Dead Men Tell No Tales ( 1752, age 62 )

The entire premise of this show is frank bullshit. Jack, in his youth, was a young man desperate to escape the ways of piracy – his goal in life was to gain the power necessary to rid the seas of piracy and governmental corruption. He wanted adventure and freedom and above all else, he wanted the seas safe from pirates. A man like Armando Salazar would, to him, be nothing short of utterly admirable and worthy of respect.

Jack is clearly in his late teens here, potentially his early twenties – it is possible that he is sailing with pirates at this point but if so, he has no authority to lead them. Jack is untested and untried – there is no reason for any aboard that ship to follow his mad scheming, when they are all clearly older than him. Whether one believes it to be Barbossa or Teague aboard that ship – both men are respectable captains who would be turned to aeons before Jack himself.

Everything about the premise here is a damn disaster of contradiction – but the worst of it all is the idea that Jack Sparrow – a young man who has, at this point, saved and spared lives at every single turn, had a panic attack at a sword for sinking a Naval ship and promptlyreturned that ship and it’s crew to life with clever wording – a young man who has only oncewished to kill anyone, and that person being none other than one who has lied to, spied upon and utterly betrayed him personally – would willfully lead a crew full of men doing nothing more than their duty to certain and horrific death.

We must remember who Jack Sparrow is to his enemies. We must remember that every opportunity he has for murder is squandered. Every chance he has to permanently end an enemy results in them spared somehow. Exceptions to this being those who have corneredJack into fighting for his life – and in those cases the ones who kill? Are still not Jack. ( Borya was destroyed by the princess of Kerma, though Jack’s plan to corner his ship likely would have ended in disaster for the Lord of the Caspian. Borya is clearly inspiration for Salazar’s fate but that’s another thing. What matters here though is it was a fight for life and in the end it was not Jack who took it. As for Cutler Beckett? Jack had ample opportunity – including a point where he had a canon on the man – and instead of pointing the canon at Cutler he pointed just past – familiar enough with how dead inside the man is to predict he might not dodge and account for it. Jack was not the one to destroy Endeavour, but it was a fate Cutler unwittingly orchestrated for himself. Despite being Jack’s long rival, it was not Jack to take him out. ) And yet we are expected to believe young Jack, who admires pirate hunters, would willfully destroy an entire crew and be a sassy shit about it. No, Disney, you utter fucks, I think not.  

Firstly, for the sake of personal continuity, this event takes place when Jack is nineteen years old, and is sailing upon a pirate vessel after slipping out of Shipwreck Cove on Teagueyet again. He was, in fact, a stowaway recently discovered – to make all nonsense here work, the captain of the ship was recently mutineed and the crew was in disarray about whom would lead them when Salazar’s ship came into their sights. Salazar is legendary in his own right – the first voice to call out a plan that sounded probable was immediately obeyed – there was no time for further argument if these men wished to live ( which, naturally, they did. )

The plan was indeed Jack’s. To trick Salazar and his crew into the rocks – yes – however this mystical bullshit was never part of it. The point of the plan was to out maneuver Salazar’s ship – thus granting Jack’s own time to escape. There was the possibility that Salazar would not be swift enough to keep his ship from being bottomed out by the rocks, but Jack was confident a man of such fearsome reputation would find a way to chase after them sooner rather than later.

For the sake of Disney’s bullshit, mystical crap does still happen – however, that is where Disney dies and my hands take the wheel. Jack would not have forgotten Salazar – he would have wondered frequently to the fate of that ship and the lack of it stalking him. There are two paths here that will then be taken, depending on how one wishes to address this disaster drama.

The first is that Jack seeks out Salazar and discovers the curse. He then, being Jack Sparrow, adventures to find a means to break it by way of apology. This is, obviously, an au arrangement available to anyone and noted under Jack’s verse titles. The second is that due to the amount of things Jack is bombarded with, he never gets the chance – but he does, indeed, always wonder where Armando Salazar went, until the day he learns the truth.

If you think guilt would not motivate him more than fear, you don’t know him. Jack will indeed seek a way to break the curse, not out of fear for his life but out of a need to correct his own error. This is the ‘canon’ alteration – that and Jack’s entire demeanor in that film, which was a disaster in and of itself. My Jack will not be a bumbling comic relief element. He will be the same man we have always known and that’s the tea on that.