Jack Thompson - the most fascinating, realistic, and human character on Agent Carter
Full disclosure here, Jack Thompson was not my favorite character when the show started in Season 1, that was Edwin Jarvis - and while I adore Chad Michael Murray as an actor, he certainly wasn’t the reason I was watching the show, that honor belonged to Hayley Atwell.
But along the way in Season 1, Jack Thompson became more and more interesting as they began to peel back the layers of his character, as little details were sprinkled in and we began to see a character who wasn’t just a cardboard box cut out but a real 3-dimensional character. Season 2 only helped in bringing in more complexity to a character that always seem to walk that fine line between good and evil.
It’s easy to label Jack Thompson as one thing or one personality or one trait - it’s easy to just call him a sexist and a jerk and be done with it - but from the moment they began to broaden this character, I found him to be the most realistic and human character of the whole show.
We love our heroes vs villains, we love seeing the world in good vs evil, but Jack Thompson straddles that line, he is the most like us - we ourselves in real life don’t always do the right thing, we are sometimes tempted by our weaknesses, our flaws, our ambitions - we sometimes make mistakes, big or small - we sometimes lash out in pain or anger or jealousy or even learned prejudice - and even if we are adults, we sometimes still have so much to learn about ourselves and the world around us.
Jack Thompson is full of contradictions, just like us.
We, like Jack, are not just one single thing that defines us.
Jack is a man who can be a real asshole yet when a fellow agent dies, he remembers to inform the girlfriend while his boss calls the wife.
Jack is a man who can fall prey to ambition, opportunity, and selfishness but can be swayed by encouragement and genuine belief of goodness.
Jack is a man who can be a brave agent yet also cowardly and afraid to tell an ugly truth.
Jack is a man who can fall to learned prejudice but learn to change and be better than he was before.
Jack Thompson is us - and perhaps sometimes that’s why people can’t accept him because we do not want to see a mirror of ourselves and our mistakes reflected back to us. After all, how many of us have told lies in fear of repercussions? How many of us have told lies so big sometimes that we don’t even know how to tell the truth anymore without disappointing everyone around us? How many of us have been selfish in thinking of our own careers and advancement, even if sometimes it’s at the expense of others? How many of us have allowed our own ambition to fuel competition against others? How many of us sometimes take two steps forward and one step back in our own development?
People are not just good and evil, and neither is Jack. And after all, life doesn’t exactly follow a straight line.
For a man intent on showing all the confidence and swagger of an alpha macho man - he’s incredibly proud and insistent on calling his grandmother “Gam Gam”.
For a man who is suppose to be falling in line with a shifty organization of his father’s friend, he spends more time not actually doing anything to really help the organization, more worried about going to Peggy about everything and convincing her to leave, and purposely keeping quiet about secrets and things that he knows that Peggy is doing or knows is doing against the organization which he never mentions it to anyone.
For a man who some label a coward, he certainly never hesitated in pushing Howard Stark out of the way of a bullet, and that was entirely on instinct the moment the gunshot went off.
All these contradicting behaviors - that’s what makes Jack such an interesting character to watch, because, like a real person, he is never just defined by one thing, and just when you think you figured him out, he can still surprise you. And it is because of this that he became my favorite character.
Most of the characters on Agent Carter are pretty set in who they are, how they act, how they respond - they fit in those neat little boxes of good guys and bad guys, heroes and villains - but Jack Thompson, he’s a little bit of everything, he is the wild card, and he still has so much more room to grow.
I don’t believe his story is finished (show renewal or not).
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