YMMV / Doc Martin

• Diagnosed by the Audience:
  • Martin. He has no grasp of social niceties, is very literal-minded, and lacks a filter between his brain and his mouth. It only becomes apparent once he's free of the chilly confines of London and can no longer bark at people with total impunity.
    Chris: Mr. Walton complains that you called him a "mentally deficient parasite."
    Martin: (earnestly) He is a mentally deficient parasite.
    Chris: Right. That man, he's always complaining about everything.
  • Peter Cronk is like Martin. How? We have no idea.
  • Aunt Ruth, herself a psychologist, proposes that his coldness is as much rooted in childhood neglect as neuroses. Martin's father (also played by Clunes) was an ogre, his gold digger mother detested him utterly, and it's even hinted that she's not his biological mum in any case. What a mess.
  • PC Penhale in later seasons, after Flanderization sets in. Originally stated to have narcolepsy, agoraphobia, and mood swings as the result of a head injury he sustained before being transferred to Portwen (which were portrayed fairly realistically in his introductory episode), these were dropped (possibly because they made it difficult to have him interact with the rest of the cast). Instead, he gained a general incompetence in his job and "quirkiness" to the point that by season 6 he seems more like a boy playing cops and robbers and no longer has the slightest idea of how to actually do his job: his presence in an emergency situation is at best irrelevant and most of the time actually serves to make things worse.
• Funny Moments:
  • Martin locking a nervous surgeon in a cupboard.
    Martin: Would you step in here for moment please?
    (The surgeon does so.)
    Surgeon: Is this one of those relaxation things?
    (Martin grabs a mop from the cupboard, shuts the doors, and shoves the mop through the handles to jam it shut.)
    Martin: (Deadpan) No.
  • Martin calling a kid's bluff about turning deaf (to get out of school):
    Martin: Your son has an abnormal buildup of fluid in his ear canals. There's no easy way to say this, his head is going to explode.
    Kid: WHAT!?
    (His mother slaps him upside the head as realisation dawns.)
  • At the pharmacy, as Louisa is giving Martin a piece of her mind over his suggesting causes of her bad breath after their first kiss, up pops Mrs Tishell with some bottles of mouthwash.
• Growing the Beard: Getting rid of Elaine Denham improved the show immensely.
• Ho Yay: Surprisingly, between Martin and PC Penhale. In the episode with Penhale's brother, Penhale runs around Martin's office and hugs the Doc while shirtless. Later that same episode, Penhale gives Martin a present and mentions their "special relationship."
• Moment of Awesome: Martin realises that Louisa has a malformation in her brain that no other doctor has spotted. He rushes to the airport and stops her flying to Spain (which would have caused the malformation to bleed) and when she is about to undergo surgery, the very young surgeon is both nervous and star-struck by Martin. Not trusting him to perform the operation, Martin locks him in a cupboard and performs the operation himself. He does it with the utmost professionalism despite the patient being his wife and it's a complete success. When his fear of blood inevitably flares up during the surgery, he takes a few seconds to vomit into a bin, goes back to the operating table, and carries on after first ordering someone to change the bin.
• Moral Event Horizon: Martin's mother was always portrayed as a narcissistic hedonist who somehow managed to have even less empathy toward other people than her son. But after his father dies, she doesn't bother to call to let Martin know, instead turning up unannounced at his house two weeks later and freeloads off him before trying to guilt-trip him into giving her money. After he refuses, she steals his antique clock (maintaining of which seems to be the only thing Martin has that could be called a hobby) in order to sell it.
  • She just inches back over the horizon in the final episode where a hallucination of her - while still as unpleasant as ever - warns Martin that his son, James, is starting to resent him as Martin resented her, implying that he still has time to avoid making the same mistakes she did.
• Nightmare Fuel:
  • Series 3 episode, where Holly (Louisa's friend) collapses on a glass bottle after the spine injury and suffers from massive blood loss, certainly qualifies.
  • Series 6 features one of the most memorable and scary scenes, where Louisa gets hit by a car.
  • Series 10 features two: in one episode, a man gets his foot caught in a tidepool as the tide is coming in; if Al and Morwenna hadn't been nearby to hear his cries for help, he would have eventually drowned, and in the penultimate episode, Martin accidentally cuts open a artery in his arm, forcing Louisa to quickly clean out the wound and stitch it shut without any painkillers before desperately trying to get Martin to a hospital before he bleeds to death.
• Paranoia Fuel: Some of the medical problems arising from seemingly-innocuous incidents. For example, did your kid fall off the monkey bars at school? Make sure he didn't rupture his spleen.
• Replacement Scrappy: Penhale in place of Mylow. While Mylow wasn't brilliant, he was still good at his job, friendly, and generally likable. Penhale is down another ten IQ points, narcoleptic, and unable to effectively do his job due to agoraphobia. He also introduces himself to multiple nicer characters by assuming they've committed some sort of crime.
• The Scrappy:
  • The group of teenaged girls who mock and laugh at Dr. Martin in almost every episode. They exist to laugh at the misfortune of others, though it's usually targeted towards the doctor, and each girl has no character of her own other than being rude to anyone who passes by them for no real reason other than that they can, and overall they have no real importance to the series whatsoever.
  • Elaine wasn't very well-liked, mainly because she's unbelievably rude and stupid, and absolutely refuses to take her job seriously. It also doesn't help that everyone in town seems to love her for some reason, turning against Martin for firing her even though he had every reason to do so. (Funnily enough, the only person who seemed to understand Martin's point of view is Elaine's father.) When she left the show after the end of season one, practically no one complained.
• Strangled by the Red String: The endless Will They or Won't They? between Martin and Louisa, which has gone on for six series even though they've actually gotten married. At some point, two people have just got to admit that it's just not going to work.
• Unintentionally Unsympathetic: The village of Portwenn in general. For as much as the show likes to paint Martin in the wrong for his undeniable misanthropic behavior and poor bedside manner. The astonishing amount of times the locals get themselves sick and/or injured either through stupidity, stubbornness or just flat out refusing to take Martin’s advice who, for all his flaws, is a trained medical professional. One has to begin wondering if his efforts are wasted on them and if it would be ultimately better if Martin left and just let nature take its course.
• The Woobie: Martin sometimes becomes one, especially when his parents are involved.

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