Warning: this post contains spoilers through Season Two of Lost, Season Two of Battlestar Galactica, and Season One of Supernatural.
In the first season of Lost, there’s an episode titled “All the Best Cowboys Have Daddy Issues,” and it was just too irresitible to change “cowboys” to “heroes” for the title of this entry, because it’s true. A lot (although not all) of the really fascinating heroes have difficult relationships with their father. Sometimes it almost seems like a requirement for being a hero.
In genre television, the difficult fathers fall into three categories. They are not mutually exclusive, and many characters embody two or even three at once.
Hero fathers
The hero fathers have often trained and mentored their offspring. If the hero is good at what he or she does, it’s because of the father’s guidance. The hero usually looks up to the father, but there’s a downside; they are perpetually trying to measure up and miserable when they can’t.
Absent fathers
The absent fathers are absent either physically or emotionally. They have trouble expressing their feelings, a trait they probably passed on to their offspring. This category is often combined with the hero father category.
Villain fathers
The villain father means the hero was unlucky enough to get stuck with Darth Vader syndrome. Dad’s a bad guy, either literally or figuratively, and the hero offpsring is often their one achilles’ heel. The hero often realizes this, and believes they can persuade their father back to the side of the angels.
On Battlestar Galactica, Lee Adama, a.k.a. Apollo, has a hero father, Commander William Adama. Adama is a wise, accomplished, legendary military leader. Apollo struggles to be as good as his father. This doesn’t actually seem to come from anything William Adama has done. Though he is dignified, he isn’t cold, and he seems immensely proud of his son. Most of the pressure on the father/child bond comes from tragic death of Apollo’s younger brother, Zak. The rest of it is from the fact that William Adama isn’t demonstrative in his affection, which runs quiet and deep, and is a problem for a self-doubting character like Apollo.
To complicate matters further, with Zak dead, Apollo is now Adama’s only child. It’s easy to read Lee’s actions as the result of his believing that he must be as good as two sons to make up for the lack. Apollo is a natural fighter pilot, following his father’s footsteps in the military, although he deliberately pursued his career away from his father’s command, trying to prove himself outside his father’s shadow. He falls into conflict with his father when he serves as President Roslin’s military adviser, and defies Adama in order to follow his own beliefs. Apollo seems concerned with doing the right thing, with being the best at what he does, and with being a leader, and he struggles with each aspect. The complicated, desperate situation of the colonists’ in the wake of the Cylon attack doesn’t present easy moral or political choices. Apollo’s leadership confidence also seems shaky; he agonizes over decisions. He performs heroic feats in the war against the Cylons, showing he is both a good fighter pilot and also a leader, but during one storyline, asks his father a question about how much he cares about his son. Apollo gets the answer he wants, but since this happens in season one, it doesn’t help him find his footing, and so trying to win Adama’s approval is an incomplete picture of his reasons for insecurity.
The series Lost is
packed with characters who have father issues.
Most notably, there is Jack, a doctor who takes charge right from the start after the plane crash, saving lives and organizing the rag-tag survivors. Eventually we find out his backstory, and it turns out his father was also a doctor. So like Apollo, he is following in the footsteps of a hero father. But in this case, the hero father turns into a villain; after he botched a surgery due to his alcoholism, the father turned the blame onto his son. This betrayal, and the need to prove himself worthy once again, seems to be what’s spurring Jack’s determination to take on the leader/hero role for the castaways. Jack is on Oceanic Flight 815 because his father has died and he’s taking the body home. So he has a hero father who betrayed him and turned into a villain, and now his father is gone.
The initially mysterious John Locke has hunting and tracking skills. He becomes a mentor both to Charlie, helping him through his heroin addiction, and to Walt, whose father is a stranger to him. In one episode, Locke starts to teach Walt the art of knife throwing, but they are interrupted by an angry, protective Michael. John Locke, we discover, has a father who was first absent then betraying. Locke tried hard to believe in his father’s redemption, but this belief is what made Locke gullible to his father’s scheme. The fact that Locke turns himself into a mentor for others is telling, maybe a way to compensate for his father’s failure.
The TV series Supernatural focuses mainly on two brothers, Sam and Dean Winchester, as they travel across the country battling otherwordly evil. Their father, John Winchester, is part hero, part absent father, and part villain, all in the first season. After a supernatural event killed his wife, John trained his sons in the art of hunting evil things, seeking vengeance for her death. Dean, the oldest son, is a skilled hunter who seems to relish, and seek, a hero role. He likes to kick down doors, says he believes in the family business of saving people, and unquestioningly follows his father’s orders. Sam, the youngest, is more intellectual. He has the technical knowledge of how to shoot and hunt, but is more likely to use Latin incantations than a gun. To Sam, John is the absent father (literally and emotionally) and an emotional villain as well, a source of anger and frustration. We know that Sam and John fought bitterly before Sam left to go to college, part of his quest for normalcy. While to Dean, John is one hundred percent hero.
John confesses to Sam, “I forgot to be your father and became your drill sergeant.” In the present, he is literally absent through most of the first season, in contact only through voice mail and through his journal of hunter lore. This journal, written so cryptically that Dean compares his father to Yoda, serves as his stand-in and a source of all knowledge for his sons, a parallel to William Adama’s dignity and knowledge and John Locke’s tracking/hunting knowledge. True to the stages of the hero quest outlined in Joseph Campbell’s Hero With a Thousand Faces, the boys eventually confront their unreachable father, and both of them change their perspective on John.
Heroes with a complicated relationship with their father is common in all media, in all eras. It’s not only a humanizing element for hero characters, bringing them closer to us. Everyone has parental issues, in addition to a myriad of other possible emotional baggage, and heroes have been subjected to them all. Ironically, the basic mental image of “hero” is of a character who is invulnerable. Not so anymore. But this makes them no less heroic, in fact it makes them more so. Sometimes the emotional demons are scarier than the real ones, and the real heroic act is surviving them.