Edward Blake and Christian Sheppard

I have great ideas when in the shower; it’s incredible. I know so many things I came up with while I was taking a shower. Some of the revisions Demyan has undergone since I rediscovered him were made in the shower, one of them being the inclusion of a woman I named Dona. I first wrote down the name some time later, there may have been a gap of a day or two because at first I was reluctant concerning the name, but it came to me in the shower as did the name of Dona’s little sister, Riez, and her storyline. One storyline involving Wes and Hobbie was developed in the shower in a hotel in Morro de Sao Paulo during the Eastern holidays and it still sticks to me, I know that there is no way I will ever get away without including this scene somewhere.

Today, it was something that just struck me. I had just watched an episode of Lost with my mother and grandma (318 “DOC”) and afterwards we got into talking about how well everything is written and I mentioned Alan Moore’s Watchmen and how it was a great inspiration for the show. A few minutes later in the shower, I suddenly thought, “Christian Sheppard has a lot in common with the Comedian, Edward Blake.”

The first character that is seen in Lost is Jack, Christian’s son, who is on the Island because he was returning to Los Angeles with his father’s corpse. So his father’s death was the driving force, the reason he ended up on the Island. Watchmen starts with two police inspectors in Blake’s apartment after the owner was murdered the night before which gets the story started. Christian isn’t only responsible for Jack being on the Island. He was the one who first brought Ana Lucia to Australia, he talked and unknowingly convinced him to kill Frank Duckett which got him deported. Both Blake and Christian connected many characters to each other in some way and are important characters in their respective stories although they are both already dead when the story starts.

Both Christian and the Comedian had many sexual relationships (in Christian’s case it was adultery as he was married) and got women pregnant in the process. The prominent example involving Blake (who at least impregnated a second woman though) was Sally Jupiter who raised their daughter Laurie Juspeczik on her own and never told her about her real father. Christian had an affair with an Australian woman who gave birth to Claire Littleton. She cut Christian off of Claire’s life after a while and so neither of the men’s daughters remember their real fathers and are raised by their mothers. But there is a moment when both men meet their daughters. Edward Blake meets Laurie at the Crimebusters’ meeting and has a short conversation with her before Sally Jupiter spots them and drags Laurie away, wanting to protect her. She breaks down and tells her that Blake tried to rape her once and so, Laurie only has negative feelings towards the man. Claire meets Christian when her mother is rendered comatose after a car crash. Christian tells Claire that he is her father but she doesn’t want to see him as such and isn’t even interested in learning his name. She is disgusted as he suggests to euthanize Carole, just like Laurie is disgusted at her Blake for having attempted to violate her mother. Both women are offended by something their fathers tried to do to their mothers.

Towards the end of Watchmen, Laurie discovers about her father’s identity with her former lover Dr. Manhattan / Jon Osterman’s help and although she is at first devastated and can’t understand how her mother could have sex with the man who tried to rape her but she eventually forgives her mother and tells her that she knows about her father’s identity. Claire can’t do so because she never was mad at her mother, Christian never did what Blake did, so this is a difference. But there is the possibility of her figuring out that Jack Sheppard is her brother. As Christian was very direct about him being her father, this could be a startling revelation because neither Jack nor Claire would ever have expected it and it would affect both of them. (Still, I don’t need them to find out).

There is another similarity between Christian Sheppard and Edward Blake when it comes to their daughters: Their mothers try to protect them from the men who fathered them. When Sally Jupiter sees Laurie with Blake, she overreacts, drags her away, not wanting her daughter to get close to Blake. Shortly before his death, Christian is in Australia and goes looking for Claire but Claire’s aunt tells him to go away as he has no right to see his daughter. Claire’s aunt Lindsay takes the mother’s place because she is still comatose by then and will probably never wake up and Lindsay has played an important part in her niece’s life, not only after what happened to Carole, but also before as I can imagine that she helped her sister with the child.

But Edward Blake and Christian Sheppard have more in common than just being absent fathers. They are very dedicated to their respective jobs. Christian trains his son Jack to be his successor; Edward who doesn’t have such, goes to the Crimebusters’ meeting where he criticizes the approach of this new generation of heroes. Christian is also prone to criticizing Jack’s way of doing things. They never seem to consider that they are handling things the wrong way. This can be seen when Christian wants Jack to claim that the pregnant patient he operated on in an inebriated state could never have been saved. Jon Osterman isn’t sure that Edward Blake is doing things the right way when he shoots a Vietnamese woman who is pregnant (it is not said if it is his child).

Both men have a vice. Blake is almost never seen without a cigar in his mouth, there is one scene in which he uses it to set the Crimebusters’ poster on fire. Christian is an alcoholic. They both die alone, without anyone, although Christian dies after an alcohol-induced heart attack and Blake is killed.

Blake is mostly shown as an unsympathetic character while Christian is also portrayed to be a caring father to Jack although they have their differences that eventually become too much for Christian to bear. He confesses to Sawyer that he is thankful for his son’s actions that led to him losing his job because it was the right thing to do but he just can’t get himself to tell Jack so. Christian is portrayed in a more human way although he is severely flawed. Edward Blake on the other hand doesn’t have real character moments, the only one being Sally looking at a picture of his with tears in her eyes indicating that Edward in fact had good qualities. But these are never shown because they are not relevant to the story. Blake is supposed to appear as an asshole so that Laurie’s discovery about her father is more shocking.

So, there are similarities between these two men, most of them somehow involving their daughters. I would not say that comparing them is too far-fetched.