Twenty years ago today, on September 22nd, 2004, the pilot episode of Lost aired. It feels almost impossible to explain how important this show is to me, and what an immense impact it has made throughout my life. So instead, I'm going to focus on one character: Jack Shephard.

"It only ever ends once. Everything before that is just progress"

For the tiniest bit of background: I watched Lost for the first time when I was about 13 years old. My parents had watched the show when it was airing, and they wanted to introduce it to my sister and me. It has become a bit of a tradition in our family to watch TV shows together, and we'd usually watch an episode or two of something after dinner each night. Lost was the first show we ever did that with, and we all got really into it. Now, the show is something I can never separate from my memories of watching it with my family, and that makes it extra special. Lost remains significant in my family, too. Fun fact: our home WI-FI network name and password are both Lost references, and have been for many many years. Jack Shephard is the main protagonist of Lost. He's also my favorite Lost character and one of my favorite fictional characters of all time. Here's another interesting fact about Jack: a good portion of Lost fans really hate him. It's something that, for a long time, I didn't really understand. Now that I do understand it, though, it just makes me want to push back against it more.

The show quite literally opens and closes with Jack. The shot above is the very first thing we see, and we then pull back to see Jack lying on the ground in the jungle. Then, we follow him out onto the beach, where he sees the destruction of the crash of Oceanic 815. Lost is an ensemble show, yes, in that there are a lot of characters and all are very significant to the overarching story and receive episodes centered around them. However, it is very clear that Jack is in fact the main character. The show, ultimately, is about him and his arc, which makes sense because the arc of his character is about all the same things that the show as a whole is about. It’s about not just accepting the concept of “destiny” but grappling with it. It’s about finding faith and belonging. It’s about the fact that people can and do change.

My alternate title for this entry was “Man of Science, Man of Faith.” It’s actually the title of the very first episode of season 2, and in many ways cuts right to the core of what this show is about. The title is directly in reference to a conversation Jack has with John Locke, another survivor and major player on this show. Jack and Locke stand in almost constant opposition to one another. In the scene in question, Locke tells Jack that they can’t see eye to eye because Jack is a “man of science” and Locke is a “man of faith.” However, the part of this scene that I actually want to call attention to is the very end of their dialogue, where Jack reaffirms to Locke that he doesn’t believe in destiny, to which Locke responds, “You do. You just don’t know it yet.”

There are a lot of reasons why the dynamic and friction between Locke and Jack works so well, both from an acting and a writing standpoint. A big one, though, is the way that Locke seems to understand and see through Jack before Jack can get there himself. In the early seasons, this is endlessly frustrating to Jack. Combine that with the fact that Locke has been a believer in the island since day one, and you set up a perfect contention between the two.

This comes around in another amazing scene from “Man of Science, Man of Faith,” in which Locke angrily asks Jack why he finds it so hard to believe. In reference to the island, but also just more generally speaking. Jack, in turn, asks Locke why he finds it so easy to believe, to which Locke responds, “It’s never been easy.” We know this because we know Locke’s backstory, and that’s why it’s so admirable how much faith he is able to have given all the things that have been thrown at him. However, we also know Jack’s backstory. He was raised by a doctor to be a doctor. Everything has always been facts and figures to him. He prefers things to be black and white. There’s a very interesting split for him between wanting that simplicity but also wishing he could believe in something the way Locke does. It’s just so hard for him to push aside logic, to embrace the impossibility of a situation, but also to ignore everything he has been raised and trained his entire life to believe is concrete.

So, when does it start to change for him? If you want to point to a specific moment where a shift occurs, the answer is pretty major: with the death of John Locke.

Jack has been having a terrible time of it ever since he left the island, but finding out that Locke is dead is very much the tipping point for him. It’s what truly prompts him to reach out to Kate and start pushing hard for the fact that he now believes they were not supposed to leave the island. This scene in the season 3 finale is big for a lot of reasons (read: one of the best plot twists of all time and the iconic “we have to go back”). However, when you watch it back, the words that Jack is actually saying to Kate are very much John Locke’s words. Saying “we were not supposed to leave” when it used to make him so mad when Locke would say supposed to. Because supposed to means destiny, and Jack never thought he believed in that. Another thing that Jack says in this scene that always gets to me is that he tells Kate that he prays. That is not a seasons 1-3 Jack Shephard thing to do or say, and yet he does and says it.

There’s another big piece to Jack’s insistence that they go back to the island, and it comes from his own mouth in his wedding vows to his ex-wife Sarah: he has never been good at letting go. He can’t let go of Sarah, or his father, or the island, or Kate. And he definitely can never let go of John Locke. With Locke’s death comes a lot of realizations for Jack that Locke was right, and that he spent most of their time together telling Locke that he was wrong. I think regret goes hand in hand with letting go, and Jack knows he will have to live the rest of his life carrying the regrets of the way he treated Locke and the things he never said to him.

I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention a few more of the most significant scenes in the story of Jack Shephard, particularly as it pertains to John Locke. After Locke’s death, the Man in Black takes on the form of John Locke to continue to carry out his plans on the island. This, of course, adds even more to the story of Jack and Locke, as Jack now has to be around someone who looks and sounds exactly like John Locke, but that he knows is not him. Everything he says to the Man in Black that he wishes he could say to the real Locke falls mostly on deaf ears. Here are my two scenes of note here:

There is, of course, the one that every Lost fan talks about, and that gave us this all-time quote:

“You are not John Locke. You disrespect his memory by wearing his face, but you’re nothing like him. Turns out he was right about most everything. I just wish I could have told him when he was still alive.”

And as much as I love that scene and could talk about it for days on end and never run out of things to say, I want to run it back to what is a relatively unappreciated interaction between Jack and the Man in Black masquerading as Locke. The scene in question is from a season 6 episode called “The Last Recruit.” The Man in Black grows increasingly frustrated with Jack’s defense of Locke and what he believed in. Eventually, he says to him, “John Locke was not a believer. He was a sucker.” It’s a particularly emotionally impactful scene because this is verbatim something Jack would’ve said to and about Locke in season 1, and he knows it. Once again, it’s that thing of knowing he was wrong and that he can never take it back or tell Locke that he understands now.

I think a big part of Jack’s arc in season 6 is having to look “John Locke” in the eye and hear him say things that the real Locke never would have said. When you look back on the early seasons, Jack is almost always criticizing or critiquing Locke’s way of thinking. Fast forward to season 6, and he is defending him at every turn. In fact, I think a large part of why the Man in Black’s plan ultimately fails is because, by taking on the form of John Locke, he just reminds Jack constantly of everything that Locke stood for. In their final confrontation, it is this exact thing that gives Jack the motivation to become the island’s new guardian, to fight the Man in Black, and to make the sacrifice he makes in his final moments in order to protect the island.

Because that’s the thing. Jack did not have to stay behind on the island. Kate says it — he could’ve just gotten on the plane and let the island sink. But, of course, that was never really an option for him. And a big piece of that that we can’t ignore is that saving the island was a major way for him to honor John Locke’s memory. But also, look at the growth of that character. If you told the Jack Shephard that exists in the pilot that he would go on to sacrifice himself on behalf of the island, he would just laugh it off. It’s almost unimaginable that any version of that man would do that. But he does it.

So now let’s think about the very last shot of the final episode of Lost. Yes, it’s one that looked extremely familiar, because it’s exactly the same as the very first shot of the show, just reversed. The show opens with that pull out from Jack’s face. It ends with a zoom in on Jack looking up at the sky, at the plane his friends are on taking them off of the island and home. He smiles, and then we move in on his face, and on his eye closing as he dies. Bear in mind that all of this is intercut with footage of Jack entering the church and reuniting with the other passengers of Oceanic 815, these people that became his family in the time they spent together. Cutting together Jack sacrificing himself for the island with clips of him and Locke reuniting in the afterlife is brilliant. How anyone can hate this finale as much as they did is truly beyond me, but I digress. Maybe on a later date I’ll defend that one.

Starting and ending the show with Jack and making it the endpoints of his character arc specifically just goes to show how much the story of Jack Shephard is the story of Lost. Everything I’ve said about him here could be applied to the narratives and themes of the overall show as well. So how are you going to say that Jack’s character is poorly written or boring when that story is the entire show in a nutshell? Yes, he makes mistakes, lots of them, but who on this show doesn’t? That’s a big point of the finale, too. These people who were brought together by the most seemingly random of circumstances, who all came from different worlds, who had all made mistakes at each point of their lives, were able to find family and forgiveness with each other. And that forgiveness gets complicated and messy, too. (See: Ben sitting outside, declining to enter the church, a scene and a character that I could also talk about for hours and hours. Or Michael notably being absent from the church altogether, stuck on the island as one of the Whispers.)

The ending of Lost, while it makes cry more than anything else I’ve ever watched in my life, is not a sad ending. It’s a happy ending for Jack. Because, yes, he dies, but he got to do it for something that was important to him. He got to believe so hard in something that he was willing to give his life for it. And really, that’s all he actually wanted. To believe in something. And to John Locke’s point, it’s hard to believe in anything that much. It took almost 6 full seasons for Jack to get there.

“The most important part of your life was the time that you spent with these people on that island. That's why all of you are here. Nobody does it alone, Jack. You needed all of them, and they needed you.”

To put a period on my point here, the score that plays in the final scene of Lost is called “Moving On". Aside from how brilliant and beautiful it is (it’s written by Michael Giacchino, so are we really surprised?), it’s also perfectly titled for the show’s ending and for my piece here. Among all the things that define Jack Shephard as a character and as a person, his inability to let things go and to move on is one of the most consistent. While other aspects of his character shift and evolve, this one largely stays the same. Even in his final moments, he can’t just leave and let the island go. Showing us Jack in the church finally finding some sort of peace where he’s able to forgive himself for the things he did wrong and the people he couldn’t save, and letting go of his father and everything that happened between them. All of these things were weighing him down his entire life, and in the next life he’s finally able to move on from them.