remember to look behind you

The Road to Hell: Jay Merrick as Unreliable Narrator


I feel like Jay tends to be under-analyzed in comparison to the other main characters of the series, which is something of a shame, because Jay has an incredible amount of power over the shape of the narrative that often goes unnoticed by both the audience and Jay himself. We seem to expect unreliable narration from the other characters, but tend to take Jay at face value. It's likely that this is due in part to the fact that Troy has stated he would use Jay's twitter account as a means to give hints for solving some of the more complex ciphers posted by totheark, but as this was about the codes, not the meanings behind the messages nor about the narrative itself, I think we'd be remiss to assume that we're meant to always take Jay's interpretations of events as accurate. Jay is just as much an unreliable narrator as Brian, Tim, and Alex are, and I'd like to explore the way Jay's intentions, biases, and deceptions work to shape the narrative presented on the Marble Hornets channel.

In Entry #3, Jay tells us that he cut together about 2.5 minutes worth of footage from around 12 different tapes. Depending on what kind of tape Alex was using to film Marble Hornets at the time, a single tape could hold anywhere from 1 to 5 hours worth of footage. Given that Alex frequently recorded himself while asleep, and how often Jay will comment that half an hour or more will pass on a tape before something else of note happens, I would wager it's more likely to be more than a single hour of footage per tape. However, at Minimum Jay watched about 12 hours of footage that Alex had recorded just to make a video where he shows us 0.002% of it. 

This is noteworthy on a few different levels. On the first, Jay is wearing himself ragged trying to keep up with the pace his curiosity is demanding he set for himself from the very beginning. Entry #1 and #2 were posted on June 21, and Entry #3 on June 23rd (he mentions finishing the final edit at about 1:30AM). Barely two days have passed, and Jay has spent at minimum 12 hours of that time going through footage, not even counting the time it would take to edit the clips together. This means that it is extremely likely that there are events and phenomenon that slipped Jay's attention -- either because he's watching an incredible amount of footage on a strict schedule, or he's fast-forwarding his way through sections of tape that seem stagnant or unimportant. Even at the very start, Jay mentions that he's avoiding sleep and forgetting to eat, exacerbating the issue further. It's impossible to presume that he was able to catch and recognize every single moment on the tape he'd received from Alex that would have been relevant to the story he hasn't even uncovered yet.

On that note, at the second level, Jay at this point does not fully understand what it is he's looking for. He's seen the Operator in clips, and knows to look out for that, but what are some of the subtler, more nuanced indications of its presence that jay is overlooking because he doesn't know to look for them?

And a step further to the third level, Jay is working to compile a document of strange occurrences. Intentional or not, this leads to Jay only really being interested in showing Alex "at his worst". His most erratic, his most agitated -- the only moments Jay believes are relevant, because he is focused on studying A Strange Happening, not on giving us an accurate image of everyone involved. All of the softer and more mundane aspects of Alex's life and relationships are completely cut out, because Jay doesn't think they're worth sharing -- he knows Alex, these things don't stand out to him because they aren't Strange, they just are. The audience, on the other hand, doesn't have this frame of reference to work off of. We know that Jay found the moments where Alex would snap at the MH cast to be out of character, but we as an audience don't get a true picture of what Alex's true character was. We get glimpses of it, of course, but the vast majority of what we actually see are the moments Jay knows to be out of character, suspicious, and unusual. This irrevocably shapes the audience's perception of Alex -- his "true" character is abstract and ephemeral -- what we are shown over and over again is Alex at his worst and most affected by the Operator's influence, and that is what shapes our best understanding of his character.

To complicate matters further, it is worth noting that Alex never -- at any point -- shot his footage with the intention of it being seen by other people. In Season One, it's likely that Alex had thought he'd already burned the tapes with the most evidence of the Operator and its influence, and even then, Jay had to harass Alex into handing over the b-roll footage Alex hadn't gotten rid of yet, which Alex seemed to regret as soon as it had happened. Unlike Jay, who films himself for the audience almost exclusively, Alex recorded footage for himself, and never anticipated an audience.

(I know some people have claimed that Alex shared specific tapes with Jay on purpose in order to tell a very specific narrative that was biased in his favor, but I don't think this idea makes any sense, really. Alex didn't want anyone to know about the Operator at all, because according to his logic outlined in Season Three, that just makes them susceptible to infection. It doesn't track that he'd take the time to craft a deliberate narrative of himself as victim, especially when his plan was to burn the last of those tapes before Jay spontaneously intervenes. It only really makes sense that Alex really did think those tapes just had mundane b-roll footage on them.)

This means that even if Jay had shared ALL of the footage on all of the tapes he had in his possession without editing anything down, we would still be missing huge chunks of relevant information, because Alex destroyed it. He did not want the footage to be seen at all. This continues into Season Two, when Alex begins filming himself a second time with the same intention to share none of it with other people, only for Jay to steal that footage and post it online anyway.

Jay's bias is only worsened by the existence of totheark. Despite the fact that they are objectively just as clueless as Jay, they present themselves as all-knowing, and Jay believes them because there is no other anchor in the onslaught of footage that can help shape it into something coherent. Jay may know that totheark is an unreliable source of information and suspicious in and of themselves, but on some level he still listens to what they tell him, because he doesn't have anyone else around offering him answers.

So when totheark claims that Alex is lying, that Alex is a threat, that Alex is dangerous, and uniquely affected by the Operator's influence and uniquely cognizant under it, Jay believes them. He initially begins to go through the footage with intention simply because he's curious and confused, but then as he begins to see Alex's stress, fear, and confusion, Jay grows concerned for him. His intentions shift to a desire to find Alex because he wants to know if Alex is "okay".

But the whole time Jay is working on this, totheark is insisting over and over again that Alex isn't someone to be concerned for, he's someone to be concerned about -- someone to be afraid of. He's not "in danger", but dangerous. Although totheark has posed more of a tangible threat to Jay than anyone else has at this point, Jay still can't help but believe them on some level, and that carries us into Season Two, when Jay's biases come out in much more blatant ways.

The tape that Alex sends to Jay at the end of Season One is notable in two ways. First, it's the present-day!Alex's introduction to the series. Everything we've seen of Alex up until this point has been old footage that is years out of date -- this is finally something that gives the audience a glimpse of who he is now. It's also the only footage in Marble Hornets that Alex curated, edited, and deliberately shared with the intention of it being seen. Outside of this one tape, Alex is the only main character who never films for the audience deliberately (Jay for the main channel, Brian for totheark, and Tim for both), or intentionally shares any footage at all. It's just this one tape -- a literal cry for help.

And Jay responds, but his previously stated concern for Alex seems to take a backseat in favor of suspicion almost immediately.

(ASIDE: Most of this article is written under the presumption that Alex is being upfront with his intentions when he and Jay reunite in Season Two. I know the popular interpretation is that Alex lured Jay out to the Rosswood area after Season One in order to kill him, but this interpretation still fails to make sense to me given that Alex has ample time to kill both Jay and Tim in Entry #35, and yet refrains, and continues to do so for a period of months. I've written about this more in a different article, if you're curious, but just be aware of this going forward.) 

Even though Tim as the Masked Man has followed Jay all the way out to the Rosswood area, and to the abandoned house specifically, and has both attacked Jay before, had a knife this time, and attacked first, Jay seems to take more of an affront to Alex's retaliation than anything else. The fact that Tim stabbed Alex is pushed aside in favor of zeroing in on Alex breaking Tim's leg -- it's retaliation that wouldn't hold up in a court of law, obviously, but it's also not necessarily completely out of pocket. Like Alex points out, it's likely that Tim was there to kill one or both of them, and Alex only really goes far enough to make sure he couldn't follow them and try again. While Alex is restraining Tim with the cord before the rock even comes into play, part of the cord is already wrapped around Tim's neck -- if Alex had wanted to kill him, it wouldn't necessarily have been hard.

In Jay's eyes (both the past!Jay who was filming footage at the time, and the Present!Jay that is editing and posting that footage), this instead only seems to "prove" that totheark was right about Alex all along, and Alex gets abruptly moved into the "suspicious threat" category in Jay's eyes. Suddenly, everything Alex does is cause for suspicion -- the fact that he doesn't immediately answer all of Jay's questions with knowledge he might not even have, the fact that he doesn't want Jay following him, knowing where he lives, or filming him is sketchy, now, instead of rational. Jay wants to know, and Alex "won't" tell him, and that makes Alex the most suspicious character on the board now.

Looking at things objectively, it feels fairly obvious that Alex is attempting to look for Amy while also minimizing damages as a whole. He -- like Tim -- likely has a job that is keeping a lot of his time occupied, he doesn't want Tim to continue stalking and threatening them so he makes sure to limit his ability to move around without killing him, he doesn't want Jessica involved because he knows she doesn't know anything about the Operator and knows that getting her involved can only lead to her getting hurt, and he doesn't want Jay coming to his house and filming there because he -- like Tim -- doesn't like the idea of his location and personal information being broadcasted onto anyone on the internet who happens to stumble across Jay's channel. Nothing Alex actually does at this juncture is particularly beyond the pale, or tangible proof of his supposedly bad intentions.

(Sure, one could argue that it's sketch that Alex isn't dedicating 100% of his attention to searching for Amy, but one could also argue that Amy's life isn't necessarily "in immediate danger". The Operator is a life-ruining presence on a lot of levels, but it's never really been shown to be a life-ending one. If you assume that Alex remembers anything from his college encounters with it, then he knows that even people who are taken by the Operator seem to eventually turn back up again alive. Amy might be missing, but it's a real possibility that she might just reemerge without warning and slide right back into her daily routine as if nothing had happened -- it's actually more likely than her being dead is, frankly.)

Jay, however, is unconvinced. The Jay who filmed the footage almost immediately begins to stalk Alex, following him around and filming him in public, following him home and breaking into his house, breaking into his house and stealing things out of it -- including a key that will make it easier for him to break in a second time. Meanwhile, the Jay who is editing and posting the footage is further cementing the biased narration by adding title cards with comments like "Alex had plenty of time to follow me, but didn't. I don't know why he wouldn't run, after seeing what was behind him" (Entry #46), which continues to influence the audience's perception of Alex.

We -- both the audience and Jay -- have seen the Operator / Operator Sickness incapacitate people several times already (Entry #18, Return, Entry #20, Entry #23, Entry #43) and yet when Alex doesn't show up on the footage Jay shot as he ran out of the house, Jay asks why he "didn't" follow him out, not if he "couldn't" (or even, frankly, if Alex had run out of the house but just didn't show up on the footage -- the present!Jay posting this title card doesn't actually remember this event, he's only reacting to what is on the film, but he doesn't seem to even ask himself if it could just be that Alex ran in a different direction). He automatically presumes that Alex made a deliberate choice to stay. It's subtle, but it is also significant -- it leaves the audience primed to see Alex as "culpable" rather than just another victim. Jay "couldn't" run away from the Operator in Return, but Alex "wouldn't" run away -- it's a disparity that impacts a Lot of the audience's understanding of what's going on.

(Again, one might feel inclined to argue that Troy sometimes spoke through Jay to lead the audience in codebreaking, but I'd be inclined to ignore you. This would be a Doyalist response to a Watsonian quandary. It doesn't matter what Troy says outside of the narrative, it matters what we see of Jay inside the narrative. Maybe Troy added that card in order to specify something about Alex's character (and I'd take that argument with a grain of salt, given that assisting in codebreaking is pretty different from interjecting on the story itself), but as a title card that Jay wrote, it's nothing more than an assumption he's making without any basis in fact.)

Jay seems almost completely unaware of both the subtle biases he introduces to the narrative, but also of the change in his own goals and intentions. Jay says over and over again that he's working out of a concern for someone else (Alex in Season One, Amy in Season Two, and Jessica in Season Three), but that's not actually something we ever seen Jay do. Arguably, Alex is the one who seems more overtly busy combing Rosswood (and arguably, his regular routine, given that again, almost everyone else that came back from the Operator seemed to slot back into their own daily routine with no ceremony) for Amy. Jay is not looking for Amy like he says he is, he's stalking Alex; because Jay isn't interested in finding Amy, he's interested in getting the answers he wants from Alex.

This dissonance continues into Season Three (and, frankly, was present back in Season One when Jay claims to be looking for Alex, but spends most of his time running around Brian's house). There, Jay claims to be acting out of a concern for Jessica -- he says he wants to find her and make sure she's alright. What Jay does, though, is simply switch his attention from Alex onto Tim, because his new actual priority is getting the answers he wants out of Tim. He sits outside of Tim's doctor's office every day for a full week waiting for him to show up again, he pauses his investigation entirely to go through the tapes that Tim gave him, and then immediately wants to go out and investigate the locations from those tapes despite the fact that they have nothing to do with Jessica, and then progresses to doxxing Tim and posting his medical records to the internet. Jay continues to pay lip service to his concern for Jessica, but in his actions she is all but forgotten entirely.

In a similar vein, the other subtle way Jay shapes the audience's understanding of the narrative are the little ways Jay edits things that undermine or softens the actions that he's taking. When Jay in S2 admits to stalking Alex, he does so in a title card that almost innocuously says "I began following Alex after finding out about him lying to Jessica. From what I can tell, I never caught him doing anything out of the ordinary during the few months I was doing this." He uses only brief clips that are 4-5 seconds long. The fact that it has been months is almost easy to miss with how quickly Jay moves past it. Disregard that, he seems to say, and pay attention to what Alex is doing in the longer clip Jay begins to show around the one minute mark. And the audience does, because Jay is almost easy to forget as a Character when he's behind the camera like that. He's "just" the cameraman, there to show us footage of Alex, not a real participant in the narrative, but an impartial observer who has no real impact on the story. Or that's how Jay seems to see himself, at least.

In actuality, though, you don't need to look any further than the Entry #48/#49 uploads to see how directly Jay's actions are affecting the other characters -- Alex in particular. Jay cuts down months of persistent stalking down to a digestible one-minute compilation and a couple of title cards that beg to be disregarded because Jay is using them to say he doesn't notice anything out of the ordinary. Alex is the one who has spent every day of those months (Jay says "a few" but doesn't specify how many, exactly; at least three) living under the stress of a persistent lack of security due to the threats cornering him from all angles (the Operator is back to stalking him again, which was so stressful it alone was enough to ruin his life in college, both members of totheark are stalking and instigating confrontations with him now, and Jay is following him everywhere he goes and continuing to film him and his house throughout the day and well into the night. It doesn't surprise me at all that Alex eventually snapped under the pressure of those circumstances.

(I'm arguably not impartial on this particular subject since I've spent a significant amount of my life struggling with persecutory delusions of being spied on, stalked and filmed. Even though I almost always have insight into my delusions and know the stalkers aren't "real", it's still a devastatingly terrifying feeling that borders on debilitating and life-ruining just on its own. The thought of being actually, tangibly, provably stalked this significantly by not just one, but four distinct individuals is literally sickening. Especially given the additional threat of Jay's audience, but I'll get more into that later.)

In the footage shown in Entry #49 it is very clear that Alex had mistaken the stranger for Jay, specifically. The keyed up way Alex talks to himself as he walks through Rosswood park at the beginning ("Don't follow me", "I know you're there"), the fact that he had just caught Jay stalking and filming him at the tunnel already just moments before, and the way he ultimately shouts "I told you not to follow me" -- all of these reactions make it blatantly obvious that Alex had reacted to the stranger's appearance under the assumption that it was Jay following him again (TBH, I don't even blame him for it). It's noteworthy, though, that Jay only comments to say "I've never seen the person that approached Alex in the tunnel before now. I'm not even sure Alex knew who it was", as if to deflect the notion that he had any role in instigating the attack.

Jay does the same thing again with Tim is Season Three. he cuts down a week's worth of daily stalking to a 45 second compilation, brushes past the fact that he's skulking around town to ask strangers to give up more details about Tim, and unabashedly posting all of the information he finds about Tim online. I know that the audience as a whole doesn't tend to consider its role in the narrative, generally speaking, because we aren't characters. Marble Hornets is an Unfiction series, not an ARG, so the audience has no role to play in directly choosing the path that the narrative follows with agency, but the fact that it is still unfiction means that the audience does still exist as a kind of character in the narrative.

Here's what I mean: Jay and the audience both see themselves as nothing more than passive observers. Jay isn't "really" making moves like Tim, Brian, or Alex, he's just kind of along for the ride. The core of what Jay actually wants (not what he says he wants) is just to Know. So that mean he'll wander anywhere the story goes just for the sake of trailing after it. He's only an active player insofar as he hunts down the story, he's not after anything tangible like Tim or Alex, so he thinks that makes him "passive". the audience, in that same vein, sees themselves that exact same way. They don't have any direct Agency over the direction of the narrative, so that just means they're "passive".

Alex and Tim, though, are on the same page when they disagree with this idea entirely, and they're right to do so. The audience isn't hidden behind the fourth wall, passive, unreal, and intangible -- unknowable by the other characters. The audience and Jay both are an active presence to the other characters, both are an active threat.

The agency that Jay constantly overlooks in himself is his ability to curate and moderate what he chooses to post online. Jay himself might disagree -- he's paranoid about losing time again like he had in Season Two, so he "has" to keep posting so he won't forget, or "in case something happens" to him like he claims in Entry #49 -- but the actual fact is that Jay does not share Everything with his audience. He can choose when he wants to upload, what he wants to upload, and can edit those uploads however he wants (from editing out last names to editing out the amount of stalking he's been doing), and this is an agency that Alex and Tim both lack

Tim, of course, is eventually able to get his foot in the door, but not until Entry #72 when Jay is incapacitated by the Operator. Att he beginning of Season Three, Jay is the one with all the power. And Alex never has this agency at any point in the series -- as previously stated, Alex is the only main character who never films, edits, or uploads a video for the audience to see.

The audience doesn't consider its role in the narrative because we know it's just fiction. The fact that it is Unfiction, however, makes the characters aware of the audience at all times, some more than others.

It's obvious that Alex and Tim both find the presence of Jay and Jay's audience alarming. Alex explicitly tells Jay he doesn't want Jay knowing where he lives because Alex is aware of the audience and the potential threat it poses in a way Jay doesn't think to be. He's the one who points out to Jay in Entry #36 how easily his channel made it possible for Alex to find Jay in order to send him the package with the tape in it. Alex knows that there are other members of the audience out there who could have much worse intentions than mailing a tape, and knows it would be easy for them to track Jay/Alex down if they chose to. He is also, undoubtedly, aware of how totheark has primed the audience to perceive him as both guilty and a threat. Alex is afraid of the consequences of the audience. Jay -- despite the fact that he arguably should be, given his apartment burning down in season one -- is not. Jay has no qualms about stalking Alex and posting that footage online, of posting footage of Alex having a mental breakdown online, of posting footage of Alex committing a murder online, all alongside the open uncensored name of the town that they're in.

Tim is equally unnerved by the audience, for reasons that may seem comparatively 'mundane', but still equally important. His outburst in Entry #59 is proof of that -- Tim doesn't consider Jay's channel to be a neutral or passive presence, it's a threat. The fact that Jay has not only been secretly filming Tim and Tim's personal information when Tim wasn't aware of it (contrast Jay waiting outside the doctor's office for a week and asking strangers for information about him with Tim noticing the camera for the first time and Jay telling him it's for behind the scenes content), but also posting all of that footage online for an audience of thousands without Tim's knowledge or consent. In the narrative of Marble Hornets, this isn't a fiction, it's Tim's real life being broadcasted in almost real-time out onto the broader internet without moderation. It poses a tangible threat to both Tim's safety and his livelihood. Tim's employment is constantly shown to be fragile and unstable due to his mental health issues, and Jay is putting it further at risk by posting this content of Tim without any subtlety. If Tim's boss found the channel it could very well put his employment at risk (either because his boss could assume that Tim is deliberately shirking his work in order to fuck around and make videos for the internet for fun, or because his boss could decide that Tim's overtly displayed mental health issues on the channel make him unsuitable as an employee, since Tim can't mask those symptoms in order to hide them when he doesn't know he's being filmed). Aside from losing vital income, given how reliant we've seen Tim be on the psychiatric system, the loss of his health insurance would be equally -- if not more -- devastating.

Whether Jay acknowledges it or not, he is leveraging their safety against their compliance. Alex doesn't comply with Jay's demands, so Jay stalks him for months, and then posts the footage of him online despite the fact that Alex had specifically told him not to. Tim doesn't comply with Jay's demands, so barely a month passes between his vehement protest of Jay's release of his personal information and the Entry #60.5 upload where Jay posts all of Tim's medical records and openly laments that Brian had censored some of the details in them. It's not until Tim is the one who caves and agrees to work alongside Jay three months later that Tim has any chance of having a say in what Jay posts about him online. To be clear, I don't think Jay does this intentionally or maliciously, but that doesn't change the fact that he still does it.

That's the point of this article's title, after all. "The road to hell is paved with good intentions" -- Jay doesn't wield this threat with any actual intent, it's simply a by-product he likely isn't even aware of. Jay is barely even aware he's doing it, which is why you'll see Jay complain over and over again about how totheark stalking and uploading footage of him is terrifying and upsetting, only for him to turn around and stalk Alex and Tim the exact same way without any hesitation. Jay lacks self-awareness on a multitude of levels. He's a good detective, but he has no comprehension of his actual role or weight in the narrative he's found himself in.

Jay's obliviousness is ultimately his fatal flaw -- the thing that drives the narrative further, and down an increasingly worsening path since Jay cannot see the full hand he has in choosing to take that route. It's what gets everyone around him deeper into the shit. Alex tried to keep Jessica out of everything, but Jay wanted answers, so he pushed and got her hurt. Alex wanted to stay out of Jay's channel and keep his focus on finding Amy, but Jay wanted answers, so he pushed and pushed until Alex snapped (I truly do wonder how much of the conflict at the end of Season Two and over Season Three could have been avoided entirely if Jay's stalking hadn't provoked Alex's attack against the stranger). Tim wanted to stay out of things, but Jay wanted answers, so he pushed until Tim had no choice but to get involved again. Alex wanted to go back to hiding and staying out of things entirely, but Jay wanted answers, so he pushed until Alex had no choice but to decide there was only one real way out of the story entirely. Jay knew the channel wasn't good for his health or his life all the way back in Season One, but Jay wanted answers, so he kept pushing himself until he had nothing but the channel left.

This obliviousness and insatiable drive for answers without stopping to consider the consequences or his role in things is ultimately what gets Jay killed. By Entry #80, it couldn't possibly be clearer that Alex is an active threat, and Jay was the one who pushed until Alex was that threat. And Jay is the one who follows Alex into an isolated, abandoned building at the end of it all. And there, face to face with a threat that blames him wholly for everything that happened, Jay doesn't run. He stands there, with his camera on, unflinching, because it still doesn't occur to Jay that he's anything but the cameraman. Jay thinks he's still just a passive, impartial observer, sitting on the outskirts of the narrative. He doesn't recognize that he's an actual character until he's already bleeding out.

I've said before that Marble Hornets is basically a natural disaster tragedy masquerading as a creature feature horror. That there's not necessarily a clear-cut "Bad Guy" you can pin all the blame on because all of the characters are stuck scrambling to find a way to rationalize and react to something completely incomprehensible. I stand by that, but it's hard not to notice that the threat of the narrative sat completely inert for three years before Jay stumbled in and woke it up again. Hard not to see that Alex had been willing to just go to ground and hide again before Jay proved over and over again that he wouldn't stop. Hard not to notice that Jessica wouldn't have been involved at all, if not for Jay. Hard not to see that Jay and his channel are the first dominoes falling that lead inexorably to everyone being killed.

The blame doesn't lie 100% at Jay's feet, of course. Everyone else made their own decisions that helped push the conflict to its final conclusion. Jay wasn't the only one to blame. But, I do think it's more "his fault" than anyone tends to give him credit for. "The road to hell" and all, and Jay was the one who dragged everyone on that first step.

I have to wonder: Did he regret it? Or did he only really regret that he never got all of those answers he'd been looking for?


This essay is still somewhat a WIP since the whole site is a bit of a living document, so I may come back to edit some parts or add more to it over time. If you have any questions, comments, or contrary opinions feel free to leave a comment; I'm curious to hear what you think!!