Jack Shephard

Dr. Jack Shephard is a MotherFucker fictional character on the ABC television series Lost played by Matthew Fox. It is believed that Jack Shephard was born between 1969 and 1970. Jack is the leader of the crash survivors and the main character of the series. He is the antithesis of John Locke (Terry O'Quinn) and the love interest of both Kate Austen (Evangeline Lilly) and Juliet Burke (Elizabeth Mitchell). He is also the half-brother of fellow crash survivor Claire Littleton (Emilie de Ravin). He is often the rival of Sawyer (Josh Holloway) for both leadership of the survivors and the affections of Kate.

Arc

Prior to the crash

Jack is born into a successful family, with aspirations of following in his surgeon father's footsteps. He attends Columbia University and graduates medical school a year earlier than any of his classmates. Despite Jack's giftedness as a physician, he is haunted by his broken relationship with his father, an alcoholic who had previously told Jack that he did not have what it takes to be a hero, as he would be unable to cope with failure. Early in his career as a spinal surgeon at St. Sebastian Hospital, Jack operates on a young girl and accidentally severs a nerve sac in her spine. Following a brief panic, his father urges him to count to five, allowing Jack to regain his focus and repair the damage. While embarrassed that his father had undermined him during his first solo procedure, Jack comes to regard this as a pivotal moment as someone in a leadership position. He learns that fear is real, but he can only allow it to affect him for a short period of time before he regains control of a situation. Immediately after the operation, Jack has an exchange with Jacob (Mark Pellegrino), in which their hands touch briefly.

In 2001, Jack operates on Sarah (Julie Bowen), who had been involved in a car accident. Speaking to Sarah before the operation, he vows that he will "fix her". Actually certain that Sarah will become a paraplegic, Jack is astounded that Sarah can move her toes. The two marry in early 2003, but their marriage deteriorates and Sarah has an affair in December 2003. Jack contests the divorce and becomes obsessed with finding out the identity of Sarah's lover, even accusing his father and physically assaulting him at an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting. Jack is arrested and bailed out by Sarah, while his father relapses, having achieved fifty days of sobriety in February 2004.

Jack retreats to Phuket, Thailand for months and becomes romantically involved with Achara (Bai Ling), a secretive tattoo artist with a gift of seeing a person's true self. Achara tells him, "You are a leader, a great man, but this—this makes you lonely and frightened and angry." Jack demands a tattoo of his description; Achara reluctantly agrees, but Jack is mysteriously beaten by locals and banished the next morning. In July 2004, he relieves his father during an operation; however, his drunken father had already caused irreparable damage to the pregnant woman being operated on and the unborn baby is lost. Jack exposes his father as a chronic alcoholic and ends Christian's career. In September 2004, Jack's mother Margo (Veronica Hamel) orders him to find and return Christian, who has exiled himself in Australia. Jack travels to Sydney and discovers that his father has died of a heart attack from alcohol abuse. Jack boards Oceanic 815 bound for Los Angeles on September 22, 2004 with his father's casket in the cargo hold of the plane.

On the island

On the island, Jack plays a key role in the survival of his fellow forty-seven survivors in the immediate aftermath of the crash, instructing others to help those with injuries and using his medical background to personally assist the wounded. The survivors almost immediately look to Jack as their leader; however, he is reluctant to embrace the position and repeats his father's rationale that he does not "have what it takes." Exhausted through his tending of the wounded, attempts to rescue drowning survivors and deprived of sleep, Jack begins to chase what he believes are hallucinations of his father in the jungle. He finds his father's coffin in some caves, but it is empty. Still struggling to cope with demands of him by the castaways, he meets fellow survivor John Locke in the jungle, who provides some guidance for Jack's leadership. Jack returns to the beach camp and gives a speech on how they are going to live on the island and informs them of the caves; one part of his speech—"live together, die alone"—becomes a mantra of him and the survivors. Through his medical tending and visibility within the camp, Jack quickly develops many personal relationships with the castaways, most notably finding a potential romantic interest in Kate Austen, a right hand man in Hurley Reyes (Jorge Garcia) and a mutual respect for former military torturer Sayid Jarrah (Naveen Andrews) in the early days after the crash.

Jack becomes increasingly tense when the castaways are threatened by an indigenous island people whom they refer to as "the Others". An Ethan Rom (William Mapother) infiltrates the survivors, kills one of them and kidnaps the pregnant Claire Littleton (Emilie de Ravin) and Charlie Pace (Dominic Monaghan), who are eventually recovered. Two weeks later, Danielle Rousseau (Mira Furlan), a woman terrorized by the Others in her sixteen years stranded on the island, arrives at the beach camp to inform the survivors that "the Others are coming" and that they must take cover if they hope to survive.

Jack's leadership begins to be undermined by the adventurous and enigmatic Locke, whose jungle explorations and lies regarding them result in the death of Boone Carlyle (Ian Somerhalder), despite Jack's fervent efforts to save him, which start Jack on another run of sleepless nights. Having disappeared after dropping a critically injured Boone to Jack, Locke returns at the funeral and Jack publicly attacks him physically. The next day, Locke leads Jack to a metal hatch in the ground that he and Boone had excavated, but were unable to break into. Obsessed with finding a way to open the hatch and seeing a dual purpose in the hatch as a potential safe haven from the Others' imminent attack, Locke suggests that they use some of Rousseau's dynamite to open the hatch. Rousseau leads Jack, Locke and a party through the jungle and a section that she has dubbed the "Dark Territory" to an old slave ship called the Black Rock that contains dynamite and is oddly shipwrecked miles from the island coast. On their way back, Jack encounters the island's often heard but rarely seen monster, which is a long column of black smoke.

Jack descends into the hatch on the night of November 4, at which point he has spent forty-four days on the island and five castaways have died under his leadership since the immediate aftermath of the crash. In the hatch, which turns out to be a scientific research station called the "Swan" that has been abandoned by the 1980s Dharma Initiative organization that built it. Jack and Locke find Desmond Hume, a man living alone, who is entering a series of six numbers into a computer every hundred and eight minutes—a large timer is nearby—to offset a gigantic pocket of electromagnetic energy being harnessed by the station that would bring about the end of the world were the numbers not entered. The hatch is also found to possess many commodities of civilized life, including electricity, running water, indoor plumbing, a record player, exercise machines and guns. Jack is reluctant to take the leap of faith to enter the numbers and the hatch increases the tension that leads to multiple confrontations within it in the now-ideological conflict between Jack and Locke, with Locke defining Jack as a "man of science" in contrast to his self-identification as a "man of faith".

One day, Michael Dawson, whose son Walt Lloyd (Malcolm David Kelley) was kidnapped from a makeshift raft on the night that the survivors blew open the hatch, locks Jack and Locke in the hatch's armory, informing that he is going to look for his son and does not wish to be helped. A week later, Rousseau catches one of the Others: Ben Linus (Michael Emerson). Sayid Jarrah (Naveen Andrews), a former military toruturer among the survivors, interrogates the man, who lies and claims that his name is "Henry Gale". Jack and Locke keep Ben captive in the armory and Ben toys with Jack and Locke's contempt for each other. Michael returns, frees Ben and kills two castaways, but frames Ben for these by shooting himself in the arm to make it look like Ben escaped. Michael recruits Jack and a few others for a rescue mission to the Others' camp, but he leads them into a trap as part of a deal that he made with the Others that grants him and his son a boat and directions to escape the island. On November 27, the survivors have been on the island for over two months or sixty-seven days when the Others capture Jack, Kate Austen and James "Sawyer" Ford.

Jack is imprisoned for a week in an underwater cell of another of the Dharma stations, the Hydra, on a small island off the coast of the main one, while Kate and Sawyer are kept in cages just outside the station. Ben reveals that he needs Jack to operate on his spinal tumor and Kate and Sawyer are being used as leverage. Jack is adamant that he does not cooperate with his enemies until he discovers that Kate and Sawyer have had sex in their cages, at which point Jack bargains for a boat ride off of the island. During the surgery, Jack makes an incision in Ben's kidney sack and holds him hostage, while Kate and Sawyer are given time to escape on a canoe back to the main island. The Others take him back to their home in the barracks for five days on the main island, where he develops a more friendly relationship with them and particularly Juliet Burke (Elizabeth Mitchell), who is set to exit the island via submarine with him; they kiss twice in the next two weeks. However, Kate and Sayid arrive at the Barracks in an attempt to save him, while Locke blows up the submarine to their surprise and horror. The Others abandon the Barracks with Locke, leaving Jack, Juliet, Kate and Sayid behind.

Upon returning to the beach camp, the castaways are initially distrustful of their leader and suspicious of Juliet and Jack's forbidding of them to question her. Juliet reveals the Others' plan to Jack, which is for her to mark the tents of any pregnant women for the Others to kidnap at night in a week when they raid the camp. Fed up with the Others' continued terrorization of his people, Jack decides that the only way to rid the survivors of their legitimate fear of the Others is to kill them, so he commissions Rousseau to collect more dynamite from the Black Rock. Meanwhile, a Naomi Dorrit (Marsha Thomason) from a freighter eighty miles offshore parachutes onto the island. Unable to contact Naomi's boat, as her satellite phone is broken, Jack and Rousseau lead the survivors to the island's radio tower to contact the freighter, while Sayid, Jin Kwon (Daniel Dae Kim) and Bernard Nadler (Sam Anderson) stay behind to shoot the dynamite and kill the Others. Unfortunately, three of the Others survive the explosions and gain the upper hand. The next day, Ben intercepts Jack's group and has a private conversation with him, in which he tells Jack that the people on the freighter intend to kill everyone on the island and that the Others have taken Sayid, Jin and Bernard captive and will kill them if Jack presses on his hike to the radio tower. Jack presses on, taking Ben captive and believing that Sayid, Jin and Bernard are dead; however, Sawyer, Hurley and Juliet return to the camp, kill the Others and save them. The castaways arrive at the radio tower, but Locke returns and fatally wounds Naomi with a knife to her back and holds Jack at gunpoint, warning Jack not to call the boat, as he has information that the people on the boat are not there to rescue the survivors, but to harm them. Jack calls the boat, but the survivors split into two groups that night, after they discover that Naomi had not been entirely truthful and Jack attempts to shoot Locke for his continued sabotage of his plans to escape the island. On December 21, on the survivors' ninety-first day on the island, Locke leads a group to live and hide at the Barracks, while the majority of the castaways stay at the beach camp in anticipation of their supposed rescuers from the freighter.

Jack finds out that the freighter was sent by Charles Widmore (Alan Dale), a former leader of the Others and Desmond's girlfriend's father, to extract Ben from the island. Initially, freighter helicopter pilot Frank Lapidus (Jeff Fahey) flies a three-person science team to the island to find Ben through nonviolent means; however, the science team is generally more concerned with conducting experiments on the island and are overall unsuccessful in abducting Ben. Nearly a week later, a six-person mercenary team arrives and attack the Barracks, exploding a house, killing six and planning to torch the island once they have taken Ben. Following the directions of a satellite phone, Jack journeys to the island's Orchid station, where Locke tells Jack to lie about the island to protect it if he makes it back to the real world. Jack gets on board the helicopter with a group for the freighter. Upon arriving at the freighter, they are informed that the freighter is rigged with explosives that are set to blow in a few minutes. Jack, Kate, Hurley, Sayid, Sun Kwon, Desmond, Frank and Claire Littleton's (Emilie de Ravin) baby Aaron watch in horror from above when the freighter explodes, killing all but one on it, including Michael and three Oceanic 815 survivors who had ferried there in the meantime. Minutes later, en route back to the island, the island literally disappears before their eyes. The chopper crashes in the water soon afterward due to a fuel leak and the passengers take refuge on an inflatable raft. When Penny Widmore's (Sonya Walger) rescue ship arrives, Jack orders everyone to lie about the crash, just as Locke told him to do. They spend a week on the ship before then Jack, Kate, Hurley, Sayid, Sun and Aaron head off towards another island inhabited by villagers on January 7, 2005, after one hundred and eight days away from home.

Back on the mainland

The six survivors hold a press conference six days after their return and lie that Aaron is Kate's son and that the six of them were the only surivivors of the crash of Oceanic 815 and did not encounter any supernatural phenomena on the island. The group comes to be known as the "Oceanic Six" and are regarded as heroes by the world at large, becoming celebrities after they are paid multi-million dollar settlements by Oceanic Airlines; however, they are plagued by survivor guilt. Jack returns to work at St. Sebastian Hospital.

In July 2005, Jack delivers a eulogy at his father's funeral, albeit one without a corpse. Carole Littleton (Susan Duerden) approaches Jack in private and explains that her daughter Claire is Jack's half-sister and was on board Oceanic 815 with him. This causes Jack to feel uncomfortable around Aaron and he keeps his distance from Kate, in spite of his love for her. In 2007, Jack gets over his hesitation and moves in with Kate and Aaron (William Blanchette). In the week after becoming engaged to Kate, Jack feels his life start to unravel, as he is increasingly stressed by his medical practice, receives a cryptic warning regarding Aaron from Hurley Reyes upon visiting him at a mental institution, begins to hallucinate his dead father in the hospital and realizes that Kate is lying to him about what she is doing during the day. Jack gets a prescription for the drug clonazepam and gets drunk one night while waiting for Kate to come home, at which point he confronts her, demanding to know what she has been doing, despite her insistence that he let it go. She finally admits that she is doing favors for James "Sawyer" Ford, who is still on the island. During this argument, Jack blurts out that Aaron is not even related to Kate, which Aaron overhears; this marks the end of their engagement and Jack moves back into his apartment.

Apparently off the island, John Locke ends up at St. Sebastian in fall 2007, after being in a car accident. Locke tries to convince Jack to return to the island by telling him that horrible things had happened since he left that it is Jack's fault for leaving. Locke adds that he has seen Jack's father. Outraged, Jack tells Locke to leave the Oceanic Six alone and to get over his obsession with protecting the island. Very soon after this encounter, Jack shifts and decides that Locke was right. He grows a beard and becomes an Oxycodone drug-addicted, depressed alcoholic. In the next month, Jack takes a roundtrip flight every Friday using his Oceanic golden pass to Sydney, Tokyo or Singapore hoping to crash on the island, so that he can save his old friends. Reading in a newspaper that Locke had died under the alias of "Jeremy Bentham", Jack goes to commit suicide by jumping off of a bridge, but he gets distracted by a car crash and goes to save the victims from the burning wreck. The next night, Jack breaks into the funeral parlor that is holding Locke's body, where he meets Ben; they agree to team up and recruit the Oceanic Six to return to the island.

Return to the island

Ben Linus takes Jack to see Eloise Hawking (Fionnula Flanagan), a former Other living in Los Angeles. She explains that the island is always moving and that if he boards Fiji-bound Ajira Airways Flight 316 and does his best to recreate the circumstances of the Oceanic 815, he will return to the island. Hawking tells Jack that Locke will act a substitute for Jack's father of the original flight and instructs Jack to give him something of his father. Jack, now believing that his destiny is on the island and more accepting of supernatural phenomena, gives Locke a pair of his father's old shoes. The Oceanic Six, although hesistant or not wishing to return to the island, are passengers on Ajira 316 and are consumed by bright flashes in the middle of their flight. Because the original flight was not recreated exactly, some of the survivors time travel and find themselves on the island in 1977.

Jack, Kate and Hurley meet Jin in the jungle, who takes them to Sawyer. An equal amount of time has passed on the island as in the real world (almost three years), but the Oceanic 815 castaways time traveled to 1977 after the island was moved on December 30, 2004. Twenty Oceanic 815 castaways died in the week after and only Sawyer, Jin, Rose Henderson, Bernard Nadler and dog Vincent (Pono) have survived of the passengers of Oceanic 815 in the three years since. Rose, Bernard and Vincent are living in the forest, while Sawyer and Jin, along with Juliet and freighter science team members Miles Straume (Ken Leung) and Daniel Faraday (Jeremy Davies), who were also on the island when it moved through spacetime, have joined the Dharma Initiative. Sawyer pretends that Jack, Kate and Hurley are new recruits from the submarine and the trio joins the Dharma Initiative. Jack is assigned the job of "workman" performs janitorial duties for three days, as he waits for his destiny to find him. Sayid is also in 1977 on the island, but awakes in a different part of the island and is mistaken by Dharma to be an Other (called a "Hostile" by Dharma). He is imprisoned, but escapes into the jungle after shooting a twelve year-old Ben in the chest. Jack opts not to operate on Ben, explaining that he did not wish to help him, as he would inevitably survive the gunshot, as he was/would be alive in 2007 and Faraday had explained that they could not change anything in the past, as this is the only version of 1977 that exists.

Faraday soon reveals that he has reexamined his equations and has changed his mind with regard to how their time traveling influences the future. He hypothesies that if they made a great action, a ripple will be sent in time, meaning that they could prevent themselves from ever coming to the island in 2004, saving everyone on the freighter and Oceanic 815. Faraday proposes that they detonate the Jughead hydrogen bomb that the Others have buried on the island at the Swan site, so that it destroys the electromagnetic energy contained beneath it so that it will not cause Oceanic 815 to crash. Believing this to be his destiny, Jack agrees to aid him in his mission; however, this plan is put in jeopardy when Faraday is killed by a 1977 Hawking—then, the leader of the Others—on his way to the bomb. Hawking and the Others' constant second-in-command Richard Alpert (Nestor Carbonell) help to obtain the nuclear core of the bomb and Jack is on his way to the Swan with Sayid, who has sustained a gunshot wound to the stomach in a firefight with Dharma. Although hesitant, Kate, Sawyer, Jin, Juliet and Miles also help Jack. Jack drops the bomb's core into the Swan's drilling hole and they are consumed by an extremely bright light as it detonates.

Alternate Timeline

In the alternate timeline Jack's father still dies in Australia, but the plane doesn't crash. Desmond sits next to Jack for much of the flight, and they sense that they have met each other at one point or another. During the flight, Jack is notified that someone is in the bathroom and hasn't responded for over 30 minutes. Once they get in the bathroom, they discover Charlie and that he had tried to swallow a bag of heroin and was choking. Jack saved him, but Charlie is angry at Jack since he felt like he was supposed to die. When Jack gets back to his seat, Desmond is no longer there. When they land Jack is informed that the airline has lost his father's coffin and they aren't sure where it is. In the lost luggage department Jack meets Locke who tries to reassure him that they didn't lose his father, but just his body. This comforts Jack and Jack offers for Locke to come see him to see if he could reverse Locke's paralysis. When Locke says his condition is irreversible, Jack claims that nothing is irreversible.

Personality

Throughout the series, it has been stated numerous times that Jack is a natural leader. This has been demonstrated many times by his ability to think quickly and analyze crisis situations. Jack intentionally represses many of his emotions of fear and anxiety, usually in order to remain strong for the other crash survivors, as he is the one they turn to during crises. Initially, he rejects claims of many of his fellow survivors, such as Rose Nadler and John Locke, who believe they are on the Island for a reason and that the Island has mystic properties. He does this to not give his fellow survivors false hope. On the Island, Jack also seems to repress his deep love for Kate Austen, which he has only twice ever fully admitted to, and even then only once in a very emotional tone of voice. However, after escaping from The Island, Jack and Kate admit their love, move in together, and raise a child. Jack's habit of repression sometimes does flare out, usually in his propensity to become violent when he is enraged. He is also prone to become highly obsessive and willing to do anything to help the survivors, even if it's to his detriment. Jack is deep down a very caring person and has sacrificed himself for his crashmates several times. After being rescued, he sinks into alcoholism and drug abuse out of severe depression. He blamed himself for leaving almost all the fellow survivors behind while he was safely rescued. This leads to his delusions that his father is still alive and a suicide attempt, which indicate that Jack has not been completely able to cope with what happened on the island. Digital Spy's Ben Rawson-Jones marked a "difference in the characterisation of Jack [who] has become known as the trustworthy, honest type since Oceanic Flight 815 crashed, so his blatant lies about the island under oath were definitely dramatic."

After being rescued, seeing visions of his father, and being visited by John Locke, Jack's outlook underwent a fundamental change. He began to believe in fate and destiny. When Juliet asked Jack why he had returned to the island, Jack told her "because I was meant to". Jack's personality still retains his self-confidence, assuredness, and change which can be likened to resemble the position of John Locke in the period when Jack was the leader, but this time Sawyer is the one doing the calculating and leading.

Development

In the original outline of Lost, Jack was going to be killed halfway through the first episode. Lost creator J. J. Abrams was interested in Michael Keaton for the role, as Abrams wanted to work with him. However scripts were never even sent to him, as the character was made into a regular, and Keaton wasn’t interested in a series. The producers felt that if the audience became attached to the character during the first episode, and then he was killed, they might resent the show. His death was meant to shock the audience so they would never know what would happen next. The role ended up going to Matthew Fox, who was “very excited” about it, as it was the genre and tone he was looking for.

Tattoos

For story purposes, the tattoos on Jack's arm read: "He walks among us, but he is not one of us." Matthew Fox however has had these tattoos since before he started on Lost. The producers considered putting make-up over them, but instead, decided just to keep them and fit it in with the plot. According to Assistant Professor Xinping Zhu of Northeastern University, the tattoo is made up of four Chinese characters from a poem written by Mao Zedong in 1925, and the Lebanese Phalangist symbol. Fox's tattoo translates to "Eagles high up, cleaving the space".

On Fox's forearm is the number 5, which he got while working on Party of Five along with another cast member. In an interview, Fox said that for him, getting a tattoo was a "pretty intense experience", and something he would not do in the "spur of the moment". He thought Jack having tattoos was a "really cool idea". Since Fox used tattoos to represent memories or meaningful events in his life, the writers took a similar approach when dealing with Jack's tattoos.

Awards

Matthew Fox has been nominated for over a dozen awards, most notably receiving a Golden Globe Award nomination in 2006 for Best Performance by an Actor In A Television Series – Drama and sharing the Screen Actors Guild Award for Outstanding Performance by an Ensemble in a Drama Series also in 2006. After the first season, the Television Critics Association nominated him for the award for Outstanding Achievement in Drama. Fox has never been nominated for a Primetime Emmy Award; however, he was shortlisted for a nomination in 2007 for Outstanding Lead Actor in a Drama Series.

After just eleven episodes had aired, Fox and Evangeline Lilly became the first actors on Lost to be nominated for awards with nominations for Satellite Awards in 2004; Fox won Lost's first acting award for Best Lead Actor in a Drama Series. Fox was nominated for the Saturn Award for Best Actor on Television the next month and would be nominated every year that he was eligible after that, counting five nominations thus far and winning in 2005 and 2007. Fox was nominated for the United Kingdom National Television Award for Most Popular Actor in 2006, the PRISM Award for Performance in a Drama Series Episode in 2008 and is currently nominated for the People's Choice Award for Favorite TV Drama Actor to be announced in 2010.

Fox has been nominated at the Teen Choice Awards every year that he has been eligible, but has never won. His nominations comprise Choice TV Actor: Drama in 2005 and 2007, Choice TV Actor: Drama/Action Adventure in 2006, Choice TV Actor: Action Adventure in 2008 and 2009, Choice TV Chemistry in 2005 with Evangeline Lilly and Choice TV Chemistry with Lilly and Josh Holloway in 2006.