Lost: What Happened to Jack’s Father After The Plane Crash

The disappearance of Christian Shephard’s body was an important mystery that plagued Jack (Matthew Fox) inLost season 1. Played by John Terry, Jack’s father played an important role in the events that brought Fox’s character to the island. But interestingly, he was much more than a flashback character; he factored heavily into Jack’s present-day arc in the show’s first season.

One of the things that puzzled Jack Shephard most when he arrived on the island was the whereabouts of his father’s body, which was stored on the plane. What made the situation with Christian so frustrating for Jack was the fact that he kept seeing visions of him on the island. At the time, he didn’t know if what he was seeing was a hallucination or the ghost of his dad guiding them to water. When Jack found his coffin in the caves, it was inexplicably empty and the body was never found. As other problems occurred and more time passed, the mystery concerning Christian’s body became less relevant.

Later on in the series, the show’s exploration of the Man in Black (the smoke monster) and his true nature helped shed light on what really happened to Christian’s body. It was eventually revealed that the smoke monster can somehow take the forms of dead people. The vessel he used the most was Locke (Terry O’Quinn), but the body he used at the beginning of the series was Christian’s. During a conversation in a season 6 episode, he confirmed that he used Christian’s physical appearance to lead Jack to the caves. What all this implies is that after the plane crash, the Man in Black found Christian’s corpse, copied it with his powers, and abandoned it somewhere.

Not unlike how other Lost mysteries played out, it took six seasons for Jack to finally receive a definitive answer about his father’s real role in the story. As it turned out, Christian was just one of many pawns in the smoke monster’s master plan. Over the course of the series, the Man in Black impersonated several other dead characters in the same way. In addition to Locke and Jack’s father, he also appeared as Alex Rousseau and Mr. Eko’s brother, Yemi. It wasn’t until much later in the series that it became apparent that each of these “ghosts” was in fact one evil entity.

Uncertainty over whether or not these people – particularly Christian – were real or something else entirely lingered for quite a while with viewers. Claire (Emilie de Ravin), Michael (Harold Perrineau), and Locke all had separate encounters with “Christian” that brought greater interest to his purpose in the series and his activities on the island in Lost. And although the real Christian Shephard did wind up accompanying Jack and the others into the afterlife inLost’s ending, he had no actual involvement in the events that transpired on the island.

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