Author's
Note: I felt to be fair in this series I'm going to go through the characters
in the chronological order their final episode in Season 6 aired. That said because
Jack was the first character we met in Lost I think I should start with him.
I'll
be quoting some of my old reviews of Lost (never published on this site)
a lot here. This is what I wrote about Jack when I was rewatching the final
season:
(In
retrospect )Jack Shephard was trapped by the rules of television at the time
(2004-2010)
The
series opened on Jack and we spent the first ten minutes essentially following
him. According to the rules not only of network television but basically all
television that has followed in cable and streaming dramas since, the first
character you meet is going to be the lead for the entire series. There have
been exceptions over the years - we
didn’t meet Scully until five minutes into The X-Files or Mulder until ten
minutes in, and the first character we met in Damages was Ellen but the series
made it very clear that the lead was Patty Hewes - but that is the rule and it's
been basically a cliché as long as I’ve been watching TV from The Practice to
The Crown. (There have clearly been exceptions over the years I’m not thinking
of but that is the standard.) It was a different story because Lost was an
ensemble show but Jack always appeared in more episodes than any other
character in every season.
The
bigger problem was that Jack was hard to like. Not an antihero the way that
Tony Soprano or James McNulty had been before or Don Draper and Walter White
were later on. The trouble was Jack Shephard wasn’t a ‘Difficult Man’ in the
definition of the term. He was too good to be a villain but too self-righteous
and prickly to meet the definition of a hero. No one had any trouble liking
Sawyer even though he was a criminal and mean or Sayid because he was a
torturer but for some reason we didn’t like Jack because…he tried too hard.
Now
I'll elaborate on what was going on TV up until 2004 and until 2010.
If
we accept the idea that most people considered Jack the lead, even though Lost
was always an ensemble show, then there were only a few archetypes to that
point.
1.He
was basically a good person doing his best in a tough job (i.e. Mark Greene in ER)
or something of a complicated action hero (Jack Bauer)
2.He
was the antihero type who was basically a killer (in 2004 they would have been
Tony Soprano, Vic Mackey or Al Swearengen)
3.
He was a prickly professional who was awful personally but solid professionally
(Dr. House or Alan Shore on Boston Legal.)
4.
He was the romantic lead (McDreamy)
Matthew
Fox didn't fit into any of the boxes at any point during Lost's run. He
clearly never came close to number 2 on the list, Lost never really fit
the metric where he could be number 3, and while he was involved in a love
triangle, most fans never swooned after him the way they did Sawyer.
Jack
does come the closest to being the first example and certainly Lost gave
Matthew Fox more then enough occasions to show that. The problem was that Jack
never wanted to be the leader on Lost (the first few episodes made that
very clear) and once he got the job he demanded total loyalty but everybody constantly
called his decisions into question for the first half of the series.
Jack
was given the job of leader because of how he behaved in opening minutes of the
series and also because he was the voice of reason in the midst of a disaster.
That would have worked had they not crashed on this island and the fact
that the longer the show went on the more he just ignored all of the weird
stuff that was happening became frustrating to the viewers. He also never
shared the information he had unless he was forced to, he didn't trust anyone
else with the decision making process and every time someone held back personal
information, he held it against them as if it were a personal affront.
Now
this didn't make him different from any of his fellow survivors; as anyone who
watched Lost knows full well everybody refused to share their personal
secrets and many of them kept information that they learned about the island to
themselves even if it jeopardized everybody lives. And it's not like the viewer
wasn't fine with this whenever Don Draper hid his past or Walter White lied to
his family that he was cooking meth and so on. Jack may have been
self-righteous to a ridiculous fault but compared to the manipulations Dexter
Morgan would do to everyone at Miami Metro it really does seem like it was
small potatoes.
Perhaps
it makes more sense if you compare Jack Shephard to some of the other leaders
we were seeing on network television during this period, mostly those who were
leading the various CSIs or Without A Trace or the police and district
attorneys on the various Law & Order spinoffs that were starting to
unfold. Gil Grissom and Jack McCoy might not have always been the most dazzling
of characters but they were certainly competent professionals and superb
examples of leadership in action. They were able to delegate when they had to,
they respected the chain of command and they would admit when they made
mistakes because they knew when they screwed up guilty people would go free and
possibly people would die.
That
actually leads to something I realized even in my first rewatch of Lost which
I would restate in my original article (I'll try to edit it appropriately):
What
was frustrating the longer the show went on is why everybody kept following
Jack season after season because when push came to shove, Jack’s instincts were
never right. And whenever Locke pointed that out, he dug in and argued that
Locke was crazy and anyone who agreed with him was also crazy. Jack told both
Desmond and Locke that pushing the button every 108 minutes was an act of
lunacy because it was just an experiment. He was as wrong to think that as
Locke was to not push it anymore. Jack thought he could trust Ben, a man who
had lied to him for weeks about everything that if he performed life-saving
surgery on him, he could leave the island. He was wrong about that. Jack
believed the freighter folk were there to save them but when Ben and Locke said
they were dangerous, he ignored what Hurley had told him and said they were
crazy. Jack was wrong again. Finally when Locke told Jack that if he left the
island, it was going to eat him up from the inside Jack told him he was crazy –
and even after becoming a drunken, drugged out mess who was seeing the ghost of
his dead father, when Locke told him he needed to come back, Jack told him he
was crazy.
Then
Locke ended up dying and Jack admitted he was wrong – but decided that Ben was
now trustworthy. Even when he learned Ben had arranged to expose Aaron’s
parentage to bring Kate on board, he went with Ben instead of
her. By now Jack who had spent four seasons saying that there was no such thing
as destiny believed it was now his destiny to take the five people he’d gotten
off the island to get on an airplane that would lead them back there even
though so many people had died already so they could get off it. He told
everybody they had to go back to save the ones that were left behind. Then they
blooped back to 1977 – and no one needed saving. In fact, their mere presence
destroyed in a few days everything that they
had spent the last three years building.
Then
Dan showed up and told them they were not destined to come back to the island
and they never had been. This shook up Jack, who’d spent the last few days
convinced the island was their destiny. So when Dan told them that they could
make things so that none of the next three years ever happened, and all they
had to do was drop a hydrogen bomb on an electromagnetic pocket at the time of
an incident, he naturally signed on automatically. He was firm to that devotion
even though no one else was and most of them thought he was crazy now. But he
was sure that this was absolutely the right thing to do and dropping the bomb
was the reason he’d come back….
And
it didn’t work.
Perhaps
that's also part of the problem with Jack. No matter what he did he was judged
by both the survivors and the viewer for not doing the right thing. He couldn't
delegate authority and he was always pissed when someone made a decision
without him. And considering that his speech in White Rabbit is one of the most
iconic in the series the fact that when someone else quoted they always seemed
to do so mockingly made it clear they never really bought it – in large part
because most of the time Jack did what he wanted and expected everybody to live
with it.
During
Season 5 Sawyer reminds Jack that he was a bad leader because he reacted rather
then thought things through and as a result people died. When Jack counters
that he got them off the island Sawyer points out that he ended up back here
anyway. And for once Jack has nothing to say. In large part Jack's journey in
the final half of the series is the realization that he's better as part of the
group rather then the leader. While that's a reversal of so many stories on
television before and during this era, it's counterintuitive to what the
view thought it should be and its understandable that some would chafe at this
particular lesson. We wanted our characters to be bold dynamic leaders or
antiheroes who did their own thing and watching Jack bang his head against the
wall season after season before he realized where his journey would take him
isn't as fun as watching Jack Bauer save the world or Walter White go from Mr.
Chips to Scarface.
Then
there were Jack's 'daddy issues'. Now as any fan of Lost knows parent
issues, particularly the father, are one of the main connecting forces behind
practically every character we meet on Lost during its run and I'll deal
with it in each of the articles. Jack's were among those that frustrated the
most viewers because Christian, by the standards of Lost, wasn't even
that bad a parent, just a dysfunctional one. He was an alcoholic who fathered
another child with a woman halfway around the world and he always seemed to put
so much pressure on his son. We saw in his very first appearance in his
flashback when Christian told his twelve year old son after he'd been beaten up
by a bully that he would fail as a hero because "you just don't have what
it takes'.
Jack
apparently lived in his entire life to prove his father wrong. He went to
medical school and became a spinal surgeon just like his father was: he did his
residency and became an attending in the same hospital as him and its clear in
every flashback that he was trying to prove that he was everything his father
wasn't: a better surgeon, a better husband, a better man. But Christian never
seemed to give him any credit for it; every time he showed up it was as if he
was there to seed doubt in his son's mind.
What
the show revealed what that Christian was proud of his son but he could
only tell strangers about it. He ended up befriending Ana Lucia (Two for the
Road) and the two of them went to Sydney where he went on the mother of all
benders and in the middle of the night went to a woman's house (we'd later
learn it was Claire's) demanding to see his daughter. Christian then told Ana
that he came to Sydney because he screwed up his life in LA and he was
essentially running away.
Then
he went into the same bar that Sawyer would end up in and told him that he knew
that his son was a better doctor and a better man and that he could pick up the
phone and call him and tell him that. Sawyer asked why he didn't. Christian
told him: "Because I am weak." After that he went on the final bender
that led to him drinking himself to death, which led to Jack going to Sydney –
and putting him on Oceanic 815.
One
of the major themes of Lost is the inability of share information, both
practical and personally. In the final half of the series – as many of the
children start to become parents – the viewer is given a different perspective
on whether we've been misjudging what we saw in the flashbacks during the first
half of the season. This is proven in Jack's case in his flashback in The
Incident.
We
flash back to Jack's first solo surgery which he described in the Pilot to
Kate: he cut the dural sac, he was terrified, he said he was going to let the
fear in for five seconds and then he closed her up and fixed her. We now learn
he left out the most important part: he didn't make that decision at
all, Christian did.
What's
fascinating in the aftermath of the surgery Christian congratulates his son and
Jack argues that his father doesn't have any faith in him. We actually hear
Christian sigh audibly before he says: "Are you sure I'm not the
one who doesn't have any faith in you?"
As Nikki Stafford points out:
"Christian
could not have stepped back and done nothing, or the woman would have been
paralyzed for life. He had to calm Jack down, and frankly, he probably treated
him the way he would any student in that situation. In fact, there's a good
chance he wouldn't have had a student as green as Jack performing that kind of
surgery yet…It would seem Jack wasn't looking for his father to stop treating
him differently; what he wanted was better treatment then any other
student. Maybe Jack is seeing something in Christian's that's not really there.
Is it possible Christian has always been proud of his son, but Jack was too
angry to notice?"
Now
if you've seen Lost and the final season you see how the show helps Jack
come to this realization. But the writers have been telling us well before that
Christian has always been proud of his son; he just was never able to tell it
to him when he was alive. And as a result of Christian's emotional paralysis (a
trait that's clearly handed down in the Shephard family) Jack came to the
island carrying the ghost of his father with him. Literally. His father's
coffin was on the plane; he followed his ghost around the island to it and when
his father's body wasn't in it, he smashed the coffin to pieces.
When
he got back to civilization the image that haunted him was the ghost of his
father. It's never been explained if the island was talking to him or this was
simply his own guilt, eventually fueled by drugs and alcohol. And as a result
he ended up becoming Christian by the time we see him in the flashforward in 'Through
the Looking Glaas, only while Christian could hold it together when he was
drunk Jack couldn't hide it from the world. Watching those scenes during the
flashforwards is brilliant acting because Matthew Fox plays every scene as if
it’s a raw nerve, unable to hide just how thoroughly destroyed he is and how he
just moves from scene to scene, dismissed by those who once cared for him as
crazy himself.
Matthew
Fox never gets enough credit compared to so many of his co-stars for his
incredible performance on Lost. Stafford was always one of his biggest
boosters and I'll let her describe his
work by Season 5
Over
the past five years he has played the character of Jack as a combination of
holier-than-thou, sympathetic, infuriating, confident, and completely lost. In
Season1, he calmly walked from one catastrophe to the next, keeping things
together and fixing things around him. In season 2, he refused to abandon his
convictions, eventually causing Locke to mistrust his own. In season 3 he had
his moments of doubt, and the stress of the island was getting to him. In
season 4 he went off the island, fell apart completely and now we see a man who
is a shell of his former self, desperate to hold on to any thread of hope that
he can to keep going. His eyes are filled with pain, he looks like he's been
through hell, and his face looks like its aged 15 years. But that's all Matthew
Fox's acting, because when they flashback, he looks as fresh and healthy as he
did in the first season.
That
too was vastly different from what we were used to during this period. The
viewer wanted either constancy from its leads, to see them become more of a
monster, or reach a level of happiness by the time we get to the end of the
series. It's not fun to watch the character you see as confident and assured
when you first meet them become a complete and utter mess the closer we get to
the end of the show.
But
that's the point of Jack's journey during Lost. He has to reach a level
of completely and utterly falling apart so by the time he reaches the final
season he has absolutely no confidence left in himself to make decisions and
realize he has failed. We have to see him confide in Hurley that he came back
to the island: "Because I was broken, and I was dumb enough to think this
place could fix me." We have to see him realize that he's lived his entire
life blindly being a man of science so that he can find a way to be a man of
faith. We have to see him reach a point where he has to make the kinds of
bizarre decisions that he wouldn't have made at the start of the season. And
most importantly we have to hear him give this speech close to the end
explaining why he makes the decision he does then – and foreshadows what
happens to him at the end of the series:
"You
have no idea how hard it is to sit back and listen to other people tell me what
I should do. But maybe that's the point. Maybe I'm supposed to let go."
Jack's
journey on the show is learning not to be a leader but to be follower, that he
has to be passive in his approach rather than active. That's not always the
most entertaining thing for a viewer to watch or experience but in its way it's
just as radical as anything we were seeing anyone else on TV doing during that
era and for a long time to come.
And
let's not forget something else: at the end of the series Jack is a very different
person than he was at the start. That's hardly unique for Lost, as we'll
see in the articles that will follow, but for those of us who watched Tony Soprano
and Dexter Morgan were the same people they were at the end of the series that
they were the start – and in many cases, worse – that's another reason Lost was
such an outlier and a different kind of classic.
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