In many ways, Jack Joyce is a man without roots, a drifter. Orphaned at a long age, raised by a brother he doesn’t really get along with. He’s had brushes with the law; when he was younger, he and his best friend Paul would get into trouble on a regular basis. Jack was never a troublemaker, per se; he was just somebody who had a knack for getting in trouble—and for getting out of it, one way or another. Jack’s always known how to take care of himself.
But not just himself. Jack’s never really been the selfish type. Drifter or not, for Jack, loyalty runs deep—deep enough for him to drop everything and fly across the world to help a friend. There was never any question whether Jack would help Paul. The kind of bond they had was sacred to him.
In the end, for all the friction between Jack and his brother, the same goes for William, too. William may have been more than Jack could handle when he left, but Jack loves his brother, bad blood or no.
Where Paul has been driven and made a real career for himself, Jack’s been doing a little bit of this, a little bit of that, whatever made ends meet. There’s always work for somebody who can think on his feet and is willing to take a few risks, and perhaps isn’t that particular about whether something’s legal, strictly speaking. So Jack’s been around; he’s put in shifts as a bouncer in a shady Bangkok nightclub and run the occasional errand for the kind of people who pay you in cash and tell you to keep your mouth shut. On more than one occasion, he’s found himself in the kind of trouble you can’t talk your way out of.
Rules have always been more like suggestions for him—if things had played out a little differently, he might have made a fine career criminal. But Jack knows the difference between right and wrong. What’s more, it matters to him. So when his best friend suggests doing something kind of illegal in the middle of the night, he doesn’t really need a lot of prompting —but when things go bad, he feels a personal responsibility to set things right.
Jack is portrayed by Shawn Ashmore.
