and Martin is that Martin does not know Boyd, he asks if Boyd is from the town, and he asks for Boyd's name. This is important because it will clash with other clues, the main one being that in season 3, when Julie shows up, Martin knows Julie. The instant he sees her he calls out her name. Like other reddit posts I've read have pointed out, this can be due to a lot of possibilities, one of the most speculated ones being that Julie might storywalk to Martin's time in season 5 at some point, making herself known to him before season 3 Julie meets him in the dungeon. While this is possible, this doesn't adress a major elephant in the room when it comes to Martin, the bomb he drops during the conclusion of his interaction with Boyd, where he reveals that he knows Abby as well. There is a lot of room for speculation on ways Martin could have known Abby, theories that go from Abby being a storywalker to Martin having gotten the knowledge from Boyd in some way we are yet to know, however, one explanation that could explain all three of those things and that is the basis of this theory is: Martin himself is a storywalker.

2. ''You're a storywalker Martin''

So, in this hypothetical, Martin would have at some point storywalked to Abby's time in the town and met her without having met Boyd. This is completely viable due to how Boyd is shown in his flashback to have been away from Abby days before she snapped. What this theory of mine proposes is that Martin at some point has 1) met Julie through her storywalking, 2) storywalked himself at some point to Abby's and Boyd's time and 3) that Martin's storywalking is what made Abby snap.

Now, stay with me here. Here's some of the evidence of Martin being from the past, prior to Boyd and Abby arriving in town: He's old himself, he's chained in the dungeon while the dungeon itself is intact(the dungeon being a place from the past is something we can asssume due to the ruins in the show's present time), he's has a tattoo people online have dated around the 1800's(don't quote me on the accuracy of this one, I'm not sure how accurately you can date a marine tatto by it's design).

It's unlikely that he was part of the town when Boyd first arrives since he describes going through the tree and that is not something the people at the time knew much about(only Victor, who would likely have mentioned or drawn something about Martin had he known him, him being such a remarkable guy and all). It's a wild shot but I think that knowledge comes from him interacting with Julie, prior to storywalking and meeting Abby during Boyd's absence.

Let's look again at the interaction between Boyd and Martin. One big question remains unanswered, even if Martin knew Abby and Julie through being a storywalker, if he doesn't know Boyd, how does he know to mention Abby? Well, that is hinted to us through their dialogue. Before talking about Abby, their conversation goes through Martin asking Boyd's name, then Boyd learns Martin is a former marine and they have little bro moment about it while Martin scares Boyd about the things in the show and the music box starts playing. Martin wants Boyd to finish him off and get out of there before whatever caught him catches Boyd too. Boyd is ignoring him, before Martin reflects outloud about Abby's idea about the place they are in. It's quite a weird conversation, with Martin seemingly randomly blurting it out, but think about it this way: Martin was storywalking and meets Abby, who's still shellshocked by a mix of Boyd being away/not returning home that night + her recollections of the place in her dreams + the shock of arriving recently in the nightmare scenario that is Fromville. They have a conversation, maybe she tells him she is a former marine and mentions her husband, a gentle man named Boyd who's been trying to help the people in this place they just arrived at.

When Martin meets Boyd, he doesn't know who he is, but as Boyd reveals him his name, says he's from the town and even talks a bit about being a marine, Martin pieces it together, he's that Abby lady's husband who she talked about. He maybe would never reveal it, or maybe would have taken his time to go into detail about it and tell more to Boyd, but the music box has been playing and Boyd is ignoring his pleas, at which point Martin who has been getting tortured by god knows what for god knows how long becomes desperate and delirious, he begs Boyd to kill him, Boyd doesn't budge, so he starts to ponder his own death alongside the memory of the lady he just recalled is Boyd's wife(you can even see it maybe as an attempt at provoking Boyd, although I think this would be a bit of a stretch). Prompting him to say what he says about Abby, before taking matters into his own hands and killing himself through a blood ritual with Boyd.

3. The Tragedy of it all

I believe Martin's storywalking is what killed Abby. What I mean by this is that through Abby interacting with Martin in some type of way during Boyd's absence, his storywalking or the sheer weirdness of it all makes her snap into thinking everything is absolutely a dream. This isn't Martin changing the story since he likely doesn't even do it on purpose, it would be another example of storywalkers storywalking being part of the story akin to Julie throwing Boyd the rope for him to meet Martin.

It plays along with this theory that every character that knows Abby talks about how uncharacteristic she's being during her time in Fromville. "Iron Abby" is as highlighted as "Mr. Fish and Loaves'' and even if she's shaken by having memories of childhood dreams of the town, her snapping is definitely sudden, to the point it deeply shocks Boyd. What Boyd didn't know was that the odds were stacked against his wife.

It could have happened in any type of way, although considering Martin knows her by name and knows about her idea of it all being a dream, I'd wager they'd have had a conversation or at least Martin would have listened in on her talking to someone(as I write this I think Ellis). However, and what led me into this theory of mine in the first place anyway, was this following piece of evidence I'll propose that imo ties things up pretty well. I believe Martin took something from Abby as a bookmark. For me to explain it though, we first need to dive a bit into what I believe ''bookmarks'' are.

4. What even is a "bookmark" anyway?

In the scene Julie is talking to Randal about bookmarks, she reads about Storywalker Fred being able to 'make' a bookmark so he could pick chapters of the story he wants to visit. I've always found it weird that Julie assumes this means she needs to take something from her current timeline and turn it into a bookmark, when in my opinion this explanation and the fact it implies the need of visiting a chapter before making a bookmark should direct her to the idea that she needs to take something from the chapter she's storywalking in to make it a bookmark. This would make a bookmark simply 'something a storywalker/person storywalking(there is ambiguity on wether or not Boyd would be a storywalker that would define this) takes from the chapter they are in'.

To back this up, let's look into how Boyd interacts with the dungeon during the music box plot in season 2. What Boyd realizes when hearing Ellis and Fatima's wedding vows is that he can use the torch he took from when he was in the dungeon with Martin to go back inside the dungeon and break the music box. In this case, the torch would be an accidental bookmark Boyd made when he walked out of the dungeon carrying it, by lighting it in the dungeon ruins, he's back to the chapter where the dungeon is intact, bookmark in hand.

Now, let's look further into a very often overlooked weird as fuck scene, when during the episode that introduced us bookmarks, Abby's ring that is in Boyd's possession suddenly shows up in colony house. This is a crazy cliffhanger that I think people don't dive deep enough in. Boyd initially has Abby's ring stored in a box he keeps on his drawer. He starts the episode by picking it up and checking it out. Later in that same episode, after Julie's bookmark experiment fails, Boyd is walking down the stairs when the ring apparently shows up from thin air dropping down the steps. Boyd runs up to the box he keeps the original ring in and actually finds it still there, just to then turn to the recently found ring and it has disappeared. What I believe has happened in this scene is that 1) The ring was a bookmark, that disappeared at the moment Boyd would have made it coexist with the original ring a storywalker took from the timeline and 2) The bookmark ring showed up around Boyd at that time because it had been dropped somewhere else into a faraway tree(I think this is the most original part of this theory, haven't seen this speculated on reddit even while researching).

5. The ring

Now, picture this scenario: Martin is storywalking, wants to bookmark the chapter he meets Abby for any reason multidude of possible reasons, maybe to prove the concept to Abby, Martin takes the ring, Abby turns around and he's disappeared with it. As she is stunned at what the fuck just happened, she looks down at her hand and... the ring is back there, since storywalkers don't change the story so it's not like they can steal an item from a timeline. I believe in season 5 we might see what happened in the gap between something like this happening and Martin walking through a faraway tree, at which point he might have been separated from his bookmarks, leaving him vulnerable to be trapped(Who knows, maybe the reason he's even being kept trapped with the worms that apparently kept him alive is related to his storywalking). Being separated from the ring bookmark through a faraway tree would, like I mentioned previously, explain how the ring suddenly teleports around Boyd. I believe it was a struck of fate.

6. Julie's role

After having explained what I believe happened with Martin, there are still a few things this theory leaves in the dark. While I think it's pretty safe to assume Julie storywalking is the key to explain most events happening in the show(I have a deeper theory on that), there's not really anything we can grasp at to assume in what exact way the ring bookmark we've theorized would end up going through the faraway tree with Martin. What we can look at, however, is back at the interaction between Julie and Martin. Martin sees Julie and he's not even shaken that she's just shown up there, he doesn't ask himself how or why, he just promptly greets her with her name, asks for her to give Boyd the rope and then sends her away before 'they' come. What I believe this interaction shows us is not only that Martin knew Julie, but that he was also familiar with how storywalking works. She's just shown up at random in front of him after years of torture, but it doesn't shock him because he knows her and knows she can do that.

Julie's time is the one where the concept of storywalking originally comes from. Her family is the one that arrives in Fromville with the book that has Storywalker Fred in it, so for Martin to be familiar with it, Julie needs to have explained it to him, or at least the general gist of it. I believe this will have been done by a future Julie that storywalks after the events of season 4. To add more into this, what I believe shows that Martin knows more about what is going on is that when talking to Boyd during their interaction, he uses the term ''tip of the spear'' to describe the Smiling Fucks in Fromville. Not 'tip of the iceberg', 'tip of the spear', which to me denotes that he knows they are just lesser threats/pawns of a greater evil(likely the MIY). That is also something that in my opinion can only be explained by a season 5 storywalking Julie visiting his chapter.

7. Wrapping things up

So, to conclude what I've been talking about, I believe all of this stuff points towards Martin being a random someone from the Town, from a random generation prior to Victor's original one, that's eventually visited by a storywalking Julie who explains to him concepts such as faraway trees, mechanics of storywalking and the MIY. During that encounter, something will happen that will make Martin storywalk on his own to Abby and Boyd's time. In there, he interacts with Abby while Boyd is away, shocking her with the magic/physics-breaking elements of storywalking, which ends up pushing her to snap like she was already doing from the childhood dreams and initial shock and violence, I speculate it happens by Martin making a bookmark ring off of her wedding ring. At some point after this Martin goes through a faraway tree, maybe running from creatures or maybe just unlucky, and ends up separated from the bookmark ring he created, which is faraway tree'd back to Boyd in season 4. It's possible that the ring is faraway tree'd to Boyd at a different point and by someone else, maybe even while Boyd is in colony house, after Martin is separated from it.

Thank you very much if you've read all of this and if you are not feeling like killing me or calling me names, I'd appreciate any feedback on this theory.