Jack Shephard

Name: Jack Shephard

Occupation: Surgeon¹

First Appearance: 1×01 – Pilot, Part One

Flashbacks: (Shared) – 1×01 – Pilot, Part One
(Centric) – 1×05 – White Rabbit, 1×11 – All the Best Cowboys Have Daddy Issues

Click for Timeline

Pre-Island

When Jack was a young boy, he was beaten in a fight trying to protect his friend Marc Silverman. Afterwards, his father Christian told him that he should never put himself in a position to make decisions where he could fail, because he didn’t have what it took to cope with failure – unlike Christian himself².

Some two months before the crash of Oceanic 815, Jack was fetched by a worried nurse when Christian cut a female patient’s hepatic artery whilst operating. Jack stepped in but was unable to save the patient and she died³.

Christian admitted to Jack he had been drinking prior to the operation, but convinced his son that this would never happen again and begged him to go along with his version of events. Although reluctant, Jack did so until he found out that his father had known that the patient was pregnant but had decided to go ahead with the operation anyway. Jack then told the hospital board that Christian was impaired during the operation⁴.

The pair didn’t speak for two months. When Christian left home, Jack’s mother Margo emotionally blackmailed Jack into tracking him down in Australia. When Jack arrived in Australia, he found his father had been on a drinking bender, and was eventually found dead from an alcohol-induced heart attack. Jack made arrangements to transport his father’s body home on board Oceanic Flight 815 to Los Angeles, from which he was going to go directly to the funeral⁵.

On board the flight, Jack sat opposite Rose, he flirted with Cindy to get an extra bottle of vodka shortly before the flight crashed.⁶

On the Island

Waking up on the island in a bamboo grove, the first living thing Jack saw was Vincent. He staggered to the beach, where he helped pull a man free of the wreckage of the crashed aircraft before tending to the pregnant Claire and helping Boone resuscitate Rose.⁷

Jack then met Kate at a secluded part of the beach where he asked her to sew a wound he sustained in the crash, telling her about a time he had to learn to control his fear in the operating room. Later, as night fell, they resolved to find the cockpit of the crashed plane just before hearing a monstrous crashing sound in the jungle.⁸

The next day, Jack and Kate set out for the cockpit accompanied by Charlie. There, they found the pilot alive but wounded – only to have him killed when the Smoke Monster attacked the plane, his body coming to rest forty feet up in a tree.⁹

On return to the beach, Jack broke up a fight between Sayid and Sawyer, earning the latter’s enmity. Later he tended to US Marshall Edward Mars, removing a piece of shrapnel from his wound in spite of the fact that it could kill him as it was the least worst option under the circumstances.¹⁰ When Mars woke up, Jack found out that his prisoner had been Kate.¹¹

When Kate returned from a hike, she told Jack about the French woman’s repeating mayday signal, but not that she had been Mars’ prisoner. After she realized Mars would die a slow and painful death she asked asked Jack if he could put him out of his misery – but Jack angrily refused, telling her that he knew she was a fugitive and he wasn’t a murderer.¹²

After butting heads with Sawyer in the fuselage while he looked for medicine, Jack stood outside the tent when Mars asked to talk to Kate alone, not knowing she had a gun. Shortly after Kate left the tent, a shot rang out and Sawyer emerged – Mars had asked Kate to kill him but she hadn’t been able to, turning instead to Sawyer. Unfortunately he missed the heart and perforated Mars’ lung, leaving it up to Jack to finally euthanize him. The next morning Kate offered to tell him what she’d done. Jack refused saying that it didn’t matter and the island had given them all a blank state.¹³

The following night, the fuselage was raided by boars, drawn by the corpses of the dead passengers. Jack decided – against Sayid’s objections – that it would be best to burn the fuselage, corpses and all, although he had no interest in conducting any kind of memorial.¹⁴

The next day, after talking to Rose about her missing husband, Jack thought he saw his father, Christian Shephard, on the beach.¹⁵

The next morning, Jack saved Boone from drowning but failed to save another survivor. He later saw Christian again – and again, just after he blew up at Hurley and Charlie for looking to him for leadership regarding the camp’s dwindling water supplies. Racing into the jungle after Christian, Jack eventually was lead off the edge of a cliff and was only rescued when Locke happened to pass by¹⁶.

Later, Locke challenged Jack to consider the possibility he wasn’t hallucinating, but that the island was a special place. Locke claimed to have seen the heart of the island and it was beautiful; he also noted that the others looked at Jack as the leader no matter what Jack himself said. Left alone to ponder that, Jack found freshwater in a cave, and also some debris from the plane – including Christian’s empty coffin. Returning to the camp, Jack took the mantle of leadership on fully, telling the survivors that they either had to live together or they’d die alone¹⁷.

The next day, Jack headed back to the caves with Kate, Locke and Charlie to fetch water. The group found two dessicated corpses – christened ‘Adam and Eve’ there, and Jack realized they must have lived there. He convinced some of the survivors to relocate to the caves for safety and convenience – but faced opposition from Kate and Sayid, who remained on the beach with some others to make sure the signal fire still burned¹⁸.

The following day, Jack continued to move items from the beach to the caves, where he was trapped in a cave-in, dislocating his shoulder. Charlie came to save him but ended up trapped himself, and Jack told him he recognized the signs of drug withdrawal and offered his aid. Charlie found a way out of the cave and saved them both. Jack was reunited with Kate, although she still decided to stay on the beach¹⁹.

When Sawyer refused to give Jack Shannon’s asthma medication which he was incorrectly believed to have, Jack – after punching him out – sanctioned his torture by Sayid to obtain the information. When Sayid accidentally severed one of Sawyer’s arteries, Jack saved his life. He also learned that Sawyer and Kate shared a connection.²⁰

A few days later, Jack competed in Hurley’s first island golf tournament on his home made golf course²¹.

Jack treated Claire when she woke up screaming several nights later. Over the next few days he became concerned that she was hallucinating due to stress, and that she was going to bring on early labor²².

When Claire and Charlie were taken by Ethan, Jack was desperate to find them, his guilt over his not believing Claire becoming anger at Locke and Kate during the course of their search. Eventually Jack and Kate split from Locke and Boone in the search, and Jack was confronted by Ethan who told him to back off. Jack attacked him and was beaten unconscious²³.

When he revived, he and Kate found Charlie hanging from a tree. After several minutes, Jack finally revived him and – there being no sign of Claire – returned to the caves with him²⁴.

Five days later, Jack and Kate dug up Mars’ body to retrieve a key for a metal case from it; Kate tried to palm the key so she could open it herself but Jack caught her. He got the case from Sawyer by threatening to cut off his meds and opened it with her, revealing four guns – as she said. However, Kate was really after a small toy plane which she told Jack belonged to the man she both loved and killed²⁵.

A couple of days later, Jack grew suspicious of Locke’s continued hunting without results, and Sayid showed him that compasses don’t work on the island²⁶.

When Claire returned from the jungle with amnesia Jack treated her. Later when Ethan attacked Jin and Charlie and told them that he would kill one person every day until he got Claire back. That night, he made good on his threat by killing Scott. Jack – along with Locke, Sayid, Sawyer and Kate used Claire as bait to trap Ethan and he fought the man to a standstill – but the captive Ethan was killed by Charlie²⁷.

A few days later when he and the rest of the survivors were unable to stop Michael’s raft burning, Jack tried to stop people from jumping to the conclusion that Jin was responsible, but not very successfully²⁸.

Timeline:

1. 1×01 [↩]
2. 1×05 [↩]
3. 1×11 [↩]
4. 1×11 [↩]
5. 1×05 [↩]
6. 1×01 [↩]
7. 1×01 [↩]
8. 1×01 [↩]
9. 1×01 [↩]
10. 1×02 [↩]
11. 1×03 [↩]
12. 1×03 [↩]
13. 1×03 [↩]
14. 1×04 [↩]
15. 1×04 [↩]
16. 1×05 [↩]
17. 1×05 [↩]
18. 1×06 [↩]
19. 1×07 [↩]
20. 1×08 [↩]
21. 1×09 [↩]
22. 1×10 [↩]
23. 1×11 [↩]
24. 1×11 [↩]
25. 1×12 [↩]
26. 1×13 [↩]
27. 1×15 [↩]
28. 1×17 [↩]

Tags: Characters, Jack