This one begins after Children of the Gods and shows us a lot about Jack's loyalty to his friends. It begins with Jack being very pally with Kawalsky, having a little joke in front of the General, and then them both making eye contact after he's told them off for doing their double act about who gets which planet and why. They are pretty much on a maturity level of ten year-olds here. One feels that Kawalsky is probably not the best influence on Jack as he encourages Jack to be sarky and Neanderthal, however he is also clearly a very decent man of whom Jack is very fond – as much as they allow themselves to be fond of each other, because this seems to be a friendship very much on military lines, forged under pressure and based on little actual conversation. Jack's main concern until Kawalsky's condition becomes apparent is Teal'c, who is being treated as a prisoner by the SGC before the Government spook, Kennedy, comes to take him away as a research subject. Jack clearly feels that he has let Teal'c down after Teal'c has gone out on a limb to save them all and the impotence of his position is clearly frustrating him big time. 

He has almost no interaction with Sam or Daniel in this episode, except crucially, when Sam is grabbed by the Goa'ulded Kawalsky Jack is obviously anxious for her, making extremely determined efforts to try and save her without injuring Kawalsky  - it is not clear if his 'Don't shoot!' to the other soldiers is on Sam's behalf or K's, but one presumes it is a bit of both, and he also seems to give her a little 'Are you okay?' look after she is out of the infirmary and back in the briefing, showing that when it comes to his team it doesn't matter how many other things he has on his mind he does try to make time for them. With Daniel, he only exchanges glances with him after Kawalsky is ill, when he and Daniel are united in their anxiety for Kawalsky; and there is a sense here that Daniel is very much a substitute friend. At this point, Jack seems to have much better bonding with Teal'c, however during this episode, Teal'c and Kawalsky are the friends in danger and Daniel is okay, so Daniel is left to Sam to take care of and one feels that Jack doesn't really spare him a thought, perhaps quite understandably. 

We do learn that Daniel is deliberately avoiding sleeping because of his fears about Sha're and he is barely seen without a Styrofoam cup of coffee throughout the entire episode. It is, significantly, Sam who talks him into going and putting his head down for a couple of hours. Jack is very definitely not on Daniel babysitting duty in this one, and there is a feeling that he is quite happy for the two scientists to run along and play and leave him to talk with the grown-ups: Kawalsky and Teal'c.

Jack handles Kawalsky's illness extremely kindly and compassionately, is quick to reassure him that he isn't to blame for what's happened while the Goa'uld has taken him over, and does his best to keep him focused and positive before the operation. He refuses to be maudlin or sentimental, joking about wanting Kawalsky's stereo if he dies, and does manage to keep his mind off things, even making him laugh. 

Despite his terrible anxiety for Kawalsky he is still fighting Teal'c's corner as hard as he can, 'barging in' on Teal'c's questioning by Kennedy, making a point of telling them how Teal'c's name is spelt, which although appearing randomly facetious, is also a very effective way of showing that this is a fellow human being they are talking about, with a name, and therefore opinions, emotions, and rights. When the General asks him if he is a hundred percent convinced of Teal'c's loyalty he says 'Yes' unhesitatingly, and later he tells Teal'c that in the moment when Teal'c came over from Apophis' side to help them, he learnt everything he needed to know about him. Again, this simplicity of Jack's is shown to be a tremendous strength, and one can't help feeling that this is exactly what happened with Daniel in the Movie; Daniel throwing himself in front of Jack to protect him might possibly have been a mistake, but standing up there with a staff weapon in his hand in full view of Ra's Jaffa and doing his damnedest to save all their lives was a very deliberate and courageous act. One feels that Jack probably felt that he had learnt all he needed to know about Daniel in that instant as well.

The fact that he was going to learn a hell of a lot more about both Daniel and Teal'c, some bad as well good, probably didn't occur to him at this point, as one feels that he and Kawalsky have the kind of friendship that has hardly altered since the first week they knew each other. It is a friendship of strong feelings but doesn't seem to have a huge amount of depth. And although Jack shows that he can be of great help and comfort to Kawalsky in a crisis, one wonders how much help Kawalsky could have been to him if their positions were reversed compared with Daniel or Teal'c.

Jack is clearly very unhappy with the way Teal'c is being treated in this episode and takes it very personally because he was the one who persuaded Teal'c to join their cause. One feels that he would never have got over it if Teal'c had been dragged off to be experimented on instead of being allowed to join Jack's team as Jack pretty much promised him. One also feels that he would never have given up trying to get Teal'c back because once he makes a commitment to someone, he makes a commitment to them and that's all there is to it. 

(One would be very surprised, for instance, if Jack was ever unfaithful to his wife. One suspects it probably never even occurred to him because once you're married you're married and that's all there is to it. Perhaps? One also wonders how he feels about Sha're and Daniel's marriage. In COTG, he makes a point of telling Sam that Sha're was a gift when Sam asks how Daniel and Sha're met and although he could just be being mischievous, or wanting to stop Daniel palling up with Sam when he wants Daniel palling up with him, one also feels that he probably didn't approve, thought Daniel was a naïve kid who got railroaded into something he didn't necessarily want because he was too polite to turn her down. Although he makes a point of offering a hand to Sha're when they meet up again, one wonders if he ever sees her as a very 'real' person, and he might not really think, especially at this point, that what Daniel and Sha're's was a 'real' marriage in the way that his and Sarah's was; no minister, no ring, no documentation, and most importantly of all no courtship. One wonders how many times he has had to stop himself from saying to Daniel: it's not like you had a single thing in common, or that you knew anything about each other before you got married, or were even given any choice about whether or not you wanted to be married to each other, and didn't you ever even wonder if she was a good wife to you because it was in her culture to do what her father said? However, he obviously never does say any of these things to Daniel, and indeed might become more convinced of the 'validity' of Daniel and Sha're's marriage as time goes on and Daniel is still determinedly looking for his wife and Jack is being exposed to more and more different cultures and accepting things about them as he does so.)

We also see Jack's pragmatism when Kawalsky becomes a Goa'uld. Although it clearly hurts him to do it, he gives the order for Kawalsky to be killed, and finds a means to deal with it when he says very firmly 'my friend died on the operating table'. He is clearly not going to go away and agonize over this, he is going to accept it and move on. He didn't kill Kawalsky, he killed the Goa'uld who killed Kawalsky. We get a glimpse here of a Jack who has lost men on missions and didn't like it one little bit but has found a means to deal with it. One also understands here why he and Kawalsky don't have the same kind of friendship that Jack has with Daniel, because if someone has had long conversations with you and relied on you and trusted you and told you how he really feels as opposed to having conversations that take place almost entirely in 'bloke code' where you kid around and never say anything very deep to each other, it is unbelievably painful when they get killed and you can't come up with some reassuring little phrase like 'my friend died on the operating table' or 'he died in a good cause' or 'it was what he loved to do' or whatever to make yourself feel better about it. You just feel unbelievably dreadful and never get over it. (As Jack learns to his cost in 'Fire & Water'.) (And one wonders if right from the beginning, Jack is scared of getting close to Daniel because he sees things in him that remind him of his son, or that he just knows could really get to him if he let them, and he does not want to get attached to anyone again; especially someone who shouldn't be let out without a keeper.)

At the end of the episode, it is definitely Teal'c to whom Jack seems to be giving the 'will you be my new best friend' treatment. One feels that he feels happier in Teal'c's company here than he does with either Sam or Daniel. At this point he seems to see Daniel as someone who knows lots of clever things, to whom he owes a debt to because he saved his life, and who it is his responsibility to take care of. Asked whether or not he was fond of him, one feels that Jack would probably deny it or say he'd never really thought about it and what the hell was someone asking him a dumbass question like that for, fer cryin' out loud! One feels that he might be dimly aware that Daniel could be something of a problem on a lot of levels in the future but that he is going to stick to his simple philosophy of I-owe-him-therefore-he's-on-my-team and not think beyond it. 

Asked about his team at this point, one feels that Jack would say that he is a hundred percent sure of Teal'c, would prefer it if Sam wasn't a scientist but he supposed it could possibly be helpful her knowing all that stuff at some point maybe, and that she appears to be a good Air Force captain as long as she could rein back on the enthusiasm and wanting his approval stuff. Asked about Daniel, I think he would have no idea how he felt about him and if asked to justify having him on a first-contact team would be hard-pressed to come up with a better reason than that he owed him and 'people seem to take to him' before quickly changing the subject.
 

Jack in...The Broca Divide

The episode where we first meet Colonel Makepeace and his jarheads, Jack turns into a caveman, Sam gets stabbed in the stomach, Daniel gets done over on a fanfiction scale, first by Jack and then by the Touched, and where Teal'c is pretty damned sexy and efficient the whole way through.

We are not really told enough about how the virus operates in this episode to learn much about how relevant Jack's behaviour is when he is a primitive. Johnson is shown to be looking at Teal'c a bit oddly before they ever head off to the planet, and so we are probably to presume that it brings out some latent feelings, however as Jack never shows any signs of feeling proprietorial about Sam in any future episodes, one doesn't like to draw any real conclusions from the scene where he beats Daniel up. The brutality with which he does so suggests a whole reservoir of repressed anger but as Jack never shows any sign of being angry with Daniel either before or after this scene, I think we can assume it's just the virus and nothing to do with his feelings for Daniel. The most interesting thing is really Daniel's reaction, in that Daniel is so busy being astonished that Jack has hit him that he never really looks either upset or hurt; he is more disbelieving than anything and one never feels that he blames Jack or would skip out of his way a little hastily on a next meeting. 

We do learn that Jack is damned stubborn and manages to wrestle a degree of his own mind back even when in the grip of the virus; however he is on very heavy sedation so is getting come chemical help. He also offers himself up for experimentation which shows that he is brave and self-sacrificing, and when Teal'c comes to tell him that he has 'lost Daniel Jackson on the dark side of the planet' it clearly really, really gets to him, despite all the sedation and the virus, one can see it hits him incredibly hard. And so it should, for we know, even if no one else does, that Daniel is having the crap kicked out of him while he is a prisoner of the Touched, as well as having had most of the clothes ripped from his poor battered body for reasons we will not even speculate upon in a PG13 synopsis such as this. 

Teal'c shows himself to be an A1 friend in this episode as well as showing us his wonderful profile on several occasions (although probably never to better advantage than in the scene where he is telling Jack he's sorry for having lost Daniel): He is clearly devastated by the loss of Daniel – whom he refers to as 'my friend' when he asks for help from the Untouched in finding him. (Even though at this point Daniel doesn't seem quite as sure of him, in that he clearly doesn't relish the idea of going back to the planet with only Teal'c for protection, yet is canny enough to yell for Teal'c to help him when the Touched are closing in, showing that Daniel is nothing if not adaptable and that if there is no Jack to yell for will yell for Sam or Teal'c instead.) Teal'c single-handedly obtains and brings back the blood sample that saves everyone, is obviously very worried about Sam when he sees her in the infirmary and is loyal and kind to Jack, sitting with him through his illness. The fact that he also keeps Daniel's glasses and is the one who picks him up and carries him all the way to the land of light and then sits by him while he is in the isolation circle, leaving Jack and Sam to make smalltalk with Tuplo while he watches over Daniel is also very touching. Although he is still a man of few words at this point, he offers the best practical assistance to everyone in this episode and proves himself to be a thoroughly good egg all round (and a damned sexy and efficient one too).

RDA does the best he can with Jack's character in the last few scenes despite the rather ropey script. He makes a lot out of his response to Sam's 'Do you think he could still be alive', making it obvious that he is not going to get over it in a hurry if Daniel isn't. He looks incredibly relieved when Daniel says that quavery little 'Jack' when he wakes up in the isolation circle; and he handles Sam with what could be deemed reasonable tact if what he was trying to do was reassure her that she hadn't made any more of an idiot of herself than he had without wanting her to start hero-worshipping him. In fact even the tank top joke is handled pretty much the same way he would handle Daniel in that situation; he tells her not to worry about what she did but then nips any tendency to think he's a completely nice guy in the bud by making a bad joke. There is a big problem in the last few scenes in that we, the viewers, have seen Daniel being very brutally beaten up, yet we don't see him being treated for what must have been pretty severe bruising at the very least. Nor do we see Jack apologise for hitting him or expressing any remorse for having done so. Nor do we see anyone checking Daniel out to see if he is fit to go wandering all over the planet in search of the Touched. However, given how protectively Teal'c was hovering over him as he came around and how quickly Jack and Sam were there, we must presume that they did check him out and that he was fit to walk. It would have been nice to see it though!

Jack has now been back in contact with Daniel for about a month at the most and has seen him get zapped by a ribbon device that left him unconscious for hours, offer himself as a host, make no attempt to defend himself when he was beaten up by his C.O. and get dragged off by hairy primitives who kicked the stuffing out of him. He also had what was clearly a not very nice wait to go and find out if Daniel was still alive and another not very nice wait to find out if Daniel was going to recover from being a primitive. It therefore seems reasonable to assume that even by this early part in their relationship although he might not have bonded with Daniel and might feel that he has more in common with Teal'c, he is already getting protective of him and might be disinclined to want him out of his sight on missions. It may also have dawned on him that he is rather fonder of Daniel than he first suspected and would definitely prefer it if no more ribbon-devicing, abducting, or abusing of Daniel took place for some considerable time as it does not have a good effect on his nervous system.

Lori