Jack

Lore & Background

Jack was born with biotics, the ability to manipulate dark energy and create mass effect fields. She spent her childhood and adolescence imprisoned at a remote Cerberus research outpost, and the abuse she suffered there shaped her belligerent, foul-mouthed temperament. After escaping she turned to crimes including piracy, kidnapping, vandalism and murder, and even joined a religious cult, looking for meaning in what had been done to her. Her tattoos cover her scars, a deliberate attempt to erase her past and write her own story.

Reader's Guide

If both Jack's and Miranda's loyalty missions are completed, the two fight aboard the Normandy; a high enough Paragon or Renegade score lets Shepard stop it, otherwise Shepard must side with one of them. Jack is a romance option for a male Shepard. Writer Brian Kindregan said in 2021 that she was originally meant to be pansexual. Critics were divided on her Mass Effect 2 portrayal as an "edgy" archetype, while her more mature Mass Effect 3 appearance was better received.

In Mass Effect 2, Shepard recruits Jack from Purgatory, a prison run by the Blue Suns mercenaries, where she was held in cryogenic stasis. She joins in exchange for Cerberus's files on the facility where she was tortured, over the objections of Cerberus officer Miranda Lawson. Her loyalty mission takes Shepard and Jack to that abandoned facility, which they destroy. In Mass Effect 3 she teaches biotic students at the Grissom Academy's Ascension Project under the alias Jacqueline Nought, and defends them during a Cerberus attack on the station; if Shepard arrives too late, she is captured and turned into a Cerberus Phantom.

Did You Know?

• Jack's Mass Effect 3 redesign gives her more clothing and longer hair to reflect her maturation.
• Jack is the central character of issue 7 of the comic series Mass Effect: Foundation.