Stranger Tides ( 1750, age 60 )

Twenty years after the last truly canonical events for my Jack, placing him at the age of sixty and not looking anywhere near it thanks to the Shadow Gold pumping through his veins and granting him longevity ( not immortality; merely a very long youthfulness due to his aging process being slowed remarkably ) the events in this storyline are not entirely contentious to me.

For the most part, I am content with the way Stranger Tides comports itself – Jack remains clever and quick on his feet, he stays well ahead of others in their own games and – despite the occasional failures in that – he does stay true to the core of himself in saving those whoought to be saved and letting nature take its course where it must.

In truth, my Jack is perhaps more energetic than this one and a little more sarcastic and biting. He’s grieving an awareness of the price of immortality while simultaneously seeking it for reasons even he is no longer certain of. He is as lively now as he was in his forties – if not his twenties! – and he sees that those whom he is used to are not aging as kindly.

Jack is placing distance between himself and what he knows ( saving Gibbs / abandoning Gibbs ) because he is ill prepared to cope with loss. He is, after all, a pirate who spends the majority of his time preserving life, rather than costing it – death is not something Jack accepts well or easily, and by this point in his life, it is circling him  like hungry sharks not out for his blood but the blood of all those around him. For a man who saves life, being confronted with the reality of mortality in those he cannot save leaves him bitter and desperate for a way to defeat the inevitable.