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I WANNA HUNT LIKE DAVID,
I WANNA KILL ME A GIANT MAN
I wanna slay my demons, but I got lots of them, I got lots of them.
User Name/Nick: Gwen
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betterdeadthanredAIM/IM: girlwonder004 @ AIM
E-mail: isthereair@gmail.com
Other Characters: Charles Xavier, David 8, Peter Parker, Elsa
Character Name: Jack Shephard
Series: LOST
Age: 37
From When?: During the shoot out in 5x17: The Incident.
Inmate/Warden: Inmate - Jack has a billion issues that desperately need to be addressed and honestly, I don't trust him with the well being of another person who's potentially a criminal and probably at least slightly emotionally disturbed. Specifically, he has an obsessive personality that makes it basically impossible for him to maintain a long term relationship with anyone, which often expresses itself in him becoming controlling and at least somewhat enraged when said object of his obsession isn't responding the way he wants them to. He has a lot of anger issues, is extremely ends justify the means (see: telling Sayid to torture Sawyer to get Shannon her asthma medication, threatening to shoot people a billion times when he doesn't get his way, etc. etc.) and also has a history of suicidal depression and substance abuse. While he does have some qualities of a good leader, he is often too impulsive and too willing to go to extremes, which has gotten a lot of people under his care hurt or killed. He tries to justify what he's doing because he's got the best interests of everyone at heart, but he needs a serious attitude adjustment before he can really be the leader and good person he thinks he is and wants to be.
Item: N/A
Abilities/Powers: Jack is a baseline normal human. He's a very skilled spinal surgeon, and has spent several weeks on an island as literally the only medical professional to a group of about forty people. During that time, he's given stitches, brought people back from the brink of death, treated a variety of illnesses, helped people overcome addiction, advised pregnant women, helped diagnose and alleviate issues with vision, given a blood transfusion using a tube and a sea urchin spine, amputated a damaged leg (although that extra was never seen again so...) and helped a fertility specialist and a dentist do an appendectomy on himself, so he's basically Super Doctor who can do whatever the plot needs him to.
He is also pretty comfortable with a handgun, and not entirely incompetent at physical combat, but can pretty easily be taken down by someone with more experience than him. I mean seriously, he wouldn't last two minutes against Charles at this point. That's about it.
Personality: The first thing the audience learns about Jack is that he's someone you want on your side in a crisis. Right after the crash of Oceanic Flight 815, Jack runs towards the wreckage of the plane and immediately starts helping everyone he can, hustling them away from the fire and fumes, treating injuries and gathering other survivors to help take care of those who need it most. This pretty much sums up his behavior for the rest of the show: when there's danger, Jack runs towards it and tries to help keep as many of his people safe as possible, even if sometimes he really doesn't feel cut out to be a leader.
This isn't necessarily a fair assessment of character on his part. Jack has certain qualities that make him an excellent leader - he's brave, he's smart, and he's capable of putting his feelings aside for the greater good of others. His position as the only doctor on the Island amongst the middle section survivors mean that people quickly grow to trust him and look to him for help with everything, and he's definitely not incapable of following through on that, particularly when it comes to giving medical advice. He's good at putting on a brave face for the sake of everyone else, and tries to live by the lesson he learned during his first major surgery - let the fear in for five seconds, and then get back to work.
The problem is Jack is basically his own worst enemy in just about every aspect of his life. He tries to come off as someone who has all the answers and knows what the right thing to do is, but he often doesn't, and ends up overcompensating in ways that usually do more harm than good.
First off, Jack has very mixed feelings about his own ability to lead anyone anywhere, which has fluctuated at different points in the series. This stems from an incident in his early childhood - when he was attacked by bullies for defending his best friend, Jack's father told him "Don't choose, Jack. Don't decide. You don't want to be a hero. You don't want to try and save everyone. Because when you fail, you just don't have what it takes." Christian Shephard meant that Jack takes failure too hard and too personally, and it would be easier for him to just walk away or let other people make the difficult choices to spare himself the crushing defeat of being wrong. Jack has internalized this, and both believes it and struggles desperately against it. He wants to be the hero, to make good decisions and do the right thing, but he takes failure very, very hard, and personally! It's hard for him to deal with the difficult parts of being the Good Guy, especially when it means doing things like "sacrificing" the lives of three of his friends to save the rest of the survivors, or leaving other people behind so at least some of the survivors can get off the Island safely. It's hard for him to deal with the consequences of being a doctor too, because as good as it is to help people, it's crushing to realize there's nothing you can do to save someone, and Jack often doesn't express that crushing emotion well. At all.
Namely, he has a lot of emotional control issues. Jack is a classic example of someone who bottles his emotions up inside for the benefit of everyone else/to save face, only to have them completely catastrophically explode later on. In Jack's case, this usually means overwhelmed crying, shouting or violently punching things, which is generally bad when said thing you're punching is a person you're still going to be stuck with for God knows how long. This seems to have cooled off a little since coming back to the Island - he has yet to punch Sawyer in the face, for example - but considering how things progress into Season Six, it's still very safe to say that Jack could do with some anger management courses. He totally has a temper, is not afraid to take it out on someone with his fists and basically can be kind of a jackass. Like, a lot.
As a side note to that, he can be very ends justify the means. He likes to pretend that he isn't and that he has the moral high ground, but there have been multiple examples throughout the series of him sanctioning pretty violent acts or okaying sketchy methods to secure the outcome he wants. He has Sawyer tortured to make him give back Shannon's inhaler (which he didn't have), literally holds Ben's life in his hands as a bargaining chip to rescue his friends and violently attacks Locke after Boone's death to try to get him to admit he was lying about how Boone was injured. Hypocritically, he is furious with Locke for allowing Sayid to torture Ben before they know the truth about his identity, and generally judges other people fairly harshly when they make decisions he doesn't agree with on the grounds of morality, when in reality, his morals can be a little gray, too.
On top of being terrible at constructively expressing anger and frustration, he is pretty lousy about telling people things like I care about you, or I love you, or generally talking about his feelings. When his (now ex) wife Sarah wanted to write their own wedding vows, he agonized over what to say for weeks, couldn't come up with anything, and decided to just wing it the day of. It ended up working out, but it still pretty clearly shows that Jack kind of sucks at being emotionally open when it comes to the people he cares about. Since the pilot, Jack has cared about fellow survivor Kate Austen a lot, and everyone knows it. Literally, everyone. But Jack has only actually admitted he loves her like, twice, and both times were under duress. His weird, inability to really express positive emotions puts strain on his relationships and can end up pushing people away. This also has roots in his issues with his father, as Christian wasn't the most emotive parent and - according to Jack in the flash sideways timeline/universe - never told him he was proud of him, or that he'd love him no matter what. Basically, despite being far from an emotionless robot, Jack really sucks at actually expressing his feelings.
All of these emotional control issues contribute to another key part of his kind of sucking at being a leader: Jack acts before really thinking about the potential consequences of those actions a lot. He is always the first person to volunteer to go chasing off into the jungle after someone, and while that's really noble of him, he's also the only doctor the survivors have, and if he dies, they're kind of screwed if anyone gets hurt or sick because Hurley sure isn't whipping a medical degree out of no where. He's also not necessarily the best trained fighter in the group, so it doesn't even necessarily make sense for him to do things like "create an army" whereas say, Sayid might be a little better qualified to go charging into the heart of darkness and organizing people to defend the camp against the Others. His quick thinking does come in handy sometimes, but often he acts irrationally without really acknowledging other people's very valid concerns about his plans, or lack thereof. Part of this is probably some arrogance, and attached to his idea that everyone made him the leader, so now he's going to make the difficult decisions and screw everyone else, you basically put him in this position in the first place so now he's going to do it. This means he's dismissive of other people's input and challenges anyone who tries to suggest maybe he's not doing the right thing - the most recent incident being his incredible belief that setting off the Jughead bomb will rest the timeline so Flight 815 never crashes, even though Sawyer and several of the others make the very valid point that he could be dooming all of them to die horrible deaths along with everyone else on the Island. Sawyer even points out that he's the one in charge now because he's been living with the DHARMA Initiative for three years while Jack's been gone, but Jack still effectively dismisses him and wants to do this own thing. This doesn't even end after Jack finds out he's wrong - he smashes the mirrors in Jacob's lighthouse days later (after his pullpoint to TLV) without knowing what he's doing, just acting out because he's upset. Had things been different and less "everything happens for a reason", he really could have screwed things up. Thus, it goes without saying that he can be a control freak, and while sometimes this isn't the worst thing in the world, often it expresses itself as him doing things like telling Kate she can't come along on an adventure "because he said so", which is kind of a dickish thing to say to someone.
He also has an obsessive need to fix things and has an incredibly difficult time letting things go. He is always looking for new things to "fix", whether it be at work or on the Island. It drives most of the people in his life insane, and like his inability to communicate, it has pushed people he loves away. Instead of learning to let things go and admit defeat, Jack pushes and pushes and pushes until he's explored every available option, or someone pulls the plug on him. He refuses to give up trying to reverse Sarah's paralysis, he refuses to stop trying treatments to fix Gabriela's father, and his attempts to fix his disintegrated marriage turned him into an angry, paranoid, obsessive stalker when he thought his ex-wife was having an affair with his father. On the Island, he similarly refuses to let Boone die until Boone tells him it's okay, is willing to sacrifice basically anything to get the other survivors off the Island and then becomes obsessed with returning to it because he feels like coming home hasn't fixed anything and they were never meant to leave. On top of that, he's just generally a pretty stubborn "I'm right, you're wrong" kind of person, and again, really comes off as a bit obsessive.
His obsessive tendencies coupled with his anger and control issues are kind of a Molotov cocktail of emotional destruction when coupled together, and this, on top of everything else often leaves him feeling isolated and alone after he's shoved everyone else away. Part of the issue is the whole "he walks among us but is not one of us" thing, namely because Jack is a part of the group without really being a part of it both because he feels like he needs to be the perfect, I have everything under control and must not show weakness leader and because he's just generally lonely. These feelings of isolation make it difficult for him to make the same kind of friendships the other survivors do and in general, he is kind of a lonely person. We've seen that he doesn't have much going on for him in his life off the Island - his father's dead, his wife has left him, really the only thing he has is his career - and while people like Hurley, Sun and even Sawyer make genuine lasting friendships with people on the Island, he's a little more distant. Apart from Kate, there's no one that can really point to Jack and say that guy is my best friend except maybe briefly Juliet. Hurley and Charlie have each other, Claire has Kate, Desmond gets chummy with Charlie, Claire and Hurley, and so on. The other survivors (and miscellaneous strays they pick up) generally like Jack a lot, but they don't really know him the same way they know the other characters.
When Jack fails at being the hero he imagines himself to be, he takes it really, really hard. He carries a lot of guilt around when he isn't able to save people, and feels personally responsible for not being able to do more for the people who were counting on him. This is especially true after he leaves the Island, and he cites that one of the main reasons he's returning after being away for three years was the thought of the people he'd left behind. He still feels like he needs to rescue Sawyer, Juliet and the others when he returns, even when Sawyer tells him they've made a life for themselves that they're comfortable with and might not actually want to be rescued. (Another example of him needing to fix things even when they're not fixable or don't really need to be.) There are other reasons for returning too, but considering how much time, energy and effort Jack put into getting the other survivors off the Island, and the fact that his primary motivation for setting off the Jughead bomb is resetting the timeline to save everyone on the plane, there's no way his goals have really changed. He wants to save everyone.
On that subject, Jack totally has a Messiah complex. It's not an intentional thing, and if anyone tried to call him out on it, he would probably deny it, but he totally feels like he's supposed to save everyone, and he's willing to sacrifice his happiness or (spoilers!) his life to do it.
Originally, Jack had a really difficult time accepting a lot of the crazy things happening on the Island, and thinks Locke is a crazy idiot for believing that being here, or pressing a button every 108 minutes, or people dying or whatever else is happening for a reason, and that they were meant to be on the Island because of fate or destiny or whatever else. All he was focused on was keeping as many people alive as possible, and then getting the hell off the Island. However, after getting back to the life he left behind, he realized... it kind of sucked. This realization - on top of a million other things - made him start thinking he made a mistake leaving the Island, and started his path of buying into everything Locke had said. While he's still a man of science in a lot of respects, he's also grown to be a man of faith, willing to put stock in things like destiny and fate where he wasn't before.
While off the Island, Jack had pretty serious issues with depression and substance abuse. He started drinking heavily when he started doubting whether or not they should have left the Island, and then became addicted to prescription medication. While this chapter in his life was admittedly brief, things spiraled out of control pretty quickly, almost costing him his job at the hospital and driving him to seriously contemplate and almost attempt suicide. Substance abuse - specifically alcoholism - runs in his family, and while it's unlikely he'll go down this road again while on the Barge, it's still something he needs to keep in mind and is part of what got him to the place he's in today.
Have I mentioned he's full of self doubt? Because he is, and this is the result of having a pushy parent who wasn't really supportive enough during Jack's formative years. Hug your kids, people. One of the reasons why he's so "good" at bottling everything up inside until he physically can't anymore is because his father had excruciatingly high expectations of his son, and made Jack feel as though no matter what he did or how hard he worked, he would never have his father's unconditional love and support. This has put a huge strain on every single aspect of his life, and is really the root of all of his problems, as potentially ridiculous as that sounds. Relatedly, he is also desperately scared of what he'd be like as a father himself, something that complicated his relationship with Kate and Aaron off the Island. Interestingly, he was actually pretty good at being a parent to his nephew, even if that kind of dissolved... horrendously. But the potential to move on from his own bad beginnings is there, if he just gives himself a chance and doesn't self sabotage again.
Basically, all of his issues can pretty much be traced back to his crappy relationship with his father. Jack might look like he has all the answers, or at least like he thinks he does, but in reality, he's kind of a shambling mess of self doubt and angst that is only holding itself together because other people are counting on him. That's a pretty admirable quality, because not everyone is capable of pulling it together for the sake of other people even when they feel like a mess, but it would be better for everyone if he could get to a place where he's less of an emotional wreck.
Despite all of his flaws, Jack does genuinely care for his friends. The show is full of little moments where Jack goes out of his way to do nice things for the other survivors, from keeping Charlie's secret about going through withdrawal from heroin to finding Sun a notebook to help her communicate with the other people on the Island when she loses the ability to speak English. He can be sweet, funny and caring, and while he does get jealous and frustrated and might kiss other women sometimes, he will try to do good things for other people and help when he can. He's also capable of relaxing and having fun instead of constantly being all serious and business like - he goofs around with Kate, plays on Hurley's golf course, plays ping pong with Sawyer and even tosses a football around with some of the Others while he's staying at the Barracks. It just takes some coaxing for the more relaxed, fun guy to come out under the hero doctor personality and because his life has been utterly crazy lately, the fun guy usually isn't out for long.
He also is capable of doing the right thing, even when the wrong thing would be a whole lot easier
In summary, Jack has a lot of good qualities, but also has a boatload of crippling emotional issues that really, really need to be dealt with. He knows he's flawed - even though he might be beyond reluctant to admit it, especially to someone he doesn't get along with - and he'll probably be a hard sell on the Barge and the fact that he's there as an inmate, but he has a ton of potential that just needs to be coaxed out.
Barge Reactions: Well, first off, Jack is going to be unbelievably furious that he's an inmate. Like, I don't think you understand what I mean when I say furious. He's spent so much of his life feeling trapped and unhappy that being stuck in yet another place after getting stuck on the Island, spending forever trying to get off said Island, and then getting home only to discover that he needs to go back to the Island because he done goofed by leaving said tropical craphole will pretty much make his aforementioned depression and inclination to substance abuse a whole lot worse. He will do a lot of I'M NOT SUPPOSED TO BE HERE!! shouting and will probably have an "overwhelmed toddler in the register lanes of a grocery store who has just been told he can't have a candy bar" level temper tantrum the first time someone tells him he's an inmate because he's done something horribly wrong.
Alright, maybe a much more mature version of that, but the metaphor still gets the point across relatively well. He's coming in from a point where he is literally trying to save hundreds of lives and wants to get back to that above all else, so he'll have a really hard time dealing with people who suggest that he's here because he's a bad person, or because he's done something really badly wrong.
Similarly, he will be innnnncredibly pissed if he's not allowed to help out in the infirmary, and will probably set up his own clinic/keep giving medical advice and respond to medical crises without asking permission because control issues/super doctor/hero complex. Even though he's been off the island for a couple years now, he's going to want to get right back into Hero Doc mode, especially once he finds out that the infirmary is almost always understaffed. Anyone who suggests the reason he's an inmate has to do with his profession will probably wind up being punched (Good job, Jack), and he will probably try to convince the wardens in charge to give him more access than the average inmate helper would have, particularly when he finds out the other wardens in charge right now are a robot, a teenager, a geneticist and a nuclear physicist. That said, he's also not necessarily going to bite their heads off unless they give him a hard time first - it's not like he doesn't realize the value of having anyone with medical experience when you're working with a limited number of people in an environment where you might not get any surgeons or pediatricians or heart specialists any time soon, and so while he might want to take point on a lot of things, he's willing to be part of a team, too. He just won't want to be treated like he's somehow less than the other staff members because 1. he's used to being prodigy miracle hero doctor and 2. he does have the most experience working in a hospital.
Either way, excellent CR opportunity for people.
In terms of how he'll respond to all the craziness of the Barge, he honestly will cope pretty well, especially once he gets his life a little more on track. He's good at assembling people in crisis situations, giving rousing speeches (LIVE TOGETHER DIE ALONE, PEOPLE) and hiking around in the pouring rain on the run from crazy people/monsters/polar bears, so he will probably try to circle the wagons and keep whatever little band of people he creates for himself close when shit hits the fan. That said, he won't like all the weird shit like floods and breaches, and will probably never be fully comfortable with them, particularly when they involve peeling away at issues he likes to pretend he doesn't have. He'll also probably buy into the concept of the Barge itself while being grumpy about the Admiral - are you Jacob, Admiral?? because it kind of feels like you are a tiny bit - except he will probably always bitterly resent that he's an inmate because he's tired of people he doesn't know watching him, having lots of info about him and then having the gall to tell him he's doing everything all wrong. I'm not sure if that's ever necessarily going to change, even after he's graduated, but as Jack does mellow out a lot more as the series winds to an end, I guess it's not impossible.
I also anticipate him being kind of wary and tired of putting up with Admiral-like bullshit, so I'm not sure he'll really buy into what the Barge is selling in general for a while. While he has become more of a Man of Faith since Locke died, I feel like this is a little conditional, or at least his new faith doesn't really coexist with the Barge in that he's supposed to be on the Island, not the Barge, and going through the whole no you're wrong you're supposed to be here this is your second chance/chance at a better life!! thing again is probably going to drive him a little bit insane.
He will also probably be pretty tight lipped about the Island at first and stick to the story the Oceanic Six gave to the press, but obviously I want him to start talking about smoke monsters and evil numbers and stuff, so I might angle to push that kind of thing along a little faster with the help of floods and such.
Path to Redemption: Ho boy. Okay, so Jack mostly needs to learn how to calm the fuck down and think before rushing into things. He has potential to be a really great person and leader, but all of his baggage makes it kind of impossible to be a genuinely Good person, especially at this point in his life. Something important for a warden to know is that they shouldn't overemphasize how much Jack sucks or he'll just get pissed and close off entirely, because he will definitely try to argue everything he did he did for the right reasons, and that his warden just doesn't get where he was coming from and therefore doesn't have the right to judge. This will really only lead to a fight that could potentially turn physical, and basically will go nowhere fast. If they keep pushing him about this, he'll get super resentful and either request reassignment, or basically refuse to ever talk or interact with them again, and that's not. Optimal.
First off on the actual making progress with him front, Jack needs to learn how to actually listen to other people. Being a leader doesn't mean telling other people to fuck off because you're in charge when they tell you things like "that's all well and good, but I worry you're going to get us all killed for these logical, valid reasons", no matter who Sawyer wants to have sex with. Actually having a warden in general will probably help him out with this, as he'll have to learn to cooperate with someone he might not always get along with who ultimately is the one in charge in this relationship. Don't bully him, but definitely put your foot down about things and set boundaries when it comes to difficult decisions, and he might actually listen.
He also really needs to learn to let things go, realize he can't fix everything, and that he doesn't need to let his father or his expectations control every aspect of his life, especially because he's dead and Christian did love him, even if he was shit at showing it. The best way to approach his myriad of issues is to kind of let him pick the pace of how conversations go, as he's likely to clam up and get defensive if the conversation starts off as clearly probing and personal. He's more likely to be vulnerable after ports/breaches/floods rip some of the veneer off, so if you follow up with him and ask how he's doing, he might offer more than you would expect from him on any other day.
He probably won't do well with someone his age or older than him, and - as terrible as I feel for saying this - I'm not sure a woman around his age would be a great fit because he has a tendency to make doe eyes at single women who try to help him, see Kate and Juliet, and that is a risk I don't think anyone should be willing to take. He might actually do better with a younger warden and will be quite protective of them, as he has a lot of unresolved feelings of guilt and responsibility towards Boone and Claire and will try to do better this time around. This definitely doesn't mean that he's going to try to turn them into Boone or Claire, or otherwise try to mold them into a more familiar role for him, but it'll help get them some immediate care and concern than an adult warden would right off the bat.
Oh also? Don't let him fall back on substance abuse when he gets depressed or frustrated. Ben flushed those pills for a reason, Jack.
In general, he really just needs to mellow out and realize the entire world doesn't rest on his shoulders. Trust your teammates, Jack! Maybe don't push Kate and Sawyer and everyone away just because you're feeling cranky and antsy! It's okay to need people and listen to their advice! Stop making terrible decisions that end up getting people killed!
Be patient with him. Jack is a good person, he just has a ton of room for improvement. Let him work in the infirmary, give him some agency and freedom, and he will be a pretty model inmate. Box him into a corner, tell him he really dun goofed, and he will be miserable, sulky and prone to lashing out, verbally and potentially physically.
History: Jack on Lostpedia
Sample Journal Entry:
[Jack has been on the Barge for just over two weeks, and already the novelty of having indoor plumbing and access to non DHARMA Initiative junk food has worn off, namely because someone has apparently been poisoning food in the kitchens, and now lots of people are sick.
The infirmary is full of miserable, cranky people, which means that your newest doctor on board is somewhat miserable and cranky too, and is not really doing a great job of hiding his growing irritation with whoever's responsible when he turns on his comm to address the Barge.]
Alright, has there been any movement on who's actually investigating who's behind this? I've got fifteen people down here who had the fish for lunch today and now they can't see straight, let alone do anything to help us figure out what's going on here.
I understand that there's not much by way of structure here so people can be reluctant to step up to the plate and take action, [Although from his tone of voice - which is heading into the territory of "I am kind of extremely frustrated and pissed off but am barely holding it together for now" - he understands it intellectually, but still thinks it's beyond stupid.] But we've got a serious problem on our hands, and if we don't figure out who's responsible, we've all in deep trouble.
And I know some of you don't think this is a big deal, but when you're puking your guts in a hospital bed because whoever's responsible is still out there? I'm pretty sure you'll get why we're all kind of in a hurry to get this done.
[Apparently Jack is one of those "I refuse to accept that I'm an inmate so in the mean time, I'll lecture like a warden" types. I know, we're all shocked.]
Sample RP:
There are a lot of things Jack doesn't love about being an inmate, but chief among them is needing to ask people's permission to do anything but eat, shower and sit in his room trying to stave off boredom, so it takes a few weeks before he actually finds himself in the CES. He's not a toddler, he doesn't need permission to do anything, and constantly kowtowing to people who thought he was here for a reason, that this was for the best, because he'd done terrible things and needed a second chance. He'd had a second chance, and this place had taken it away from him, had taken him away from the people he was trying to help, was treating him like he was some kind of criminal when there were bigger things at stake than whether or not he'd made mistakes in the past.
So basically, asking someone to let him do anything hadn't sat well with him.
It had started off innocently enough - someone had asked if he wanted to come along, and he said fine, knowing the basics of what the CES actually was and that he probably could do with some fresh air before he actually went crazy, fully expecting that with his luck, they'd either wind up in the arctic or on some weird, alien planet and resigning himself to that possibility. It's not like it would be the worst thing to ever happen to him.
But nothing could have prepared him for what was waiting for him in the enclosure.
In retrospect, he probably should have realized this would happen. That whatever supernatural force that decided his life was just some cosmic joke would still be at play here (and really, why else would he have ended up here?) because as soon as the door had opened, he'd realized where they were.
And it keeps happening. He'd demanded to be taken back the next day, and then the next, and a week later, and it was always the same. They'd open the door to discover the beach, Hydra Island, the caves, the site of the Swan station - there were even scorch marks on the ground from the explosion. And every time, he'd run through the jungle, over the sand, looking for any sign of his friends, the Others, the DHARMA Initiative, anything, desperate enough that he almost wished he could hear the whispers, the tell tale clicking and rustling of the monster, anything-
It's the fifth time, and although the same sort of desperate panic (or hope, he's still not really sure what it is) had started clawing at him as soon as he'd recognized the strip of sand and seemingly endless ocean, it's died down. He's not frantically running down the beach calling for Kate and Sayid and Hurley like he had on the first day, not trekking through the jungle ignoring any questions (he'd tried really hard not to bitterly think of them as a babysitter, even if it felt that way) the warden that had invited him threw his way while he desperately tried to find the barracks, or Rousseau's camp or something to prove that they had been there, that this was the right place, and even though he'd been told there wouldn't be anything, he'd still had to see for himself.
This time, he's just standing at the water's edge after walking up and down the beach where their camp had been. He'd kicked off his shoes and socks and walked out far enough for the waves to lap up around his ankles and past him, pulling the sand out from under him as it retreats, slowly burying his bare feet.
His chest feels tight, and he'd sort of like to cry, he thinks, but he doesn't. He just simmers, emotions coiled so tightly inside him he feels like they're strangling him, but he doesn't cry, or scream, or lash out. Not right now.
He knows he isn't perfect. But he doesn't understand why he's here, or why the Admiral or the computer system or whatever is controlling this is taunting him with this.
He has to go back. He needs to go back to the Island, and no one's going to be able to convince him otherwise.
Special Notes: Here is some extra voice testing. He also makes faces like this a lot:
REVISIONS PART ONE
1x08, Confidence Man: Jack supports Sayid torturing Sawyer with bamboo spikes to get him to “confess” to having Shannon’s asthma inhaler. This continues until Sawyer breaks free, fights with Sayid and winds up with an accidental serious stab wound to the arm, for which Jack never really apologizes for and sort of just awkwardly ignores or tries to justify it whenever Sawyer brings it up.
1x12, Whatever the Case May Be: Jack threatens to withhold Sawyer’s medication from him if he doesn’t give him the case of guns Kate and Sawyer had found.
1x15, Homecoming: Jack allows Claire – then heavily pregnant – to act as bait for the man who has already kidnapped her and attempted to hang and kill Charlie.
1x21, Do No Harm: Jack beats the crap out of Locke for “killing Boone” and needs to be pulled off of him by several others.
2x11, The Hunting Party: Jack bosses Kate around and pretty much treats her like shit, which encourages her to chase after them on their mission to rescue Michael, and winds up getting held at gunpoint, forcing the Losties to retreat from the Others. If he was less of a jackass, he could have 1. either let her come along in the first place or 2. explain he doesn’t want her to come because he worries about her and talk her into staying behind like a rational human being. His bad attitude/terrible leadership skills is part of the reason she almost gets killed.
2x17, Lockdown: Jack again threatens to withhold Sawyer’s antibiotics from him because the two are basically jealous of Kate’s affection for the other.
2x20, Two for the Road: Jack pulls a gun on Sawyer and demands he surrender the other guns Sawyer had conned everyone into giving him.
3x01, A Tale of Two Cities: It’s revealed in flashbacks that Jack becomes obsessed with his wife leaving him and starts to stalk her. When his father tells him to back off and let it go, he becomes convinced that he is the one Sarah was having an affair with and physically attacks him at an AA meeting, ending his sobriety and showing that Jack is at least partially to blame for his ongoing abuse of alcohol. Jack ends up in jail after the attack.
3x06, I Do: Jack threatens to kill Ben during surgery if the Others refuse to let Kate and Sawyer go. While this could be a really nice, brave thing to do, the Others (and especially Ben) are such unpredictable enemies with seemingly all powerful control of the Island and how stuff works there, he has no idea if they will or won’t call his bluff, and in doing so, he risks the lives of everyone he cares about back on the beach just to get Kate and Sawyer out for who knows how long. It does work out, but it could have done with some thinking.
3x09, Stranger in a Strange Land: In flashbacks, Jack gets super creepy and aggressively violent with Achara when she refuses to tattoo him, even though she’s explained why she’s unwilling to do so.
3x12, Par Avion & 3x13, The Man from Tallahassee: Jack has now apparently abandoned his plans of getting everyone else off the island so that he can get off himself, all because Kate “chose” Sawyer. Not cool, bro. (This plan goes to shit when Locke blows up the sub the Others were going to let Jack leave on.)
3x22, Through the Looking Glass Part One & 3x23, Through the Looking Glass Part Two: Jack kisses Juliet in front of Kate in the ongoing mess of the worst love triangle in the history of fiction, showing once again that he’s an asshole who can’t let anything go and is apparently happy to hurt the people he loves just because he’s feeling shitty. He also allows the Others to “kill” Jin, Bernard and Sayid (two of whom are married and one of whom has a pregnant wife) so that the other survivors can escape, and then beats the hell out of Ben afterwards because he’s angry about what he was forced into doing. He also says he’s planning on killing Ben once the rescue copter comes. IN THE FLASH FORWARDS, Jack has left the Island and has now basically become a drunk, drug addicted mess. He continues to work at the hospital while under the influence of both alcohol and prescription drugs (the very thing he got his father fired for, which led to his drinking himself to death in Australia, which led to Jack ending up on the Island in the first place), thus endangering the lives of his patients and pretty much anyone else who has the misfortune of running into him. It’s revealed that he’s succeeded in pushing Kate away and now wants to return to the Island after spending so much time wanting to get off of it.
4x01, The Beginning of the End: Jack tries to shoot Locke and then beats the crap out of him for stabbing Naomi. IN THE FLASH FORWARDS, it’s revealed that Jack has begun drinking heavily to help cope with the guilt of leaving everyone else behind on the Island. He also stubbornly refuses to interact with Kate while she raises Aaron because he feels angry, weird and bitter about her raising his nephew, thus denying them both something for basically no reason other than that he’s a stubborn asshole.
4x09, The Shape of Things to Come: Jack violently threatens Faraday, but has to pull back when his inflamed appendix causes him too much pain to continue.
4x10, Something Nice Back Home: IN THE FLASH FORWARDS, Jack lets his insecurity about his relationship with his father come between him and Kate, in that he’s basically incapable of being comfortable being a parent to Aaron. He also stops trusting Kate, demands she answer his questions about her seemingly odd behavior and once again tries to emotionally blackmail her about Aaron not actually being her son, just in time for Aaron to hear the whole thing.
4x14, There’s No Place Like Home Part Three: Jack’s stubbornness and inability to believe that the people on the freighter were there to help him basically gets a ton of the Oceanic survivors (most significantly Jin) killed. Everyone who was evacuated to the freighter except Sun, Kate, Aaron, Sayid, Hurley, Desmond and Jack are killed.
5x01, Because You Left: Off the island, Jack tells Ben that he’s going back to the island because he feels guilty about leaving his friends behind, but in a season six episode, he reveals his reasons for coming back are a lot more selfish. Namely, he wanted to return to the Island because he thought it would fix him because he felt broken back in the real world, and that had been his primary motivator in returning.
5x10, He’s Our You: Jack reluctantly has accepted Sawyer’s position as the new leader of the group, but still pretty much doesn’t actually accept it at all and almost blows their cover as new members of the DHARMA Initiative, putting the whole group at risk.
5x11, Whatever Happened, Happened: Jack refuses to help operate on a young Ben Linus because he’s “done trying to fix things”, despite this being a massive fucking lie as revealed in the season finale.
5x14, The Variable through 5x18, The Incident Part Two: Jack becomes convinced that they need to detonate the Jughead bomb to reset the timeline and stop Oceanic Flight 815 from ever crashing on the Island. Kate, Sawyer and Juliet are unconvinced that this is a good idea, citing that there’s a good chance everyone on the Island will get killed if they try to alter history and succeed. Jack ignores this, and his plan results in a shootout that gets Sayid shot (the wound proves to be fatal in season six), and after this so technically after his pullpoint but still, Jack and Sawyer once again dissolve into a violent fist fight and have to be separated. Jack is so determined to “be the hero” and “fix everything” that he’s putting hundreds of lives at risk on a hunch that might or might not work, and is pretty much unwilling to listen to anyone’s very logical suggestions about why this might turn out to be a fucking horrible idea. Sawyer also sees through his whole “this is our destiny to do this” bullshit and gets down to the fact that Jack is doing this for selfish reasons because he screwed up his relationship with Kate, which again is not a reason to risk the lives of other people who apparently don’t get a choice in the matter.
6x05, Lighthouse: This is after his pullpoint, but he smashes all the mirrors in Jacob's lighthouse in a spur of the moment angry temper tantrum that could have proved catastrophic if it hadn't been Jacob conning Jack into doing it in the first place.
REVISIONS PART TWO
On top of that, he just wouldn’t buy into what the Admiral is selling because he now genuinely thinks his purpose is to be on the Island, and specifically to be on it to reset the timeline. Being offered something else by a crazy otherworldly being he knows nothing about wouldn’t even occur to him as a possible option at this point, because he’s so focused on doing what he thinks he needed to do.
I feel like his personality section already explains his character flaws pretty well, but more specifically, as an inmate, he’d need to learn:
- How to control his temper. His temper is violent and is not a sign of a good leader or a support system for another person. As I mentioned, basically every confrontation he has in the course of the series erupts into a violent incident, and that behavior really needs to get fixed if he wants to ever find any kind of peace in his life. Threatening to kill people or beating them up doesn’t endear you to other people or really get much accomplished in the long run other than to make you feel shitty about yourself.
- How to share the burden of leadership with others. A leader isn’t someone who just runs around doing everything by themselves, and Jack needs to learn how to really consider and respect the opinions of people he doesn’t agree with. His solution right now is to basically yell them into submission or threaten to hurt them if they don’t agree with him, and that’s not awesome. Even with his reluctant acceptance of Sawyer’s position with DHARMA, he still clearly thinks of himself as the leader and resents that Sawyer thinks he’s in charge.
- How to think before running into something or making a decision. Again, he needs to listen to and respect the opinions of other people, because acting rashly has gotten people hurt and killed when he's done it before.
- How to generally be less selfish. He’s been basically told since he was a kid that he’s brilliant and amazing and perfect, and while he knows he isn’t, at the same time, he kind of thinks that he’s always right. This mucks up his relationship with other people, particularly because Jack has a really hard time admitting when he was wrong and saying he’s sorry. He also needs to learn he doesn’t always need to get his way, or get what he wants, because that’s pretty much what’s been motivating him this entire time. He wants people to believe in him like his father never did, to look up to him and to have a life he actually likes, and that should never be a primary motivating factor in doing things like risking other people’s lives.
- How to be more objective about himself and other people. Jack condones Sayid torturing Sawyer and never really says he regrets doing it, but gets angry at Locke for allowing Sayid to do it to Ben, and in general, he’s a big fat hypocrite when it comes to telling the truth, trusting people and being super judgmental of what they think or what they’ve done.
- How to be less bossy. Yelling at people and trying to bully them into submission is also a terrible leadership “skill”, and he needs to find a way for people to listen to him when stuff is serious without
- How to stop being so obsessive, stubborn, and prone to holding grudges. There are times when it’s pretty evident that he and Sawyer or he and Locke could have been a really great team, but Jack’s inability to compromise or forgive them for their past actions gets in the way of them actually accomplishing anything. His obsession about his failed marriage led to him violently assaulting his father and ultimately leading to his death in Australia, and his fixation on Kate and the trust issues they’ve had constantly strains a relationship that otherwise could have been totally amicable.
- How not to fall into crippling depression and substance abuse when he doesn’t get his way or feels shitty about how things are going, especially considering his family history. It’s okay to fail and it’s okay to be upset about things, but you can’t let your entire life go to shit like this just because you’re unhappy.
- How to let things go. Jack doesn’t know when to walk away from a situation or admit that he was wrong, or that something might be too much for him to handle on his own, and this is pretty much what drives all of his other issues.
I chose to take him from 5x17 because I’m not really interested in playing drunk, depressed, pill popping Jack from seasons 3 and 4, and I believe an earlier canonpoint wouldn’t have the same interesting cocktail of emotion he’d be bringing in from if he’s pulled in during the gunfight during the first half of the season five finale because he’d just be a depressed hobo trying to drink himself to death in the pub every day if people let him. During the finale, he’s basically hell bent on setting off the Jughead bomb, refuses to listen to anyone’s arguments to the contrary (namely, Jack you’re insane and are going to kill everyone on the Island and these people/we don’t deserve to go out that way) and if he’s pulled away from all that after all of the crap he’s been through, he’s going to have a meltdown. He’ll be angry, frustrated, prone to lashing out verbally and physically, and has potential to slide back into depression and substance abuse if someone isn’t keeping on top of that. I don’t want to take him from after the Jughead explosion because he’ll be less desperate and angry about being on the Barge, and the shootout provides a convenient near death experience. I don’t want to take him from season six either because his shock and depression about causing Juliet’s death make him a much different animal from the character we’ve known up until that point. That being said, the only reason he’s a calmer character in season six is because he has proof that his plan failed, whereas on the Barge, he wouldn’t have that. Instead, he has his Messiah Complex ready and raring to go, knowing that his friends are still on the Island without him, and he’ll be incredibly pissed he can’t just leave and go help them out.
Finally, I’d like to take the time to point out that one of the major themes of LOST is that basically everyone on the Island is kind of a bad or at least deeply flawed person, but has the ability to overcome that and be something better. Jack is no exception at all and while some of his problems are worked out by the end of the series, a lot of them aren’t handled in as in depth a way as the Barge would let me explore. In fact, most of them are kind of swept under a rug of shock and depression, and then (I would say spoilers but this entire thing has been spoilers…) he dies, so things like his temper and his inability to be wrong or not the one destined to save everyone never really get addressed as unhealthy behaviors that could do with some adjustment, whereas being a warden would let him continue being a sanctimonious asshole to everyone who had the misfortune of running into him. Because of this, and because redemption and good versus evil are such huge factors in the show itself, I feel like he’s better suited to be an inmate not only at this point in canon, but just in general. Yes, he’s arguably the main protagonist of the show, but we’ve had inmate protagonists and even heroes on board before (and have some now, too), so I really don’t think he’s a bad fit for the role.