Best Medicine handed us one of the quirkiest love triangles on network television this season, and then quietly chose to herd it in an unexpected direction.
It made a pretty compelling case, episode by episode, that neither of the two men circling Louisa Gavin was actually ready to be with her.
Maybe not for a while, and the show was smart enough to keep that ambiguity alive even as it nudged Martin and Louisa toward each other with the subtlety of a Port Wenn fishing boat in a fog.
Martin kissed Louisa, the whole town erupted about it, and then the two of them spent a significant chunk of Best Medicine Season 1 Episode 11 trying to escape the gossip.
Which was, let’s be honest, a fairly accurate preview of what an actual relationship between them would look like at this stage of the story.
The good news was that all three of them were growing.
But the frustrating news was that “growing” and “ready” weren’t the same thing, and the show had been making that distinction quietly all season without ever quite stating it out loud.
Martin Is in Love With Louisa and Completely Unequipped to Do Anything About It
Aunt Sarah told Martin directly that he was in love with Louisa.
Despite his ex-girlfriend’s arrival in Best Medicine Season 1 Episode 12, it was immediately obvious to everyone in the room that the dynamic between Martin and Louisa was something different.
Martin encouraged a twelve-year-old to be brave in a heart-to-heart that was transparently also about himself.
The show has been dropping these moments every episode like breadcrumbs, and Martin stepped over every single one with the focused determination of a man who had decided not to see them.
He has deep-seated psychological issues preventing true intimacy, which the show itself has been honest about since Best Medicine Season 1 Episode 1, battering the romantic tension whenever it got close to a fruitful conclusion.
When he sprinted through the Blood Factory haunted house, chanting his way past his worst fear to save Louisa’s life, it was proof of his potential to break out of his own shell.
It was so clearly the most emotionally available he’d ever been. And then he still couldn’t say the thing.
The sad part wasn’t that Martin hadn’t told Louisa how he felt — it’s that he genuinely wasn’t sure he knew how, or whether he deserved the chance to.
That’s not a man ready for a relationship, but rather someone who needs to learn that he’s allowed to want things before he can show up for someone else’s wanting.
Louisa has already figured that out about him to some degree.
That’s exactly why a relationship starting right now would just be her carrying the emotional labor of a connection Martin hasn’t done the internal work to match yet.
Mark Is Cheerful, Lovable, and Absolutely Not Over Any of This
Mark Mylow was the easiest person to like in Port Wenn, which was part of why it was so easy to underestimate how much unresolved mess he was carrying around.
He was relentlessly cheerful, congenitally friendly, and determined to be best friends with the man his ex-fiancée was developing feelings for.
However, somewhere underneath all of that was someone who had ended a long engagement and hadn’t quite processed what that meant for him.
The karaoke duet with Louisa in Best Medicine Season 1 Episode 5 was the most honest moment the show gave him — with Mark walking away because he couldn’t quite make it feel like a couple again, even when the town was cheering them on.
That was a genuinely bittersweet beat, and Josh Segarra sold it without making it sentimental.
Then, Best Medicine Season 1 Episode 6 confirmed that Mark had been sleeping with half the town since the breakup and had managed to give chlamydia to multiple women in the process.
Under the laughs, it was the portrait of someone bouncing around trying to fill a hole rather than actually sitting with what they’d lost.
Louisa spent years with Mark, led him through an engagement she probably knew, deep down, wasn’t quite right, and ended it before the series even started.
Going back would be settling for something familiar over something she’d already decided wasn’t enough.
And the show has been too careful about her intelligence all season to believe she hasn’t noticed that the problems were still there under the good humor.
We Need the Growth First
The three of them growing individually, separately, at their own pace, was the best thing Best Medicine could do for all of them.
And quietly, without announcing it, it has already started.
Over to you, Port Wennians!
Do you think Martin and Louisa should wait, or is the show rushing them together too fast? And do you think Mark genuinely gets it now, or is he still in the middle of his own thing? Let’s debate it in the comments.
Subscribe and follow us for weekly Best Medicine coverage — Season 2 has already been greenlit, and we have a feeling Port Wenn is about to get considerably messier.
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The post Hear Us Out: Best Medicine’s Louisa Shouldn’t Date Mark or Martin appeared first on TV Fanatic.