Best Medicine: 7 Jobs Martin Can Do If He Loses His Medical Practice in Port Wenn

By the end of Best Medicine Season 1, Martin Best was staring down a State Medical Registry investigation, a blackmailing childhood bully, and the small matter of Elaine performing blood draws without a license.

If Glendon gets his way on Best Medicine Season 2 and the medical license finally disappears — and let’s be honest, it’s been wobbling since Martin fainted outside the supermarket — Port Wenn’s grumpiest resident will need a new income stream.

The town will absolutely refuse to let him leave, especially after how he stood up for them against the Norwegians. Here are seven jobs waiting for him.

1. Martin ‘Watson’ Best

The Sherlock Holmes dynamic between Martin and Mark has been simmering since Best Medicine Season 1 Episode 1, and Port Wenn has been too polite to name it. Martin diagnosed two men’s simultaneous hormonal conditions in a single episode.

Mark, meanwhile, once genuinely believed a goldfish had joined a rock band called Cutie and the Goldfish.

Put that brain next to that level of cheerful incompetence in a consulting arrangement, and Port Wenn gets the most chaotically effective detective duo since the actual Baker Street originals.

Well, Mark almost called him Watson once, so there’s that. And if they do work together, Martin would spend forty percent of every case explaining what deductive reasoning meant and the remaining sixty percent doing everything himself while Mark looked on admiringly.

2. Food Quality Inspector — At The Salty Breeze

Greg and George are, by every available measure, lovely people. And they would invite him with open arms, despite Martin being the reason The Salty Breeze almost got closed.

They run a warm seafood restaurant, own a pig named Brisket, and refer to themselves as the Dynamic Duo, with the unshakeable confidence of two men who have never once had a bad day.

Martin would have extremely detailed, extremely unwelcome opinions about the hygienic preparation of every dish on the menu, the temperature of the walk-in refrigerator, the sourcing of the catch, and probably the structural integrity of the napkin fold.

Greg would respond by comping him dessert. Martin would refuse it on the grounds that he hadn’t finished his assessment. George would bring it anyway.

This cycle would repeat at every visit, without variation, and by the end of the first month, Martin would have become their most loyal regular.

3. Martin ‘The Recluse’ Best

Well, this one isn’t exactly a job, but the show basically offered it up on a silver platter on Best Medicine Season 1 Episode 8, where Mark read aloud from the historical records about Martin’s ancestor James Brewster — a notorious recluse who kept to himself in a shack by the bog and always found cause to quarrel when he could.

Mark laughed and said it sounded like Doc, and he wasn’t wrong. Martin’s entire default setting is Brewster’s lifestyle with better shoes.

Strip away the medical license and what remains is a man who prefers silence, finds most social interaction exhausting, and has a demonstrated talent for being left alone.

The bog shack would need some renovation. Martin would handle it himself, complaining the whole time. Port Wenn would check on him constantly, which he would hate, and which would be the only reason the arrangement worked at all.

4. Supply Teacher — At Port Wenn School

Just imagine: Martin explaining the human circulatory system to a class of ten-year-olds with zero adjustment for age-appropriate language, and then getting visibly irritated when someone asks what he considers an imprecise question, refusing to soften his feedback on a science project.

What the show has already shown us, quietly, is that Martin has more patience for Port Wenn’s younger residents than he has for almost anyone else.

Peter Cronk, the astronomy-obsessed kid, is the clearest example — a child who asks genuinely good questions and gets genuine answers in return. A classroom full of curious kids would be catastrophic for the first two weeks.

By the third, Martin would have reorganized the entire science curriculum without being asked, and would be falling prey to cute pranks right in the spirits of Port Wenn.

5. Lobster Hand — With Aunt Sarah

Sarah has been the most patient person in Martin’s orbit since he arrived in Port Wenn at the beginning of Best Medicine, and she has been hauling lobsters alone for decades without complaint.

Martin has worked with her before, but as a kid. Older Martin is something else. He would object to the rope technique within four minutes. Sarah would hand him the rope again without comment.

They would argue for the better part of an hour, and then, because Martin’s diagnostic brain notices patterns in everything, he’d mention something about the water temperature and the trap positioning that nobody had thought to connect.

Somewhere in the banter between them, out on that grey Maine water with the cold coming in, something would settle between these two people who are more alike than either would ever willingly admit. It’d be a very good hour of television.

6. On-Camera Talent — On Elaine’s YouTube Channel

Elaine’s channel — which already produced the masterpiece that was Claw & Order: B.O.G. — has been missing one crucial element since it launched: a furious, unwilling, six-foot co-star who stumbles into frame while trying to get to the coffee machine.

Martin would never agree to appear on the channel. He would never acknowledge that the channel existed.

He would, nonetheless, end up in the background of approximately forty percent of Elaine’s videos, reacting to whatever she was filming with expressions ranging from bewilderment to active disdain, and those clips would become the thing the audience actually subscribed for.

Comments sections across the internet would fill up with people cataloging his reactions. A compilation would go viral. Elaine would be thrilled. By the season finale, his face would be on merchandise, which Port Wenn would buy enthusiastically.

7. Pharmacy Assistant — With Sally Mylow

Martin’s encyclopedic knowledge of pharmacology and drug interactions would make him genuinely, legitimately excellent at the job — and that’s the part that would drive him absolutely insane.

He’d have to explain complex drug combinations in plain language to people who hadn’t asked for a lecture, which runs directly counter to every instinct he has.

Sally, it should be noted, is perfectly capable of running that pharmacy without him, but her flirty nature will annoy the hell out of Martin.

He’d reorganize the inventory within the first week. Sally would move one thing back, just one, to see what happened. Martin would notice immediately.

It would be fun to see Martin try and find a way around everything Sally throws at him, without losing his job, and without making Mark upset.

Seven jobs, zero of which Martin would willingly choose, all of which Port Wenn would make work through sheer relentless warmth and his own grudging competence.

Which of these would you actually want to see in Season 2? Sound off in the comments below.

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