John Sheppard, Stargate Atlantis Character Mini-Essay
The following is a mini-essay is a response to Ann Tara’s comments about John Sheppard’s background. I managed to lose it on my computer for about a month. This is the beginning of a continuing series of observations I will be posting. I will label all my essays and post them under cuts, so if you are not interested in reading ponderous character analysis you (happy reader) can skip them.
John Sheppard, Stargate Atlantis an On Going Character Analysis
I'm never not going to regret the producers refusing to really delve into John's background. We know his father wanted him to go to Harvard, so he purposely chose to go to Stanford instead, which is certainly one of the top schools in the country. Not exactly a slacker institution. But John is a CA boy and wanted to stay on the west coast, and didn't desire the pretentiousness of the Eastern Ivy League. Definitely not his style. But I got the impression he also didn't want to go the Harvard route specifically because it's what his father wanted. Yet, if he had, he would have gotten further away from his family much sooner, so obviously being rebellious in that regard was more important to him. :) Ann Tara
John Sheppard, Stargate Atlantis an On Going Character Analysis
Since I watched all the Stargate Atlantis episodes within a three month period, I didn’t have years between the seasons to think and rethink Sheppard’s background. I’ve started exploring this universe when it was mostly a closed fandom. I was initially puzzled why so many writers wrote him from a military background. I realize now that a military history made a lot of sense (early on), especially in the absence of canonical information. I also think fan author’s liked the angst of exploring Sheppard’s potential bi-sexuality or gay issues against that background.
I however like the rich-kid-slumming model of Sheppard’s background. I’m tending away from John’s family rupture being caused by a ‘big gay freak out’ as the fans call it. What I liked about the Harvard book is it’s insight into prep school education, and how that spills over into college success, and life success through social contacts.
The out-of-sight wealthy, the super rich what ever you want to call them, don’t necessarily send their kids to the Ivy’s. They don’t need too, especially if their kid’s are going to inherit. They are just as likely to send their kids to smaller (still very prestigious) liberal arts colleges. The Harvard track tends to be the destination of the upper-middle class kids, who want in to make the contacts will launch them into successful careers.
I was over helping Elemgi with some box moving, and between bouts of hauling book boxes I asked her opinion about Sheppard’s background. Specifically was Sheppard from old money or new money? (Nouveau riche) That makes a big difference, especially in his college path. Elemgi’s answer to my question was-“mother old money, father new money.” I realized she was correct.
This explains the dichotomy in Sheppard’s character. He’s inherited his father’s aggressive management skills and also his father’s egalitarian attitude toward the value of a self-made-man. From his mother he’s inherited his artistic side (love of books, music, math and science) as well as his goofy sense of humor, and oddly from her an unconscious projection of patrician manners and attitudes (his coolness of temperament and a touch of moralistic snobbery-his…. ‘I’m smarter than everyone else’ attitude that causes him to ignore other people’s opinions and instigate actions, recklessly and totally on his own sense of certainly)
It makes sense for the self-made Patrick Sheppard to want his son to go to Harvard. Sheppard’s mother on the other hand would have encouraged him in a different direction. Telling her son to follow his own heart--Sadly she probably died before she could help him with that.
I don’t think Sheppard’s difficulty with his father was because of John’s sexuality. There are lots of complicated reasons for why I believe that, but I won’t go into them here. Except that if Sheppard was even minimally smart about his personal life, his father would have never known his son was gay.
I think John from a very young age knew what he ‘didn’t’ want to do with his life, and knew he and his father were on a collision course. John internalized correctly that his father’s plans were not to be argued with, and that youthful rebellion wasn’t going to get him what he wanted. Instead of emotional rebellion John utilized his intelligence to manipulate situations and people to circumvent his father’s plans.
John as a child and as an adult is fiercely intelligent, perhaps too much for his own good in that he took control of his life in his early teens, and made choices that were reactive rather then proactive about his future. He perfected his escape skills at the expense of discovering who he really was. And the path he set himself on, specifically the military was a choice made without consideration of his personal needs. Meaning he probably didn’t consider the amount of group and interpersonal interaction a career military officer would be required to make. As a teenager he was seduced by the Top Gun lone-pilot fantasy. After the glow of pilot training passed he would come to understand that the military in many was just as entrapping as his family life had been.
Fairly early on Sheppard would have had an ironic laugh at himself when he realized the professional skill set a military commander required was pretty much identical to the skill set he would have needed as an executive in his father’s company--That his big escape from his father’s world hadn’t been much of an escape at all. He’d traded one set of crushing responsibilities for another, and that he probably wasn’t all that different from his father in that both of them internalized responsibilities in the same megalomaniac way, putting other people’s welfare above their own.
John had grown up with a father who had had little time for him because Sheppard senior was building and nurturing his utility company. John resented not having access to a father he adored, a father he perceived cared more for strangers and his business then his own son.
John like his father is a very inner driven man. He’s an intensely private person, with a very rich interior life that he shares only with much reticence. He retreats within when stressed or cornered or angry. His mind is his refuge and he is happy when he is alone. It puzzles John that people don’t get this, especially when they try to draw him out. He is a loner, and has embraced that self definition.
I think John’s deep interiority is probably what tore his marriage apart. That coupled with the stress of long separations and John’s inability to talk about it drove two people who where deeply in love out of love. John finds the sharing of intimacy terrifying and is always caught off guard when friends and people who love him express it. (To be continued)