Characters / Borderlands: Handsome Jack

Spoilers Off for games prior to Borderlands 3 as well as for Spoiler characters that are marked as such. Proceed with caution. You Have Been Warned.

Borderlands Character sheets
Playable Vault Hunters: Borderlands | Borderlands 2 (Krieg) | The Pre-Sequel (Claptrap) | Borderlands 3
Supporting Characters: Borderlands | Borderlands 2 (Tiny Tina's Assault on Dragon Keep DLC) | The Pre-Sequel | Borderlands 3
Spinoffs and other media: Tales from the Borderlands | Tiny Tina's Wonderlands | New Tales from the Borderlands | Other media
Weapon Brands: Atlas | Dahl | Hyperion (Handsome Jack) | Maliwan | Jakobs | Torgue | Tediore | Other Weapon Brands
Other: Bandits and Bandit Factions (Children of the Vault) | Hodunk and Zaford Clans | Creatures (Eridians and Vault Monsters) | Raid Bosses

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Handsome Jack

^{Click to see him in The Pre-Sequel}

Voiced by: Dameon Clarke (English), Hiroyuki Kinoshita (Japanese), Christophe Lemoine (French), Juan Amador Pulido (Spanish), Kai Taschner (German)

"Hey kids, do you know what your mommies and daddies gave up to live here in Opportunity? Literally nothing! You're paid to be here! I'm the one who feeds and protects everyone. Remember, we should all love our parents, but love me more."

— An announcement in Opportunity

The main antagonist of Borderlands 2. After taking over the Hyperion corporation (via terrorizing the board of directors and strangling his boss), Jack has made it his goal to "bring order" to Pandora by wiping out every undesirable on the planet. To do this, he needs what is inside the second Vault, and is having his armies drill into the planet and mine Eridium for this purpose.

The Pre-Sequel! expands upon his past, showing how he rose to take control of Hyperion while trying to save the people of Elpis and Pandora from the Lost Legion. In the process, Jack's progression into megalomania and madness is shown as he faces intense stress, makes morally questionable decisions, and deals with the consequences of his own greed.

To make a long story short; he's selfish, petty, a massive dick, manipulative, violent, narcissistic (just look at his damn name), immature, sociopathic, deranged, megalomaniacal, volatile and shamelessly sadistic.

So, yeah... not a very pleasant dude.

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#-D

• 0% Approval Rating: Zigzagged. Pandorans absolutely hate him unless he pays them. But for his own company, it's different. He does openly make his employees' lives a living hell and scientists such as Dr. Samuels are only working for them due to him threatening their loved ones, most employees such as Rhys, Vasquez, and Nakayama idolize him due to his powerful personality cult and see his poor treatment of them as some weird sort of affection. After his death, his office on Helios was made into a memorial museum with VIP only access, with die-hard visitors wearing his mask. The general pattern seems to be that if he wants to hurt someone for his own amusement, they seem to see it as nothing special because he's successful and he does it to everyone. If Jack hurts someone with an intent in mind, God help them.
• Abusive Parent:
  • Keeps his daughter Angel locked up and pumped full of Eridium because her Siren powers can power the Vault key. Electrocutes and verbally abuses her whenever she disobeys him. She's been that way for so long that cutting the Eridium flow would kill her, so she literally has no release but death from her torment.
  • He apparently had an Abusive Grandparent too, as you can find a buzz-axe in his grandma's home, which is labelled a "disciplinary tool". As revealed in the Pre-Sequel, said grandparent also beat him regularly and drowned his cat when he didn't make his bed.
• Accidental Misnaming: It was done to him by his boss when he worked for Hyperion, and then does it to his own employees after taking over the company. Even before then, he could never get Nakayama's name right, though he still hated him for being incompetent and annoying.
• Action Survivor: Sure he helped design the place, but surviving on a space station for several hours with hundreds of ex-Dahl soldiers and the base's own weapons trying to kill him was probably no small feat.
• Ain't Too Proud to Beg: He goes down from making death threats toward the the Vault Hunters to actually begging them not to go through with helping Angel die.
  Jack: Please. Okay? Are you hearing me? Please don't... kill my baby girl...
• Almighty Janitor: Despite being described as a "low-level programmer" in the Pre-Sequel, he's actually the guy in charge of Helios, having control of all its resources including being able to somehow preserve The Destroyer's eye and using it as a weapon, a massive office and answering directly to Tassiter. Canonically, he even has Blake, who is the VP of his own department, as a personal lackey at that point. Of course, having a Siren serving as your personal supercomputer is a hell of an advantage to have. It's clarified later on that Jack was a lowly programmer before the Pre-Sequel, but worked his way up to being the head of Helios Station, which is presumably a relatively remote position as far as Tassiter's concerned.
• Ambiguously Bi: Jack's interest in women isn't to doubt, but he also expresses an odd attraction for...his body double. Also, his cyber-clone in Tales From the Borderlands ogle at Vaughn's bare chest.
• Ambition Is Evil: He's got bigger plans that go beyond making money and killing for sport (though he still likes doing both). Naturally, he's got the brutality to match the scope of his schemes.
• A Nazi by Any Other Name: He's often called a fascist by most characters, and for good reason. Cult of Personality around him that portrays him as a virtual god, Sigil Spam everywhere, a private army fiercely dedicated to him, funding huge building projects to create an Egopolis, ruling the planet as a totalitarian dictator where all dissent is killed, and a burning desire to kill all Pandorans for being "bandits", even herding them into a wildlife preserve for horrific slag experimentation. He's a corporate version of Mussolini in space!
• And There Was Much Rejoicing: During the end credits, the stills reveal that 2's Vault Hunters are received as heroes. In-game, various civilians in Sanctuary express joy and relief that he's finally gone.
• Arch-Enemy: To the first and second groups of Vault Hunters in general. Even long after his death, the scars he left on them and their allies are still felt.
  • In the formers' case, Jack manipulated them into finding the first Vault at the start of the series. Later on, Roland, Lilith and Moxxi blew up his Destroyer-powered orbital laser that he intended to use on bandit camps, nearly killing him in the process, in response to his callous murder of four scientists whom he thought might have been traitors. As retaliation, he razed Fyrestone and New Haven once he came into power and they've been rebelling against his occupation on Pandora ever since. Individually, it's especially the case for Lilith and Mordecai.
  • In addition to the destruction of Jack's orbital laser and failed assassination attempt on him, Lilith permanently scarred Jack's face with the Vault Artifact in The Pre-Sequel. On Lilith's side, Jack killed Roland, her ex-boyfriend, and enslaved her in place of Angel to charge the Vault Key while cutting into her flesh over and over as she regenerates from it out of sadism and anger. Even after his death, Lilith's hatred of him is so great that she had Athena captured and nearly executed for working for Jack, even after Athena admitted that she regrets it.
  • Mordecai especially has lots of reasons to hate him. Jack captured and experimented on Bloodwing, forced her to fight the Vault Hunters, and then killed her with an explosive collar to sadistically spite them and Mordecai. To say nothing of his killing of Roland, torture of Lilith over an ECHO and Moxxi leaving Mordecai for Jack in the past (She regrets ever dating Jack, but her relationship with Mordecai is really sour.)
  • Jack's an indirect example for Brick, as Jack's girlfriend Nisha is the one who personally has animosities with Brick and vice-versa. Jack still has a hand in this hostility as Brick's violence against Hyperion was too much even for the Crimson Raiders, forcing them to cast him out of Sanctuary until the need for Brick and his Slabs come to pass. There's also the attempted raid on the Slabs' home base as well as the murder of Roland to account for.
  • Lastly, he regards the Vault Hunters of 2 as this above anyone else. He nearly killed them and left them for dead at the start of 2, causing them to side with the Crimson Raiders and manipulated them through Angel into shutting down Sanctuary's shields for an aerial assault. If it wasn't his growing failure to kill them over the course of the game (and them wrecking Opportunity in side-missions) that earned his hatred, it was definitely when they helped his daughter commit suicide. At which point he rescinds the bounties he put on them so that he can have the pleasure of killing them himself, threatening anyone else who gets to them before he does.
• Archnemesis Dad: Jack himself never sees it this way, but Angel makes it clear that she hates his guts.
• Arm Cannon:
  • In his boss fight, his two wristwatches become laser cannons.
  • In Borderlands: The Pre-Sequel!, he uses wrist-mounted guns that shoot electric blasts. His Doppelganger can also use them as a skill.
• Author Avatar: Burch pretty much describes Handsome Jack as all the pent-up rage he has with humanity except he is "handsome". For bonus points, Anthony Burch voice-acted a body double of Handsome Jack... extremely badly.
• Ax-Crazy: While it's much more subtle than other examples in the series, Jack is still very volatile, capricious, sadistic, and generally mentally unstable in both Borderlands 2 and Borderlands: The Pre-Sequel!, and the latter implies that he's a genuine psychopath. This side of him shows up the most after he just goes off the deep end in The Pre-Sequel, and is discussing how he will wipe out all the bandits on Pandora in omnicidal subtext while Laughing Mad. So considering his present day demeanour, it seems that he has taken great pains to keep this side of him at least much less obvious than it really is. Unfortunately, it becomes more evident as any plot he's involved in goes on.
• Badass Normal:
  • Amoral as he is, he definitely qualifies. The few times he steps into the field himself, he proves himself capable of handling quite a few threats through merely anticipating the actions his foes may take. Even as early as the Pre-Sequel he's pretty capable with his Arm Cannons and was capable of holding his own and surviving solo against the Lost Legion for quite some time.
  • By Borderlands 2 he's regarded as the biggest badass on Pandora, to the point where just seeing him in person and living through Jack's ambush causes the new batch of Vault Hunters to gain a godlike reputation. His skills aren't exactly overrated either; he kills Roland and takes down Lilith, both extremely powerful former Vault Hunters, in the span of a few seconds. Heck, even during his boss fight, he's pretty skilled and he will get you into FFYL if you aren't quick enough. He's quite the bruiser too, if other dialogues have any merit; ripping out throats, strangling people who talk too much, and punching people so hard he chips their teeth (in Vasquez's case) seem to be pretty common things for him.
• Bad Boss:
  • It sucks to work for Hyperion. Jack makes the Atlas Bosses look nice by comparison. He even treats Blake, Hyperion's vice-president and his long-time personal lackey, more as a butler than anything.
  • He also used his own employees as punching bags, to the point that Vasquez thought he had a special standing with Jack because Jack hit him every time they met. Apparently this was so common that Jack literally couldn't remember who Vasquez was until a more unique form of torture was brought up: that Jack would stick money between the then-cheap hair implants on Vasquez's head and called him "Wallethead."
  • Life as a Hyperion employee under Jack and his successors is so bad that in Tales From the Borderlands, most of the Helios workers consider Rhys destroying the Helios power core, killing countless workers as it crashes, and stranding them on the Death World of Pandora where they have almost no survival skills to be such an improvement that they start worshipping Rhys as a god for liberating them. We get a terrifying glimpse of Jack's true treatment of his employees early on in Episode 5, where Fiona and Sasha run onto the sight of Jack holding a fascist show trial on his own employees, where he asks them if they know Rhys or where he is. If the unlucky sap can't give Jack the answer he wants, Jack takes control of a turret and guns them down. By the time Fiona and Sasha, alongside August, get to Helios's ship bay, Jack's already killed dozens of his employees as the remainder try to run away.
• Beard of Evil:
  • A symbolic example - the metal clip on his chin holding his mask in place resembles a goatee. He had a real one before the mask.
  • He occasionally does this with Tassiter's severed goatee, pretending to be an even eviler version of himself while doing so.
• Be Careful What You Wish For: In The Pre-Sequel, Nakayama creates a questionnaire for Jack so that he can make an A.I. with Jack's personality. Jack's answer to the question "How would you like to die?" is "Somewhere warm, with a hot chick nearby." Jack is eventually killed in the middle of a Lethal Lava Land, standing next to Lilith, and is killed by either her or the player.
• Believing Their Own Lies: Anthony Burch has stated that Jack has convinced himself that he imprisoned Angel for her own safety rather than to satiate his own greed and ambition, and genuinely believes he's making Pandora a better place.
• Benevolent Boss: Though he's primarily a Bad Boss, the A.I. version of him admits that, as shown in The Pre-Sequel, he always watches out for his team, that being the people who work alongside him directly on missions. For instance, he gave Nisha an entire town for their anniversary and was prepared to make good on his offer of money to Athena, and never betrayed them. However, this is purely situational as shown by his eventual poisoning of Wilhelm, and God help you if you aren't on his team.
• Berserk Button:
  • His biggest one: Betrayal, just ask the Meriff and Roland. In fact, his Sanity Slippage is in great part caused by his growing belief that he can't trust anyone.
  • His unnamed wife, and Angel apparently killing her with her Siren powers. Bad enough that when an aide mentions it offhand, Jack immediately begins strangling (not choking) the man to death.
  • A more subtle one: profanity and littering. He regularly mandates death for both of these offences. The only ones who get away with it are Angel and himself.
  • He's deeply narcissistic and will go ballistic if you destroy his prized monuments in Opportunity, namely his construction site, and the giant statues of himself.
  • He absolutely despises Claptraps, and one of the very first things he did once he took over Hyperion was discontinue their product line and destroy every single one of them, with the "main" one only surviving due to Shadowtrap's intervention.
• Big Bad: The main antagonist of Borderlands 2 (with his plans to "cleanse" Pandora driving the plot) and the Greater-Scope Villain of the first game, due to being behind the unsealing of the first Vault.
• Big Brother Is Watching: Oh, so very much. He's incredibly Orwellian, to the point of being a corporate version of Big Brother and constantly presenting his twisted version of the truth as fact. Part of his rule is intended to keep Pandora under his gaze permanently, and he's so omnipresent that he can send down loaders to attack you anytime he wants. He had Helios constructed for the purpose of watching Pandora at all times, and he's constantly watching you, either through Angel or some other means. Even his dream city of Opportunity is meant to keep its citizens under constant surveillance. His personal office actually faces Elpis, though.
• Big Good: In The Pre-Sequel!, the player characters are all his henchmen and serve to help him accomplish his goal of saving Elpis and later on hunting the Vault. This changes later.
• Big "NO!": A rapid-fire version when Moxxi destroys the Eye of Helios.
• Big, Stupid Doodoo-Head: The scene where he considers naming his diamond pony "Butt Stallion" and "Piss-for-Brains" in "honor" of the Vault Hunters being the prime example. When his opinion of the Vault Hunters goes from amused disdain to genuinely murderous hatred, his insults become much less casual.
• Bitch in Sheep's Clothing: Even before his descent into open insanity, he had already imprisoned his own daughter and used her as a tool to get the first Vault open, showing that he always had a selfishly ambitious streak.
• Black-and-White Insanity: Combined with a nasty case of Protagonist-Centered Morality - that is, he's convinced he's the one the story centers on, so what he does is okay. He considers anyone that opposes him a "bandit", regardless of whether or not they actually are bandits.
• Boomerang Bigot: Has open contempt for the people of Pandora, but there are several hints that he was raised and grew up there in some capacity, or came from a similar environment.
• Bread and Circuses: He implements a particularly wasteful example of this in Opportunity. People are evidently paid to be in the city and people willing to listen to his mural of Blatant Lies get a sizeable tax refund.
• Breakout Villain: A rare example where this trope applies to a Big Bad. Handsome Jack was initially just another episodic villain succeeding Commandant Steele from the first game, even getting killed off at the end of 2. However, unlike Steele, Jack was so much more memorable for his devilish charms and hammy speeches that he never managed to fully disappear from the series, even getting his centered prequel in The Pre-Sequel. Writers will always find a way to feature him despite his death, such as resurrecting him in the imagination of Tiny Tina, revealing that he had a virtual clone of himself he kept hidden or having a space casino where he left a recording alongside a giant robot version of himself.
• Bright Is Not Good: His favorite color is bright yellow, almost to the point of obsession. When he takes control of Hyperion's assets, he promptly makes it the corporation's signature color (previously they used black with a red stripe) and paints it on absolutely everything that stands still for long enough. Net result: the vast majority of the things trying to kill the Vault Hunters are Jack's favorite shade of yellow.
• Brilliant, but Lazy: He's actually exceptionally intelligent and is a master of machinery and engineering, to the point of being able to control robotics purely with his mind in Tales, though this probably has something to do with being turned into a sentient computer program. Throughout most of 2, however, he prefers to sit around snacking on pretzels while repeatedly taunting the Vault Hunters and their friends, despite demonstrating on more than one occasion the ability to wipe them out pretty fast if he chose to, justifying it as them "not being worth his time". When finally provoked enough, of course, he shows exactly WHY he's so feared.
• The Caligula: While he's definitely brilliant, and has to be a good businessman to run an intergalactic multi-trillion dollar MegaCorp, he's also a completely deranged sociopath that killed a random Hyperion worker's kids For the Evulz, and that's not even the limit of his insanity. Some of the stuff he spends corporate money on, by the way, is a bit... questionable, such as a Turbo-Mansion (don't ask, we don't know), a live pony made of diamonds, and the city of Opportunity, which from a city planner's perspective is not that big or planned out all that well.
• Catchphrase:
  • "Heeeeey, Handsome Jack here!"
  • "KIDDO!"
• The Chessmaster: As of the beginning of the Pre-Sequel, Jack is presented as just some guy in over his head with heroic aspirations. Yet, those who have completed Borderlands 2 know that he has already wired his Siren daughter up to Hyperion's A.I. and used her to trick the original 1 Vault Hunters into opening a Vault filled with "nothing but tentacles and disappointment," causing the mineral eridium to emerge on the surface of Pandora. He's hired another gaggle of Vault Hunters to come find another Vault on the moon, he's built a massive orbital laser cannon into Helios, and he's commissioned a surgical body double. All this while still a "low-level Hyperion programmer." In a position where others might be content to pilfer office supplies or make personal long-distance calls on company phones, he's already meddling with the destiny of the galaxy. In fact, there's a good chance he's playing you, too.
• Classic Villain: One of the most famous examples in gaming history.
  • Representing pride, greed and eventually wrath as he undergoes a Villainous Breakdown, as well as having the storybook traits of being rich, bullying and cowardly. He also dies after a Battle Amongst the Flames, and you can kill him with a Hyperion weapon if you have one, or pick one off the ground.
  • He's also an incredibly Orwellian ruler, which is the standard for any fictional dictator. His totalitarian fascist rule over Pandora is relentlessly violent, he has posters with his face plastered everywhere, lots of people, and all Hyperion personnel stationed there either see him as a near-godlike figure or an outright god, and he is willing to torture anyone who opposes Hyperion. And finally, Opportunity is simply just a shiny, over-exaggerated parody of Airstrip One - people have to listen to his twisted version of history, there are statues of him everywhere and he even demands that children love him more than their parents.
• Conspicuous Consumption: He spends his money on... odd things. Justified in that he went straight from being a programmer to running the entire company, and canonically, he is completely out of his gourd.
• Consummate Liar: Of the "Truth Twister" variety. He has no trouble misleading, telling the part of the truth he wants you to hear, or telling his own incredibly biased version of the truth. However, almost everything he says except about his grandmother is true to a degree.
• Control Freak: He has to be in control. Ironically, though, he has little control over his own temper or emotions, as he is prone to buying silly things and committing ridiculously sociopathic actions on a whim.
• Cool Mask:
  • It's clear from the beginning that he's wearing a mask, with the paler tone of the mask compared to his forehead and arms, and what look like staples keeping the mask in place. Underneath it, he's been branded by a Vault symbol, which has also taken out his left eye.
  • The Pre-Sequel reveals why he wears a mask. He was scarred after Lilith punched the symbol of the Vault into his face. His disfigurement made him obsessed with his vanity, covering it up with a mask, and inspiring him to take the nickname "Handsome" Jack.
• Corporate Warfare: Under Jack, Hyperion fields its own massive army of robots, along with a small core of human soldiers and its own spacecraft. He's surprisingly very successful in this despite his lack of military education, winning the war of attrition against the Raiders and wiping out bandit clan after bandit clan. Though Hyperion still has competition, it has the largest and most prolific market on Pandora. Jack also completely took over the megacorporation Atlas and integrated its shares.
• Corrupt Corporate Executive: He took over Hyperion, declared himself Dictator of Pandora, blocked the light by building a base right in front of the planet's moon, and claimed credit for finding the Vault and slaying of The Destroyer. He tricks potential Vault Hunters into coming to Pandora, then has them killed after they board his monorails. His environmental, employment, safety, advertising, motivational and building practices are all either astonishingly careless or totally evil.
• Create Your Own Villain: While Lilith and Roland don't exactly create Handsome Jack in The Pre-Sequel! (Jack was already on the path to becoming a villain regardless, having admitted to wanting to use a Kill Sat on Pandora, among other things), their actions do lead to him turning into a full-blown lunatic hell-bent specifically on killing them and everyone they've ever known. Really, it's more like pressing a Berserk Button, making a bad situation worse, and pointing it straight at them.
• Cult of Personality: He has a very effective one that endures long after he's dead, with part of Tales from the Borderlands dealing with that personality cult and its effects on Rhys, who starts as a total Jack fanboy. It seems to consist of three main components; presenting him as a hero out to civilize Pandora at last, portraying him as a god (to the point of his name replacing God), and putting his face everywhere, just like Mussolini. He's aided by Hunter Hellquist, who generates a constant stream of propaganda demonizing the Crimson Raiders and painting Jack's fascist colonialism as heroic and even beneficial. Up on Helios, employees are highly encouraged to venerate him like a god, and everyone is reminded of his 'humble programmer to CEO' myth as a model for their own careers.
• Cut His Heart Out with a Spoon:
  • Jack is fond of making threats that would be... impractical to carry out, at best.
    Jack: I swear, you take one more step, every soul back in Sanctuary will die staring at their own lungs as I rip them from their chests.
  • According to one of his rants, during Jack's attack on New Haven, a man tried to kill him with a spoon. Jack took the spoon and scooped the man's eyes out with it, while his kids watched. A random NPC in Sanctuary apparently still has the spoon.
• Dark and Troubled Past: Jack's life was rough to say the least; abused as a kid, his daughter accidentally killed her mother/his wife, and he felt betrayed by the closest thing he had to "friends" during his Elpis mission. But it was clear there was always something twisted about Jack to his core and that these events only pushed him closer to the edge of insanity.
• Deadpan Snarker: About 75% of his dialogue is dry sarcasm, and it's funny as hell to listen to.
  Jack: I can actually see why you'd want to tear that particular statue down. Clearly, you are illiterate and the image of me enjoying a good book just makes your head hurt something awful.
• Deader than Dead: By the end of Tales..., assuming that Rhys crushes his cybernetic eye containing his Virtual Ghost, Jack is presumably about as dead as he can be with little to no chances of coming back.
• Dead Man's Switch: After his death, his personal casino, "The Handsome Jackpot" went into lockdown, trapping everyone (Body Doubles like Timothy included) inside, and turning it into a post-apocalyptic hellhole.
• Despair Event Horizon: Jack crosses it when a child Angel gets kidnapped by a bandit who intends to sell her off due to her Siren powers. Angel, being a little girl, unconsciously activates the bandit's turrets which kills not just the bandit, but her mother/Jack's wife as well. This sends Jack completely over the edge and fuels his decision to lock her up to protect her, only to later take advantage of her Technopath abilities to rise in Hyperion's ranks.
• Despotism Justifies the Means: Everything Jack's ever done since he was a code monkey and murdered his way to the top of Hyperion was so he could awake The Warrior and use it to take over... Only, he really didn't need to. He was already the leader of the most powerful and successful corporation in the galaxy since the demise of Atlas. Yet all the atrocities, all the death was so he could amass even more power and put everyone under his heel.
• Doppelgänger Attack: During his boss fight, he summons decoys of himself that assist him in battle while also making difficult to tell on which one to shoot. His playable body double can also use this as his special attack.
• Dystopia Justifies the Means: While in his eyes, it's the other way around, judging by Opportunity his vision of Utopia is simply an Orwellian society that all but outright deifies him and enforced by the death sentence for such crimes as littering or "verbal" littering.
• Dirty Coward:
  • According to Angel, Jack is a coward who relies on backstabbing and minions to do his dirty work and will not deal with problems personally without overwhelming manpower (Wilhelm to be exact). Other sources do support this - he almost never enters a fight unless he's got a big surprise up his sleeve (such as a personal cloak, lots and lots of robots, an actual army, on-command orbital bombardment, a few tonnes of explosives, some unforeseen huge technological advantage, dozens of decoys and so on). However, after Angel's death, he wants nothing more than to kill the Vault Hunters with his bare hands and will fight them himself, albeit with some back-up at the end.
  • Fittingly for a coward, his murder of Roland is when no one's even aware he's there before he shoots the vault hunter In the Back.
  • Averted in the Pre-Sequel, where Jack is surprisingly hands-on and helps you out in combat a lot more than any previous quest-giver in the series, even going as far to you help you out when you fight Zarpedon face-to-face. Granted, this is before he became a big shot and also before completely losing his mind. At the end of the game, he has the pawns go first.
• Do Not Call Me "Paul": President Tassiter (as well as Tassiter's assistant and at least one engineer who reprimands him for tampering with Claptrap) refers to him as "John", which he hates. Note that "Jack" is a common nickname for a person named John, and it is stated many times that Jack might not be his real name, but otherwise it's never confirmed if his real name is John or not.

E-I

• Establishing Character Moment: There's at least a few scenes at the beginning of 2 that perfectly sum up the kind of man that he is:
  • You collect some ECHO recordings in Liar's Berg that describes him confronting Helena Pierce, making fun of her appearance, shooting her in the head, laughing at how Bloody Hilarious it was, before ordering the massacre of a trainload of civilians she was trying to take to Sanctuary.
  • There's also trying to kill the Vault Hunters in the opening scene by luring them onto a train that he's loaded with explosives.
  • And if you skipped the intro, he introduces himself by arrogantly taunting you over ECHO, laying out "how things work" and telling you to kill yourself.
• Evil Cannot Comprehend Good: He has no real understanding of the concept of "good". In his eyes, a hero is something you can just say you are and enforce using the right words. ("Because that's what heroes do. We're merciful." "You don't do things because they're easy, you do them because they're right!") ...Or he just thinks of good in a self-serving way, i.e, "a hero" is him.
• Evil Colonialist: He's rich, powerful, greedy and convinced of his own inherent superiority by virtue of being a corporate man compared to the 'bandit savages' of Pandora, claiming that he brings order, progress, and stability to the planet's untamed frontier. The city of Opportunity is his hope to fill Pandora with settlers after the entire population is wiped out for being bandits, and much of his profits come from aggressive Eridium mining that ravages the planet's ecosystem, as seen in the Eridium Blight.
• Evil Feels Good: In the Pre-Sequel, while he's certainly less murderous towards subordinates than he is in the future, when he does actually have to kill them (either because they shot first or he suspects them to be traitors) he finds it extremely exhilarating. He comes to like doing it over the course of the game, finding more and more minor reasons to engage in murder, whether himself or by proxy.
• Eviler than Thou: For all his altruistic motives, Jack still manages to be the biggest bastard on a planet loaded with unrepentant mercenaries, thieves, lunatics, slavers, monsters, pirates, sadists, grifters, and cannibals. A HELL of an achievement, to say the least.
• Even Bad Men Love Their Mamas:
  • Mentions in the Pre-Sequel that he loves his grandmother. Due to the entry in Abusive Parents above, it becomes a little sad to remember that she beat him so horribly as a child.
  • Averted with his actual mother in Tales from the Borderlands.
    Jack: I punched my mom, for Christ's sake!
• Even Evil Has Loved Ones: Played with.
  • Subverted when he sends the Vault Hunters to check up on his grandmother, and seems genuinely worried. Once you get there and find she's been murdered by bandits, Jack reveals that he's the one who hired the bandits to kill her, and sent you to her house to make absolutely sure she was dead.
  • Played straight with Angel, which makes how he treats her all the worse. He becomes genuinely terrified when Angel begs you to kill her, reduced to sincerely pleading with the Vault Hunters not to harm his "baby girl." After she dies, he refuses to take any responsibility for her death, calling off the bounty on your head so he can kill you himself, apparently not aware (or outright denying) that Angel herself chose death to escape him. In The Pre-Sequel!, he keeps a picture of Angel as a child◊ on the desk of his office. In Episode 4 of Tales from the Borderlands, the same picture is still on his desk, and you can choose for Rhys to comment on it, to which Holo!Jack suddenly becomes very solemn and asks if Rhys could bring him to visit her after dealing with taking over Hyperion, completely unaware that she's been dead for a while. After Helios crashes, Jack says that he went through the Hyperion database and learned that she was dead all over again, and admits that she didn't have a choice but to choose death over staying with him.
  • Zigzagged in regards to his girlfriend, Nisha. After you kill her, he actually seems surprised that he's "a little pissed off" that his girlfriend's dead. For her part, Nisha likes Jack just fine, but doesn't share his grand vision.
  • Played straight with his original wife and Angel's mother. It was her accidental death being shot by turrets that a kidnapped Angel accidentally activated with her Phaseshift that drove Jack over the Despair Event Horizon and was the Start of Darkness of his ambitions of power.
• Even Evil Has Standards:
  • He's both incredulous and amused when the Hyperion figureheads behind the Wildlife Exploitation Preserve write him a script trying to portray the slag experiments they're performing there as being done in the name of science, as their "volunteers" know exactly what's about to happen to them and finds it pointless to sugarcoat it. While he still carries out the experiments (and threatens at least scientist's loved ones to force compliance), he's at least above lying to his victims about what he's going to do.
  • In one instance on his Reddit AMA, someone asked if gay marriage was legal on Pandora, and he answered in the affirmative, and seemed confused at the idea that it might not be legal in other places.
  • If in Tales from the Borderlands, if you choose have Rhys sympathize aloud with the recently-murdered Henderson, Holo!Jack asks him if he was aware (he wasn't) that Henderson was a "massive racist," and partook in dog-fighting with kittens.
• Evil Genius: Jack designed several of the most powerful weapons in the Hyperion arsenal, and designed the collars that control both Angel and Lilith. Before becoming the President of Hyperion, he was also a "code-monkey" who controlled Hyperion space-deployment assets assigned to Pandora, and as the game goes on, it turns out that he's the Head of R&D, and almost singlehandedly programmed the entirety of Helios.
• Evil Has a Bad Sense of Humor: In general, he's prone to deriving amusement from murdering people in the most immature way possible, such as laughing hysterically at the sounds Helena Pierce's head made when he blew out her brains and when reminiscing about the time he blinded a man with a spoon and mocking Bloodwing's death by playing the violin extremely badly.
• Evil Is Petty:
  • Evidently Jack has nothing better to do with his time than annoy the Vault Hunters with insults, threats, and bragging about how awesome he is. As the game progresses, he gets more and more serious, with his ECHO transmissions only coming when you catch his attention or he gets angry. At the same time, he upgrades from taunting you to gradually mounting determination to kill you to eventually screaming in periodic outbursts of fury.
  • One optional mission has him hire you to kill yourself, and for quite a genuinely nifty reward. Of course, you'll immediately come back via the Hyperion New-U station. He just wants to watch you do it, and even pays the promised amount. Refuse and you get nothing, and a suicide hotline will call you a coward, but you'll get more XP (and piss him off).
  • In 3, a sidequest reveals that he installed a Wi-Fi throttler on Pandora because a local kid kept beating him at video games.
• Evil Overlord: He has aspirations to become one of these to Pandora (and if we're going by the cut content, the entire galaxy), but with the "evil" part removed, at least in his head.
• Exact Words: The vision he has in The Pre-Sequel shows him he'll succeed in his goal to awaken the Warrior... but leaves out the bit that both he and the beast die before they get anything done.
• Expressive Mask: It's never explained by what mechanism Jack's mask retains all the expressiveness of his flesh-and-blood face, especially considering the metal clips that hold it on suggest the mask to be relatively low-tech.
• Facial Horror: His face is quite obviously a mask, what with the two different skin tones, its almost too handsome appearance, and the friggin' bolts holding it to his head. And that's not getting into why he wears it; he has the Mark of the Vaults (aka the logo on the box) branded across his face. It is a bright blue color and appears to have a part of it etched across his left eye.
• Fallen Hero: Borderlands: The Pre-Sequel! shows that he was at one point genuinely heroic to an extent before becoming the megalomaniac with delusions of heroism that he is in Borderlands 2. Athena even makes a distinction between Jack the Hero who saves her life early in the game, and Handsome Jack the insane megalomaniac.
• Fantastic Racism: He hates Claptrap bots with a burning passion. Granted he isn't the only one who despise them but he goes a bit too far as to kill all of them, including the one who helped him through his entire journey in The Pre-Sequel. He also despises all Pandorans in general as 'bandits', delights in sending them to die in slag experimentation, and one of his main goals is to turn Pandora into a paradise for rich colonizers.
• Fascist, but Inefficient: Opportunity is not only an incredibly costly and poorly planned project to build (as well as having wasteful Bread and Circuses elements to it), since it's located in Pandora, no sane person would be willing to move there. When this is pointed out to him by an employee, Jack reveals that he had the employee's children killed.
• Fatal Flaw:
  • Greed, always demanding more, Pride, making him too egomaniacal to stop, and the vital bit Wrath, fueled by revenge after all the betrayal he's been through.
  • On a broader scale, his obsession with Pandora. Pandora is only one planet in what is implied to be a vast galaxy. Its only notable resource worth controlling is Eridium, which does propel make Hyperion plenty of money through it's monopoly on E-tech weaponry and licensing thereof, he wastes vast amounts of the stuff in order to wake up a monster that, while impressive, can be taken out by one particularly resourceful person on foot. For as obsessed as Jack is with the Warrior, it doesn't provide Jack with anything that the Helios moonbase doesn't already grant him. This tunnel-vision causes him to spend a ludicrous amount of resources (Eridium, money, manpower, materials, his own daughter) for an end-goal that is of no practical use whatsoever.
• Faux Affably Evil: He's well-spoken, energetic and charismatic, but he's also a petty, sociopathic monster who does nothing but verbally abuse you in conversations. And his composure doesn't just break, it shatters into powder.
• The Fettered: In the Pre-Sequel, Jack isn't fully aware of his sadistic tendencies, doesn't indulge them and endangers his own life to be "a hero" by saving Elpis and Pandora (specifics to be determined). He has big ideas and believes that what he wants most is to protect innocent people and fight evil. However, the thrill he gets from killing people coupled with his basic Lack of Empathy eventually lead him to becoming Handsome Jack, where he's a whole lot less discerning about "evil". Moxxi even tries to kill him after Colonel Zarpedon's been dealt with, realizing that underneath his ideas of heroism is a dangerous absence of humanity. Unfortunately, it doesn't work, unhinging him even further.
• Fiction 500: Jack has money and he has no qualms taunting you about it. Early on he calls you up just to tell you that he bought a pony. Made of diamonds. 'Cause he's rich. And not a diamond statue of a pony, but an actual living creature. Later you can find an audio log where he tells some bandits that if they can find Lilith for him, he'll pay them enough money to build a mansion "made of other, smaller mansions." Tales from the Borderlands also reveals that he technically owns Atlas Corporation as well, having bought their majority stocks for chump change after they went under.
• Flunky Boss: When he does directly fight the player, he makes ample use of his illusory decoys and body doubles to confuse and attack the player.
• Foreshadowing:
  • Regarding the truth behind Angel. During the "Assassinate the Assassins" quest, ECHO logs reveal that he knows that only 6 Sirens can exist in the universe at any given time, and he already directly knows three. Let's see... Lilith, Maya, and... nope! Not Steele! Steele's dead, remember?
  • During the same quest, he claims he can handle Lilith, while the bandits will just get themselves killed. This is because he has a Slave Collar he can use to control Sirens.
• For the Evulz: Sometimes it seems like his only motivation. However, he never sees it that way, believing that he is a hero and anyone he kills/torments is evil and deserves what they get, and/or necessary sacrifices to save the world, usually both.
• Freudian Excuse: A whole bunch of them, actually. While they shouldn't excuse the things he's done, they do show how miserable Jack's life has been up to Borderlands 2.
  • According to a late-game mission, as a child Jack lived with a highly abusive grandmother who used a buzz-axe as a disciplinary tool.
  • Some of his Jerkass behaviour towards his own employees are things that were done to him by Mr. Tassiter back when he was an employee.
  • In The Pre-Sequel, Jack starts off with genuinely heroic aspirations (though even by that point he'd locked Angel up to use her abilities for his own gain, had her manipulate the events of the first game and taken the Eye of the Destroyer to make a Wave-Motion Gun with intent to kill anyone he doesn't like), but when the Meriff tries to shoot him in the back after Jack says he was going to spare him, Jack learns not to show mercy to anyone anymore, and he slowly gets worse from there. Getting betrayed by Moxxi, Roland, and Lilith later in the game speeds up the process.
  • 3 gives us a side mission that explains what happened with Jack's wife and her accidental death at the hands of a child Angel. This causes him to cross the Despair Event Horizon, driving him to lock the little Siren up and explaining why he kept her in solitary confinement until he decided to use her abilities for his own gain. This event is considered Jack's Start of Darkness since this was the precursor to all the events that later happened in the Pre-Sequel.
• From Nobody to Nightmare: He started off as a relatively low-level programmer before his ascent to power.
  • At Hyperion, anyway. He had Angel and the technology to use her abilities for his benefit long before he started climbing the ranks, and several ECHO logs in The Pre-Sequel (and stealing the eye of the Destroyer and mounting it to a space station without anyone noticing) imply he had resources and possibly backers that not even his bosses in Hyperion were aware of.
  • It should also be noted that low-level programming is machine code, and may not imply a low rank (except relative to a President/CEO).
• The Generalissimo: A corporate example rather than a military one. Jack regularly bills himself as a hero and claims to be civilizing Pandora, which is a planet comparable to a third-world nation (if not even worse), throughout the game. He rules over the planet with an iron fist, suppresses dissent by sending his army to destroy any resistance, cultivates a cult of personality from both Hyperion workers and Pandoras, and puts up statues and posters of himself everywhere. His ideal city for Pandora is also a massive Egopolis dedicated to himself and telling everyone what a great hero he is. The final episode of Tales also hints that he regularly kills his own employees, with AI Jack interrogating his workers to find Rhys's location, and casually gunning them down with a turret if they can't answer immediately.
• Giver of Lame Names:
  • He named his diamond pony "Butt Stallion", who is a a mare.
  • Jack is the reason why Hyperion guns use corporate buzzwords like "Synergy", "Competition", "Face-Time", and so on (his justification being that they are "weapons for smart sons of bitches made by smart sons of bitches").
  • Nisha even acknowledges the fact that he's terrible at naming things, stating that were it up to him, Lynchwood would be named "New New Haven".
    Nisha: I love the guy, but he doesn't exactly have a way with words.
  • This extends even beyond the fourth wall, with Jack claiming in the Pre-Sequel trailer that he came up with the word "Pre-Sequel."
• Glory Hound: Everything in Opportunity has his face printed on it. He has giant statues of himself wherever they'll fit. He even built a mural recounting the story of the first game, but with himself in the place of the Vault Hunters as a wise, all-seeing hero working to bring order and prosperity to Pandora. In fact, he sees the whole world as a story being told with him as the protagonist, incapable of doing any wrong.
• Godhood Seeker: Some unused dialog has him talking about how he has plans to use The Warrior to achieve godhood via galactic conquest.
  "Y'know what? Call me old-fashioned but... being a god sounds like a helluva lotta fun!"
• Good Is Not Nice: According to him and him alone. Handsome Jack believes he is the hero of the story no matter how much of an asshole he is, and believes all of the atrocities he has committed are simple Shoot the Dog moments.
• Good Scars, Evil Scars: Under that mask, he has a giant Vault symbol burned across his entire face, including one of his eyes. The Pre-Sequel reveals that Lilith was the one who scarred him, which only amplified his hatred of her and the Vault Hunters.
• Greater-Scope Villain: He was behind the events of 1 despite not being named anywhere. And the effects of his actions (such as the very existence of the Handsome Jackpot) are present and felt even several years after his death.
• Has a Type: He has a thing for women with hats such as Nisha, Moxxi and Fiona, who he ranks 9/10 on his hotness scale because of her hat.
• Hair-Trigger Temper: Jack has a nasty temper and will punch and/or strangle anyone with little to basically no provokation and one should consider themselves lucky if all he does is this since he has no qualms about killing people, or their entire families, if they so as much disagree or worse, piss him off.
• Hated by All: He is hated by anybody who does not work for him with nearly everyone on Pandora voicing their contempt towards him, including Claptrap himself. Angel even uses her last words to spite him upon death and those who used to work for him including Rhys and Timothy became disillusioned from him because of his behavior and atrocious actions.
• Hero Antagonist:
  • That's what he thinks. In fact, it's unusually debatable. In his mind, the heroes are the bad guys, who turns out to be just really treasure hunters and mercenaries looking for an ancient alien vault, that would inevitably became the Eridian war once it opened, by the end of The Pre-Sequel!. While none of them have completely reliable moral compasses, they're paragons of virtue compared to him, even in The Pre-Sequel!, considering he'd enslaved and immobilized his daughter as a Wetware CPU by then. Pandora is a crime-ridden, dangerous, chaotic planet, but the solution probably isn't shooting/burning/torturing everyone who won't submit to his idea of order.
    Jack: ARGH, this is so frustrating, see, this is what I don't get about you bad guys. You know the hero is going to win, but you just don't die quickly!
  • Becomes more of a true Hero Antagonist in Tales, where he has a major role in helping (and, depending on player actions, tormenting) Rhys.
• Hero Ball:
  • Related to the above: He is so convinced that he's the hero that he will occasionally do stupid things because "that's what heroes do." Such as when he tortures Tannis, but lets her live, thinking he's being "merciful."
  • In the Pre-Sequel!, Jack is actually grasping the Hero Ball to the point that its detrimental to him, at first. He willingly lets the traitorous Meriff go after barely any questioning at all, and is promptly betrayed by the greedy, selfish, idiotic bastard the moment his back is turned.
• Hero Killer: He shoots Helena Pierce off-screen, mutilates and kills Bloodwing, and then kills Roland. All essentially in cold blood.
• Heroic Sacrifice: In the Pre-Sequel, he volunteers to stay behind on Helios to man the moonshot cannon so the Vault Hunters he hired (including a body double who ought to be doing the whole staying behind thing) can get to Elpis and hopefully shut down the jamming signal that's subverting all the base's defenses. While he has no real intention of dying, all the characters in the story and those hearing it liken the act to be suicidal and strangely noble given the fact that the station is crawling with soldiers that want Jack dead.
• He Who Fights Monsters: Sure, Pandora is home to a lot of horrible people, but Jack's actions against everyone on the planet (including killing children and sending people to be experimented on), bandits or not, makes him as bad as the people he condemned.
• Hilariously Abusive Childhood: His grandma used a buzz axe as a spanking stick, for one thing.
• Hoist by His Own Petard:
  • Jack developed the VAULTHUNTER.EXE program that allows Claptrap to become the Fragtrap. The functional core of that programming was what would become Shadowtrap. When Jack betrays and shoots Claptrap and dumps him in the frozen tundra, Shadowtrap manages to keep Claptrap functional until Sir Hammerlock saves him. And in the end, Claptrap is the key to the Vault Hunters in 2 being able to both shut down the gates that lead to Control Core Angel and reach Jack himself. So effectively, Jack wrote the program that would lead to his own destruction.
  • Similarly, Jack lured the new Vault Hunters to Pandora in order to use them as pawns to expose and destroy Sanctuary. Yeah, that ended poorly for him since the old and new groups of Vault Hunters teamed up to stop Jack in the end.
• Hypocrite: He's a gigantic one.
  • The most serious example being his hatred of betrayal. In The Pre-Sequel, he complains about being unable to trust anyone after Roland and Lilith betray him. What he fails to take into account is that their backstabbing was itself done after they witnessed him killing the scientists who assisted him by fear they might be traitor.
  • He views Angel's suicide-by-vault-hunter as the murder of an innocent girl, and regularly calls the Vault Hunters "child-killers" after it happens, but he himself has implicitly, and in one case very explicitly, killed children, including those of his own employees.
  • In addition, he ruthlessly mocks Helena Pierce's facial scars, in spite of the fact that he himself is scarred under his mask.
  • Also, despite disliking his former boss calling him John, he does the same thing when referring to Jeffery Blake as "Jimmy".
  • And, as mentioned above, he considers death a perfectly suitable punishment for swearing and often chastises Angel for doing so. This does not stop him from throwing the odd swear word around.
  • He quotes "Did you know some people on Pandora still believe in silly superstitions like angels, demons, and ancient alien warriors? We like to call them bandits." This statement is obviously hypocritical on Jack's part because his primary goal is to control "The Warrior" which is literally an ancient alien warrior.
• Iconic Sequel Character: While he made his appearance in the second game, Jack is without a doubt the most famous character of the series.
• Is This Thing Still On?: He accidentally called his boss an asshole within his boss's earshot at the beginning of the Pre-Sequel because after "losing the connection" he forgot to actually end the call.
  Tassiter: What?!
  Jack: I called you an asshole, because I thought I'd hung up? My bad.
• It's All About Me: Sees himself as the hero of his own epic, and couldn't care less about what happens to anyone else other than perhaps his daughter Angel.
• It's Personal:
  • The death of his daughter does not go over well.
    Jack: (on the planet-wide ECHO) People of Pandora... my daughter is... dead. Murdered. By the Vault Hunter. So I've decided — I am rescinding the bounty on the Vault Hunter. If you should kill that child-murdering sonofabitch before I do? I will find you. And you will regret denying me my vengeance.
  • Also, The Pre-Sequel! reveals that Moxxi, Lilith and Roland destroying his superweapon as well as Lilith scarring him is why he hates them so much.
  • As revealed in an ECHO in 3, his goal of taming Pandora runs much deeper than a desire for money or glory as a Pandoran bandit was indirectly responsible for murdering his wife.
• Insistent Terminology: He likes to strangle people. Not choke, strangle.
  Jack: No no, Jimmy, choking is what happens when you eat too fast. As I'm crushing Mister Moorin's windpipe with my watch chain, what I'm actually doing is referred to as strangling.
• Irony: Despite wanting to take care of the Vault Hunter himself in the penultimate boss fight, he's a rather unabashed Flunky Boss who's doubles can very well kill them in his steed.

J-N

• Jerkass: And that's the nicest way to describe him. Other ways used in-game: douche, tool, asshole, fascist, sociopath, maniac... The jerkassery was a pre-existing condition, but it used to be tempered by rationality. Now it...isn't.
• Jerkass Has a Point: He's right about Pandora being an uncivilized planet filled to the brim with bandits and in desperate need of order and stability. But then again, he's just as bad, if not worse, than plenty of them. His A.I. self even acknowledges this in Tales, believing he should've tried to be more diplomatic while sparing those who weren't actually all that bad.
• Jerk with a Heart of Gold: In Borderlands: The Pre-Sequel!, he was still kind of a jerk, but ultimately heroic and genuinely DID want to save Elpis and its inhabitants. This aspect of his personality gets obliterated by the end of the game, though.
• Joker Immunity: Discussed in New Tales from the Borderlands with the description of his Vaultlander figure stating that he "has trouble staying dead". Note that while it's true that Jack managed to stay relevant for a long time past his death in 2, only one of his reappearances can be considered a resurrection; his A.I clone in the first Tales game. His other appearances are in the form of posthumous roles or flashbacks.
• Jumping Off the Slippery Slope: Borderlands: The Pre-Sequel! shows how he went all the way down starting from a heroic-minded programmer who was in over his head and gradually descending through one questionable moral decision to another, pushed by the need to save Elpis from certain destruction. One event leads to another: Watching the Lost Legion massacre the Helios personnel leaves him angry and desperate, being betrayed by the Meriff leads to growing paranoia and vindictiveness, forcibly tearing apart Felicity's mind leads to a willingness to make morally-questionable calls for the greater good, and both rear their ugly heads when Jack throws his own scientists out an airlock on the suggestion that one of them might be a traitor. Then he is betrayed by Moxxi, who tries to destroy Jack and the Eye of Helios together because she believes Jack is a deep-seated psychopath with too much power, and his questionable actions and megalomania have only confirmed that suspicion, which drives him from desperate paranoia to outright hatred and rage. It all culminates in Lilith scarring him when she destroys the Vault relic, which finally drives him over the deep end.
  • Throughout the story this gets highlighted by the sidequests he gives out: at first he just wants you to help retake Helios, but then he asks you to deface the Meriff's memory, then he has you help him create new weapons on Helios, including a mission where he outright uses a defecting Dahl soldier as a test-dummy for his Moonshot cannon. This is followed by a mission to rebuild the Eye of Helios where Jack is ranting and shouting at the player in fury and frustration. Finally, late in the game, he's consumed by nothing but rage and greed, and is ordering the player to execute surrendering Dahl soldiers and telling them to stop and kill everything in their path, screaming down their objections by telling them that they can't leave any enemies alive to stab them in the back.
  • The "Get to Know Jack" sidequest in Borderlands 2 gives the context that he was already too far gone even before that - locking up Angel and using her for his own gain, including manipulating the events of the first game.
  • In The Pre-Sequel, it's revealed he used the Eye of the Destroyer to make a Wave-Motion Gun with the intent to wipe out "bandit camps".
  • Moxxi mentions that part of the reason she dumped him was that he once lit a group of people on fire in Borderlands 2's "Rakkaholics Anonymous" sidequest. She saw under his mask of heroism that he was already a psychopathic monster.
  • 3 shows quite possible the first and most significant catalyst: Witnessing Angel as a little girl use her Phaseshift Siren powers to unconsciously control a bandit's turrets, killing the bandit and his wife/her mother by complete accident, sending him clear over the Despair Event Horizon and locking up Angel for her own "protection", only to later use her abilities to benefit himself and his rise in the ranks of Hyperion.
• Kick the Dog: Like it's a football game with puppies in Borderlands 2.
  • For starters, there's his Establishing Character Moment (see above).
  • Later, when its shields are down, he opens fire on Sanctuary with multiple mortar barrages, with the intent to kill civilians.
  • Pretty much everything he's done at the Wildlife Exploration Preserve.
  • Then there's his murder of Bloodwing right in front of Mordecai, followed by a hilariously badly played violin, which was meant to be played in a sarcastically sad manner. Even afterwards, he puts what's left of her mutated body on display in Opportunity.
  • If the player chooses to kill Sheriff Nisha (who happens to be Jack's girlfriend) in Lynchwood before completing the game, while Jack is a tiny bit miffed that she's dead, he's much more surprised that the Vault Hunters actually managed to anger him at all, showing just how little he cared for his own girlfriend in the end, even if she did love him.
  • In Opportunity, one of the ECHO logs you can find details that he murdered an employee's children simply for pointing out flaws in Jack's plan to build Opportunity.
  • In one ECHO call to the player, he explains how he and Wilhelm tortured Tannis by beating her for hours and then taking the Vault Key from her, only sparing her because "that's what heroes do. They're merciful."
  • His treatment of Angel in general; despite talking about how much she means to him, he sees nothing wrong with shock-torturing her when he's mad.
  • After killing Roland, Jack uses his ECHO to prank call the Vault Hunters and mimick their fallen leader's voice.
  • And then there's his Cold-Blooded Torture of Lilith after her capture. Considering Lilith's actions in Borderlands: The Pre-Sequel!, this might fall under Pay Evil unto Evil territory, depending on your stance.
  • According to the ancillary material, he sent Sanctuary a box with the heads of Pierce and Roland, and what was left of Bloodwing's. The only time he could have done this was when he had Lilith captive.
  • He even had a few of these in Borderlands: The Pre-Sequel!, which was before he even became Handsome Jack in the first place. While most of them (such as wiping Felicity and spacing the scientists) can be considered shooting the dog considering the situation at the time, however he showed little remorse and casually moved on with his goals as if nothing happened.
  • Late in the game he orders the player to execute a surrendering Dahl soldier, and laughs if they do it.
  • It doesn't stop after his death; in the Handsome Jackpot segment for Borderlands 3, the entire Handsome Jackpot facility is put under lockdown due to his death, and when things really get compromised at the end of that chapter, it turns out the station has protocols to be sent into a black hole, with no regard for the safety of anyone inside.
• Killed Mid-Sentence: This can be his final fate should the player choose. Don't want to listen to Jack's Villainous Breakdown when you finally beat him? Put a bullet in him to shut him up for good. You'll get an achievement for it too.
• Klingon Promotion: He became the president of Hyperion by murdering his boss. If Tales of the Borderlands is anything to go by, evidently this is a pretty common way to move up the ranks.
• Knight of Cerebus:
  • While he's a much funnier example than most, Jack is shown to be a horribly Abusive Parents to his daughter, Angel, manages to kill Helena Pierce, Bloodwing, and Roland and captures/tortures Lilith at one point. His tone of voice also changes to become much colder after Angel's death.
  • In a franchise built on Comedic Sociopathy, Handsome Jack manages to stand out as a genuine monster to most.
• Knight Templar: Utterly convinced that he is doing the right thing by trying to kill "bandits" (read: anyone on Pandora who opposes him) and imposing a fascist state of pure order and obedience to him.
• Knight Templar Parent: When Angel is trying to kill herself, he screams that everything he's done — all the people he's manipulated, all the bandits he's killed — has been to protect her. She is...not exactly overcome with gratitude and dies calling him an asshole.
• Lack of Empathy: Even before he went of the deep end, he struggled with actually comprehending or even caring about the negative impact his actions could have on others. This began with him imprisoning his own daughter to contain her powers without even realizing the horrific state he had left her in, and he only gets worse after his rationality flies out the window in the Pre-Sequel.
• Lantern Jaw of Justice: Jack starts The Pre-Sequel! with a cleft chin, which slowly "falls" throughout the game and goes completely flush when Lilith scars him.
• Large Ham: He's quite over-the-top, to say the least.
• Laughably Evil: Is incredibly petty and vain, leading to amusing sections where you hear about the pointless crap he uses his power for.
  Jack: Just bought a pony made of diamonds, because I'm rich. So, you know. That's cool.
• Laughing Mad: Occasionally breaks out into maniacal laughter during the fight against the Warrior — another illustration of how much he's lost it by this point.
• Leave No Survivors: He ends up adopting this stance after suffering numerous betrayals in the Pre-Sequel, starting from the Meriff to Roland, Lilith and Moxxi destroying the Eye of Helios. When encountering the RK5 in the endgame, despite his minions telling him that they could easily bypass it he orders them to destroy it since to him, leaving survivors means a chance that they'll backstab you.
  Jack: NO! You let your enemies live, and they'll shoot you in the back! I don't want any surprises! I DON'T WANT ANY SURVIVORS!
• Love Martyr: Towards Pandora itself. The natives of the planet would very much like to leave it, the mercenaries and corporations that willingly go there are only fond of it for its resources and by virtue of being able to leave it at their leisure, and then there are those poor exiles that despise the world so much that they'd prefer death to spending one more second on it. In contrast to all of the above, Jack honestly believes that Pandora can be salvaged and repurposed into a utopia of safety, peace, and order. No one in the franchise shares this sentiment.
• Mad Scientist: Jack is a talented engineer and computer programmer in addition to his skills as an administrator. The mad part comes from the fact he made the Fragtrap and personally funded and oversaw a long period of deadly slag experimentation on Pandora citizens.
• The Man Behind the Man: After the player dispatches of Wilhelm, it is revealed that Jack manipulated the player and the Raiders into going after the Vault Key directly, with the help of Angel, who orchestrated Roland and Co.'s hunt for the vault during the events of 1.
• Manipulative Bastard: Loves using people to further his ends, then offing them for shits and giggles. He tried it with the Vault Hunters but failed. Or so one thinks at first glance. Turns out he was using Angel the entire time to control the Vault Hunters.
• Masking the Deformity: He wears a mask that looks like his own face, albeit of an obviously different skin tone to the rest of his head. This mask hides a massive scar in the shape of a vault logo that was given to him by Lilith, as revealed in Borderlands: The Pre-Sequel!.
• Middle-Management Mook: In Borderlands: The Pre-Sequel!, Handsome Jack is just plain old Jack, a middle-management upstart in over his head during the attack on Elpis.
• Mirror Boss: When you finally get to fight him, you expect him to climb into some big robot. Nope, he fights you, man to man, as a strange mix of four of the classes at once. Specifically, he dual-wields his Arm Cannons similar to Salvador's gunzerking, he tosses down turrets like Axton, he uses an invisibility cloak like Zer0, and calls robots to his side like Gaige.
• Modest Royalty: Downplayed as he still looks wealthy by the way he dresses, but it surely doesn't fit a powerful CEO like him.
• Mommy Issues: He has deep-seated grandmother issues. She was abusive towards him, if the "disciplinary" buzz-axe in her house is anything to go by.
• Moral Myopia: One of his defining characteristics. Paired with It's All About Me, he doesn't seem to understand that other people are even people. If you kill his girlfriend Nisha, he's less upset and more surprised that he's upset. But the death of his daughter — even though technically it was suicide and also his fault — is what finally makes him declare It's Personal. This is even worse than it sounds, because it's clear that his attempts to convince you he's done a good thing for Angel, as well as the fear, loss, grief and rage he displays as the event plays out, are genuine, which means he is literally incapable of comprehending that he has not done good things.
• Mysterious Past: The "Get To Know Jack" sidequest as well as the Pre-Sequel gives us some details on his backstory. It is known that he orchestrated the events that led to the opening of the Vault, and somehow knew enough about Vaults and Eridians to do so, that he was married and his wife "disappeared" after the Siren they fathered did... something to her (3 reveals that Angel accidentally killed her and drove Jack way past the Despair Event Horizon), that he somehow rose through the ranks of the company after somehow redirecting a satellite containing Angel to Pandora and starting the Eridium rush, and that his sanity steadily decreased in his attempt to save Elpis, particularly after Roland, Lilith and Moxxi destroyed the eye of The Destroyer that he was using as a superweapon. And then there was the ironic hideous facial scarring, which was caused by none other than Lilith, who punch an Eridian artifact right into his face. 3 also adds some more questions as portraits of him and his wife can be found in the Jakobs Manor, implying a connection to the Jakobs family.
• Narcissist: Extends far beyond his self-aggrandizing handle.
  • His egomania is best portrayed in the construction of Opportunity, where his face is plastered on every other surface, has statues of himself being portrayed like a noble hero and any criticism of his constant media bragging is grounds for execution. One section of it is called the "Living Legend Plaza" and is literally a memorial of the story of the four original Vault Hunters, but with Jack stealing all the credit.
  • He's such a narcissist that in The Pre-Sequel! he'll actually come onto his own body double.
    Timothy Lawrence/Jack: “How egocentric does this guy have to be to hire body doubles? The dude's just a programmer. That’s like a grocery store clerk wearing kevlar. You’re not important enough to kill man, hello.”
• Never My Fault: He blames the Vault Hunters for Angel's death, refusing to acknowledge the fact that he drove her into desiring death.
• The Nicknamer: He's fond of calling people people condescending pet names such as "Kiddo", "Pumpkin" or "Cupcake". In the case of the Vault Hunters, he generally calls them Bandits or later on, "Child-killers".
• No Good Deed Goes Unpunished: After confronting the Meriff about his betrayal, Jack decides to let him go. The Meriff takes the chance to shoot him once he turns his back on him, which teaches him to never take a chance and show mercy.
• Non P.O.V. Protagonist: In The Pre-Sequel, he's thematically speaking the main character, but the story is told through the perspective of his hired Vault Hunters.
• Nothing Personal: When he first "welcomes" the Vault Hunters to Pandora via exploding monorail, he actually prints these words on a sign for them to see before they die. His continued attempts to kill them and everyone they associate with develop gradually from that motive to It's Personal as the plot unfolds, and his attitude develops accordingly from a sort of amused disinterest to icy, homicidal fixation.

O-S

• Obliviously Evil: Jack means well, and does everything in his power to ensure Pandora is crime-free. However, he inflicted so much pain and caused so much horror that he ended up being no different from the bandits he claims to fight against^note In fact, quite the opposite: his actions throughout all the games and the backstory makes him look worse than the aforementioned bandits, and considering we're talking about Pandorean bandits, that's saying something, yet still thinks himself as the hero of the story.
• Offscreen Villainy: He's mentioned to have done horrific slag mutation experiments against Pandoran citizens in the Wildlife Exploitation Preserve, burned down New Haven, massacred whole towns as his army swept across Pandora and launched a 3-year-war against Sanctuary and the Raiders... but we don't get to see any of it, and only hear it in ECHO logs.
• Older Than They Look: While he looks to be roughly mid-30's, Jack is at least old enough to have a daughter in her late-teens at the least. According to Moxxi, he's had plastic surgery. The mask probably helps.
• Omnicidal Maniac: He has no problem personally calling airstrikes or sending in his army to raze any Pandoran settlements that don't accept his twisted view of order. He even threatens to burn the entire planet to the ground with an Eridian gryphon construct, just because he wants everyone to fully accept his rule.
• Only Known By His Nickname: A dweller in Sanctuary is sharing the rumors that his name isn't "Jack". Since Tassiter and other Hyperion officers call him "John", it's most likely his real name, as "Jack" is commonly used as a nickname for a person named John.
• Only One Name: His last name is never stated in the series. Even his company ID simply refers to him as "Jack". In the AmA, he says his middle name is "Newustationsarentcanon," and allegedly German. Though this should probably be taken with a grain of salt.
• The Only One Allowed to Defeat You: After Angel's death, Jack rescinds the bounty on the Vault Hunters because he wants to kill them himself.
• O.O.C. Is Serious Business:
  • As shown by Maya's ECHO recordings, mentioning a Siren to Jack will make him drop all of his theatrics. His tone changes from interested to infuriated determination.
  • Two of his traits get broken during the climax of "Where Angels Fear to Tread":
    • Once you've started destroying Angel's Eridium Life Supports, Jack will be Suddenly Shouting at you and begging you to stop, acting differently from his usual cold and mocking tone. That's because you're now helping in his daughter's suicide.
      Jack: Who cares about the goddamn key!? You're endangering the life of a little girl!
    • All throughout the game, Jack would simply laugh at you and comically mock your efforts via the ECHOnet and he doesn't even directly appear for the majority of the game. Even Angel claims that Jack is a coward and "would never face you in person". After you've shut down Angel's life support, a furious Jack briefly shuts off his monitor, then teleports to the room, personally killing Roland from behind, kidnapping Lilith and taunting you in person.
• Orcus on His Throne: Throughout almost all of the game he's content at sitting back and letting his minions fight the new Vault Hunters (albeit while heavily taunting them the whole way). Despite having enough firepower to wipe out a continent, his Helios Station very rarely launches direct attacks.
• Papa Wolf: Extremely protective of Angel, which just makes all the horrible things he's done to her even worse. He goes so far as to rescind the bounty on you after you help her to die, just to kill you personally. The fact that she's a Living Macguffin and necessary for him to open the Vault is a factor, but he does love her in his own twisted way, and doesn't seem to understand that the abuse he put her through led to her wishing for death to escape him.
• Posthumous Character: He's long-dead by the time of 3, but his presence is still present in the Handsome Jackpot DLC.
• Pre-Asskicking One-Liner:
  "Hey, you're right on time - Key's nearly ready! But before I cleanse this planet for good, I am gonna avenge my daughter."
• Pre-Final Boss: Before The Warrior is fought at the end of 2, Jack personally confronts you in order to, in his mind, get his vengeance for Angel's death.
• Promoted to Playable:
  • In a sense. Jack's body double is the first DLC character of The Pre-Sequel!. However, the two are completely different characters and Timothy proves to be much more moral and sane than the real Jack.
  • In an indirect sense in Tales from the Borderlands, where he is imbued in the protagonist Rhys' consciousness.
• Protagonist-Centered Morality: In his own head. Jack sees himself as The Hero and has no problem pointing out the Vault Hunters' more dubious actions, while at other times casually joking about worse crimes he's committed against Pandora's "bandit" citizens. He also has a habit of denying things that would be inconvenient to his view of himself as a hero.
• Protagonist Journey to Villain: The Pre-Sequel centers around Handome Jack's rise to power, which parallels his descent into madness, eventually becoming the insane Evil Overlord of 2.
• Properly Paranoid: This saves him when Moxxi has Lilith and Roland destroy the Eye of the Destroyer. If it wasn't for him insisting on restarting the eye remotely, he and his crew would have died with the Eye's destruction.
• Punch-Packing Pistol: He and his holographic doubles in his boss fight carry a purple-rarity Hyperion Vision that is also made of all Hyperion parts, which gives the gun bonuses to weapon damage, reload speed and magazine size. He also one-shots Roland with it.
• Psychopathic Manchild: He's the powerful CEO of an N.G.O. Superpower that presumably spans several galaxies, but behind that, he's an immature dickhead that insists on randomly calling up the Vault Hunters just to hurl insults at them and brag about being rich enough to blow his cash on ridiculous things, such as a Turbo-Mansion and a live pony made of diamonds that he names Butt Stallion. His sadism is also reminiscent of a schoolyard bully; at one point, he laughs as he tells a story about gouging out a man's eyes in front of the man's children.
• Rank Scales with Asskicking: Downplayed when you get into a straight fight with him. While he's decently strong as a boss, when he's up against the Vault Hunters—who, at this point, have gotten strong enough to potentially fill out at least one skill tree and may be packing some legendary gear to boot—he falters rather easily. The only reason he doesn't get one-shot initially is because of his use of cloaking and summoning decoys to throw you off.
• Reality Is Unrealistic: Low-Level Programming. Considered by the majority as a low-class job, which is ironically not true. Low-Level programming is basically code-within-hardware, coming from the other wiki, sophisticated by machine code all by itself, while high-level programming are already translated code to human language that makes common programmers today easily considered competent, but surprisingly as well, they're not. Which means Jack knows a lot more about the coding more than most people in Hyperion, which resolves him a respectable position in Hyperion as a whole, such as being the command of Helios station.
• Red Right Hand: The face-mask that he wears. Underneath that mask, he has the Vault symbol branded upon his face.
• Refuge in Audacity: He took over his company not because he was the greatest businessman (he's much too crazy), or the smartest cookie (he has a living computer intelligence in the form of his daughter helping out there), nor even because he got a hot tip that Pandora was about to turn into an Eridium bonanza (though that helped), but because he's so vicious, violent and unpredictable that the pencil-pushers at the top of the company must either fold or die before him. He literally strangles people to death in his own board room and has children of his own employees executed in passing because one of them brings up a minor problem with one of his plans.
• Sadist: He's an extremely cruel person in general, and even when he's not physically violent he still likes to hurt people with his words, such as making fun of Pierce's scars or taunting Mordecai over killing Bloodwing. Also shown to be sadistic in that way evidenced by dialogue from the Handsome Jackpot DLC.
  "Tremble before me! I'm just kidding— I mean, you totally could tremble before me, I get off on that kinda thing."
• Sanity Slippage:
  • While it's difficult to tell, as wiring your daughter into an Eridium injector and forcing her into a lifetime of painful servitude is not exactly an indicator of sanity, there's some progression in the "Get To Know Jack" sidequest of 2. By the time of the third ECHO log, he's clearly lost what little stability he ever had.
  • The Pre-Sequel! details the process, though making this somewhat disturbing, through some of the ECHO logs.
  • 3 shows through a side-mission's ECHO logs that he began losing his mind after both having the child Angel accidentally kill her mother/his wife when unconsciously controlling a bandit's turrets and crossing the Despair Event Horizon with losing his first love. After putting Angel in isolation, he used her abilities to gain power and rise among the ranks of Hyperion.
• Screw Yourself: When interacting with his body double in the Pre-Sequel, Real Jack can't help but admire how sexy he is (to the point of being distracted by his body double's good looks), which seriously creeps out Fake Jack.
• Schmuck Bait: After you Mercy Kill his daughter Angel, Jack gives you a quest where he will reward you handsomely if you literally kill yourself. When you go to the objective point, you can see a bandit jumping to his death in hopes of getting the reward.
• Sealed Evil in a Can: Wants to release one, the Warrior, from a Vault and control it.
• Shadow Dictator: He is very similar to Big Brother in many ways, but overall he's an Inverted version, due to him being an Attention Whore who plasters his face everywhere and keeps his Propaganda Machine going through his monologues to Pandora and the Vault Hunters.
• Shut Up, Hannibal!: After you defeat The Warrior, a bloody Handsome Jack starts going on a last, desperate Break Them by Talking. The game actually doesn't kill him off, it gives you the honor of choosing what weapon you wish to use to kill him. Of course, if you wait a while after he's done ranting, Lilith will offer to do it herself.
• Significant Anagram: To him, anyway. In a Reddit AMA, one user noted that "Handsome Jack" is an anagram for "He's a damn jock".
  Jack: "Oh, Jack, did you realize your name has an interesting anagram? Hey Jack, you definitely didn't run your name through an anagram machine when you decided to completely redefine your personality and found the one that had the most masculine and aggro sentences hiding in it, did you? You're definitely not the smartest goddamn person on Pandora, so there's no way you did any of that, right?" You goddamn people.
• Smug Snake: Manipulates everyone in the game to get his hands on the Warrior, but his downfall comes from his inability to understand that he can lose.
• Sore Loser: In 3, Edgren (AKA, the Lord of Skags) tells the Vault Hunter that, after he kept beating Jack in a video game, he set up a broadband-hogging device to shut his internet down as payback. Though considering who we're talking about, he could've done much, much worse.
• Start of Darkness: Even before The Pre-Sequel!, a side mission in 3 known as "Childhood's End" shows the exact events that caused Jack to enslave Angel, beginning his descent into evil. A child Angel was kidnapped in front of both Jack and her mother by a bandit named Grogmouth, who intended to sell her off to the highest bidder due to being a Siren. A scared and angry Angel unconsciously activated some turrets Grogmouth was using using her Phaseshift ability which fired wildly at everything around them, killing the bandit and her own mother by accident. It was this event that drove Jack to put the child Angel in her solitary confinement and begin his slow Sanity Slippage as he decided to use her to make gains at complete power in Hyperion.

T-Z

• Tautological Templar: The way Jack sees it, he's the hero that Pandora needs, and therefore everything he does is for Pandora's greater good. Even if it involves massacring innocents, Cold-Blooded Torture, and abusing and manipulating his own daughter, it's all to make Pandora a better place and ridding it of bandit scum (read: anyone not living under Hyperion's banner).
• Techno Wizard: While his business skills are questionable, he's insanely talented in the fields of robotics, programming, and general technology.
• This Cannot Be!: When the Warrior is defeated.
  Jack: This can't be happening! THIS CAN'T BE HAPPENING!!!
• The Sociopath:
  • Handsome Jack has all the qualifications. He doesn't care about anyone, uses people for his own ends, and is incredibly impulsive, as evidenced by his bizarre Conspicuous Consumption (seriously, Turbo-Mansions?!) and creation of Opportunity. He is capable of long-term planning up to a point, but after that point defaults back to "melt all dissenting voices using overwhelming firepower"; and while he does love Angel, it's possessive and controlling.
  • What's most unsettling about him is that the more someone deviates from his expectations, the more enraged he gets. And he never lets it go. This is shown in The Pre-Sequel!, where Moxxi tries to kill him because of what a dangerous bastard he is... which causes him to declare a massive case of It's Personal and take a step closer to being the utter psycho we see in 2.
• The Starscream: Get To Know Jack reveals him to be a successful version of this, with Tassiter calling him a "hideous little code monkey". In other words, low-ranking, treated like dirt by his bosses, and a No-Respect Guy. Near the end of the Pre-Sequel, he loses all patience with Tassiter and begins openly threatening him.
  Jack: You say one more word, and I promise to make your death slow.
  Tassiter: What are you-
  Jack: That was three. I'll be seeing you soon.
• That Man Is Dead: According to Athena, Jack was a hero who was willing to stay behind to ensure his team made it to Elpis and was unwilling to resort to torture or murder outright. By the time Lilith scarred him and he went insane with hatred and revenge, however, she says that the hero who saved Elpis had died. Exemplified in Jack's title cards: when he's first encountered on Helios, he's just Jack, an executive who's in over his head. At the end, he's Handsome Jack, after murdering his boss in his own office. Though in fairness to Athena, she never found out what he did to his daughter.
• They Call Me MISTER Tibbs!: He makes a point that he wants to be called Handsome Jack.
• Took a Level in Jerkass: Yes, seriously. While he never really takes a break from being a mass-murdering blowhard, Angel’s death causes his insults toward the Vault Hunters to become rather more venomous and personal.
• Torture Technician: It's made clear by several characters, including Jack himself, that Jack relishes torturing his enemies and giving them as painful a death as possible. When Lilith is captured, he took advantage of her Eridium-induced Healing Factor by stabbing the hell out of her while she couldn't fight back, knowing she wouldn't die from the treatment.
• Tom the Dark Lord: He's the most infamous villain of the series and also the one with the plainest and simplest name. He doesn't even have an intimidating last name as his name is evidently just "Jack".
• Totally Radical: His video featuring tips on surviving Elpis for The Pre-Sequel is peppered with strained attempts at being current which are made doubly hilarious given that his presumed audience for it consists of three (or five) gritty adults and a weathered robot.
• Tranquil Fury: For the midpoint of the game, Jack will periodically start screaming in frustration at the Vault Hunters and their allies because he just can't kill them or they're sabotaging his operations/defacing his city. Then the Vault Hunters kill Angel, and immediately afterward, everything he says is in his casual, mocking, trollish tone. However, behind that forced calm, you can sense the pure, undiluted hatred in him as he mocks you with infinitely crueller barbs and insults. But hey: he's back to cheerful when he describes how much he's anticipating killing you...
• Troll: He is constantly taunting and belittling the Vault Hunters, but a number of his later barbs, like the the jokes he cracks relating to the deaths of Bloodwing and later Roland, are just cruel for their own sake. There's a subtle but definite shift in his trolling as the game progresses. He starts off with petty insults, moving up to mocking the player, then cruelly twisting the knife as he starts hurting and killing people close to the Vault Hunters just for his own amusement. From there he starts getting angrier and more frustrated that he can't kill you, and the trolling shifts to angry, petty insults (noticeable especially in Opportunity). Then, when Angel is killed, his trolling becomes much more vicious, as his cruelty becomes less the amusement of playing with a toy and more the vicious satisfaction in hurting someone you personally despise and want to die screaming.
• The Unfettered: After becoming Handsome Jack, he does pretty much whatever he feels like, reasoning that he's a hero, and therefore anything he does (no matter how twisted or depraved) is heroic.
• Ungrateful Bastard: Despite everything Claptrap has done for him, he betrays him and commits the genocide of his entire kind at the end of A Claptastic Voyage all because he found them annoying. Wilhelm takes part in this betrayal unaware that he will later be victim of a similar fate.
• Unholy Matrimony: His relationship with Nisha turned out to be remarkably happy and stable, and they were together for 3 years. She outright says that she loves him during a Lynchwood PA announcement (although she hates his way of naming things.) That said, though, he's surprised that he's angry at all when you kill her.
  Aurelia: "The sex must be horrifying."
• Unwitting Instigator of Doom: His quest for the Vaults unknowingly set into motion a war that could potentially threaten to kill billions, and even worse, Jack flat-out ignored all the attempts by Zarpedon and the Lost Legion to warn him of the danger, shooting Zarpedon in the face before she could tell him just how bad it'd get.
• Utopia Justifies the Means: A big believer in it. Killing bandits, making his own ridiculously wasteful city, invading and occupying Pandora with a hostile military... in his own mind, it's all necessary to civilize Pandora, and bring order to a lawless world (and possibly galaxy). Unfortunately, he has several character tropes in this entry that make this problematic, namely his own belief in Protagonist-Centered Morality, (the protagonist being him) It's All About Me, and his barely-restrained enjoyment of killing.
• Villain Has a Point: His hatred for bandits isn't unjustified, and many of his claims against them aren't entirely hyperbole: the vast majority of Bandits are deranged lunatics and murderous thugs who on a regular basis commit acts of murder, torture, pillaging, and other horrible crimes (such as baby eating) often just for the fun of it. Many characters (including a good chunk of the Vault Hunters) could have been more supportive of his goals, had he not considered everyone living on Pandora a bandit.
• Villain with Good Publicity: He even has his own propaganda service thanks to Hunter Hellquist. Although it's Inverted at least on Pandora, where everyone knows that whatever he has published is absolute bullcrap.
• Villain Ball: He poisons Wilhelm to set up a Batman Gambit to completely wipe Sancuary off the map. Not only does this particular gambit fail (for the most part), but Jack is now left without his highly dependent muscle. Yes, his girlfriend is a former Vault Hunter herself, but she's not at all interested at anything that goes on outside her town, including Jack's war effort. Indeed, his composure starts to break more easily from there on out.
• Villainous Breakdown:
  • During 2, the usually calm and snarky (though malevolent) Jack eventually gives path to the psychopathic, genocidal asshole that we know well:
    • He gets extremely pissed off at the end of "Bright Lights, Flying City" when he realizes Angel is disobeying his orders to stop helping you.
      Handsome Jack: Send in the Constructors, I want those bastards dead now! (...) I'm sending EVERYTHING I have at you. EVERYTHING!
    • The sidequest "Statuesque" opens with him calmly taunting you and gradually becoming angrier and angrier, eventually screaming at you and shouting "HERE'S YOUR PRIZE!" while launching Super Badass Loaders.
    • Once you kill his daughter, he really starts to lose it. It's quite jarring, watching the gigglesome sociopath melt down into a grieving father.
    • The full extent of his breakdown kicks in at the grand finale and leads into another one when the Warrior is defeated.
      Handsome Jack: No, no, no, I can't die like this... not when I'm so close... and not at the hands... of a FILTHY BANDIT! I could've saved this planet! I could have actually restored order! I wasn't supposed to die... by the hands... of a CHILD-KILLING PSYCHOPATH! You're a savage! YOU'RE a maniac! You are a bandit AND I AM THE GODDAMN HERO! The Warrior was practically a God. How — HOW in the hell have you killed my Warrior? You idiots! The Warrior could have brought peace to this planet! No more dangerous creatures! No more bandits! Pandora — could have been PARADISE!
  • Jack has several breakdowns in The Pre-Sequel! as well:
    • The moment when he is going to spare the Meriff but the man attempts to shoot him in the back is a turning point that Jack finds "exhilarating."
    • Moxxi and the original Vault Hunters sabotaging the Eye of Helios is when Jack starts to become the psychopath we know in 2, complete with raving that they're all no better than bandits.
    • He has another right after when Tassiter tries to contact him about the Eye of Helios blowing up.
      Jack: SHUT THE HELL UP, TASSITER! SHUT! THE! HELL! UP! My ex-girlfriend and her two BFFs just tried to kill me, and THE LAST THING I need right now is your senile ass WHINING IN MY EAR! If I get ONE more message from you that isn't "Addaboy, Jack" or "I'm sending you a big bag of money", then I'm gonna reach through my ECHO communicator and GOUGE YOUR EYES OUT WITH MY PINKIES! ARE WE CLEAR?!
    • He finally loses it completely when Lilith punches him in the face after he learned of the Vault of the Warrior, scarring him to the point where he must wear a mask of his former handsome visage from that point forward and now armed with the knowledge of a new doomsday weapon to wreak his vengeance.
• Villainous Legacy: His actions (i.e: bullying) "inspired" other people, like Hugo Vasquez in Tales from the Borderlands who wanted to follow Jack's footsteps after his demise. The Handsome Jackpot DLC in 3 deals with a casino he built back when he was alive that's gone into lockdown after his death, trapping everyone (including Timothy) inside. Both Moxxi and Timothy lament that even in death Jack is still screwing them over. Even Pretty Boy, the main antagonist of Handsome Jackpot was influenced by Jack's callousness.
• Villains Never Lie:
  • Jack rarely tells an outright lie. He loves to distort the truth, lie via omission, or simply spin his extremely twisted view of reality, but out-and-out lying is very rare — which makes the moments when he does do it all the more potent.
  • He isn't even really lying when he claims he was chiefly responsible for the Vault Hunters' actions in the first game as he was the one that tricked them into performing said actions.
  • 3 reveals that he was actually being honest about Angel killing her mother. When she was being held captive by a bandit as a child Angel took control of a turret in a panic that killed both the bandit and her mother.
• Virtual Ghost: An A.I. copy of his consciousness plays a major role in Tales from the Borderlands. As of 3, copies of said A.I. still seem to be in circulation, as one is installed inside the Handsome Jackhammer legendary weapon. Alternatively, Rhys ended up not destroying Jack at the end of Tales and eventually installed him into a submachine gun for lulz.
• Visionary Villain: Dreams of a Pandora cleaned of bandits and instead serving as a bright shining beacon of civilization. Of course, "bandit" is "anyone who doesn't bow down and worship him" and "civilization" includes laws mandating death for littering, profanity, or complaining about the laws (which is considered verbal littering). Even back when he was a supposed "low-level programmer" he had grand ambitions, up to even commissioning a surgical body double, something that does get lampshaded.
  Janey Springs: What's a low-level Hyperion employee doing making body doubles of himself?
  Timothy: He's got big dreams, and I have student loans.
• Voice with an Internet Connection: Seems to be able to track you over your journey through his info network, and will regularly call you up over the ECHOnet to berate and insult you.
• Warmup Boss: In the final battle, he serves as a light boss fight before facing off against the Warrior, the tougher Final Boss. However, on higher difficulties, he's a Wake-Up Call Boss.
• Well-Intentioned Extremist: Deconstructed. His intentions to clean up Pandora are good, but the means he uses are horrible. Assuming he even wants to clean up Pandora out of something remotely resembling altruism, instead of so he can say how awesome he is for cleaning up Pandora, which would be entirely in-character.
• What Is This Feeling?: He's more blatantly angry at the Vault Hunters for wrecking Opportunity than he is about them killing his girlfriend. He admits to feeling "kinda" angry about it, but he sounds less outraged and more confused that he actually feels anything about somebody else dying.
• With Great Power Comes Great Insanity: In The Pre-Sequel!, Jack is already on his way down the slippery slope by the time he interfaces with the Elpis Vault's "computer", but the Eridian knowledge downloaded into his brain (coupled with being branded by Lilith at that moment) are what cause him to finally go full Handsome Jack.]
• Would Hurt a Child: In addition to enslaving Angel as a child, he's not above the outright murder of children — Sir Hammerlock mentions so, and an ECHO recording heavily implies that he had a Hyperion colleague's children killed for pointing out that Opportunity is Fascist, but Inefficient. Also, if you listen to Helena Pierce's echo logs, you can clearly hear women and children screaming when Jack orders Wilhelm to open fire.
• Wrong Genre Savvy: He believes he's the hero and at least one ECHO message he sends you suggests he believes his victory is assured simply because the hero is supposed to win while the bad guys die. It thus comes as something of a shock to him when he loses.
• You Have Outlived Your Usefulness:
  • He generally prefers to kill folks rather than pay them, as demonstrated by him sending bots after Roland and the Bloodshots after the former was captured. He also does this with some bandits he sent to kill his grandma by sending you to kill them, though he does at least end up paying you in the end. He attempts to do this to the Vault Hunters after breeching Sanctuary, but repeatedly fails (no thanks to Angel helping them out).
  • The Claptastic Voyage DLC of The Pre-Sequel shows that after obtaining the H-Source, the first thing he did was to use it to destroy all Claptrap units before personally executing Fragtrap himself out of frustration for putting up with his crap. He first foreshadows this when his team reaches Eleseer, telling Fragtrap that his new robot army is making him look incredibly redundant.
  • He had Wilhelm, who was his STRONGEST enforcer at the time, poisoned and killed so he could pull off a gambit on an attempt to destroy Sanctuary.
• You Killed My Father: Inverted; the heroes assist his daughter's suicide. He's pissed.

The Handsome Sorcerer

The Handsome Sorcerer

Played by: Dameon Clarke

"So looking for the Queen, huh? That's adorable."

— The Handsome Sorcerer upon being first heard.

The main antagonist of the post-game expansion Tiny Tina's Assault on Dragon Keep. In the roleplaying game Bunkers & Badasses played by Tina, she imagines Jack as an evil sorcerer.

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• Adaptational Nice Guy: While he is far from a nice guy, he is definitely less evil than the man he is based on. For one thing, he treats his daughter well. He also warns the hero(es) she's where she is for a reason and makes no excuses for all the evil crap he does.
• Adaptational Relationship Overhaul: His daughter is fully on his side, as opposed to the real Jack's abusive treatment of Angel (though ironically he's far less bothered by her death here.) This is due to Tina's perception of Angel, whom she blames for Roland's death.
• Ambiguously Human: While the real Jack is clearly human, the line is blurrier here, notably because his daughter is a half-spider monster. Also, like her, he can shape-shift.
• Ass Pull: In-universe. Lilith complains that the reveal of Davlin being the Sorcerer makes no sense. Tina ignores her. It is foreshadowed by his hair, and his clasp being the same as Jack's watch, but Lilith and the others presumably couldn't see that.
• Back from the Dead: After dying at the end of the main story, Jack returns in Tiny Tina's Assault on Dragon Keep as the Handsome Sorcerer, though he is technically a character made-up for a roleplay game between the Vault Hunters.
• Big Bad: Of Tiny Tina's Assault on Dragon Keep.
• Card-Carrying Villain: As opposed to the actual Handsome Jack who is Obliviously Evil, the Sorcerer is very aware of his villainy and pretty damn proud.
• Dark Is Evil: He kidnapped the Queen of Flamerock as she is the only one able to reverse his curse. Said curse consists of wrapping the kingdom in eternal darkness.
• Dead Person Impersonation: Tina is implied to be using the voice changer the Vault Hunter used to get into the bunker to imitate the now deceased Handsome Jack, much to the discomfort of her players.
• Demonization: He is meant to be a negative portrayal of Jack painted by Tiny Tina but ironically comes off as more likable compared to the actual guy.
• Disney Villain Death: He dies being pushed from the top of his tower by Bloodwing.
• Dragon Tamer: In his last form, he summons red dragons. He also has a "Handsome Dragon" as his... well Dragon who must be defeated to reach him.
• Everyone Calls Him "Barkeep": He is solely referred to as the "Handsome Sorcerer", even if it's clear he is Jack in all but name.
• Evil Gloating: Constantly makes fun of the adventurers, especially when they start fighting the dwarves they were supposed to free.
  Mordecai: You're killin' me here, Brick. I'm being taunted by a thirteen year old girl doing the voice of a grown man.
• Evil Overlord: Let's see: A wizard dressed in black who loves the darkness and has an army of undeads, orcs and dragons? Yeah, he definitely checks out.
• Evil Sorcerer: He's basically Jack, if he had magic powers.
• False Friend: He spends the beginning of the game pretending to be a helper named Davlin only to trick the hero(es) into a trap of his.
• The Family That Slays Together: His daughter is just as evil as him, and the two pair up in their devilish schemes.
• Final Boss: Once arriving to the top of his Evil Tower of Ominousness, he delivers a climatic boss fight that conclude the expansion.
• Flat Character: He has no motives for his doings, no backstory and the rare moments of dialogues he has get quickly broken by Mordecai reminding you that he is just a character played by Tina.
• Flunky Boss: He is fought alongside the skeletons and dragons he summons.
• Generic Doomsday Villain: A blatant case of a villain with no real depth or reasons for his evil doings. Justified since he is the antagonist of a poorly-written roleplay game and the actual story is more about Tina and her friends coming to term with Roland's death.
• Hyperaffixation: He is the Handsome Sorcerer who has a Handsome Dragon in his Handsome Tower.
• An Ice Person: In his first form.
• Imaginary Enemy: As he is only a character imagined by Tiny Tina for her tabletop game, he only exist to be the Big Bad of her fantasies.
• King Mook: He's mostly an upgraded version of the wizard enemies encountered in Bunker & Badasses, changing abilities with each form.
• Laughably Evil: More so than the actual Jack, mainly because the very worst traits of his original counterpart are greatly downplayed.
• Necromancer: In his second form, he gains the ability to summon fighting skeletons.
• Not His Sled: Unlike the real Handsome Jack, he fails to kill both Roland and Bloodwing.
• Prophet Eyes: He has bright blank glowing eyes which takes the color of whatever element he takes the form of.
• Robe and Wizard Hat: As befitting a fantasy wizard.
• Sequential Boss: Upon defeating him, he turns into the Necrotic Sorcerer and then the Demonic Sorcerer. Note that luckily enough for the player, dying to him will not reset the battle to his first form.
• Summon Magic: As a Necrotic Sorcerer, he can summons undeads to help him in battle, and as the Demonic Sorcerer, he summons red dragons.
• Walking Spoiler: It isn't apparent who he's supposed to be in the Borderlands's universe until halfway throughout the story.
• What the Hell, Hero?: He gives one to the hero(es) upon noticing that they ended up fighting the dwarves who they initially came to free from the Sorcerer and formed an alliance against him.
  The Handsome Sorcerer: Wait, wait, wait, wait, are you fighting the dwarves? You're such an idiot! How did you morons manage that?

A.I. Handsome Jack

A.I. Handsome Jack

"Exactly. Everyone thinks they´re the hero of their own story."

Played by: Dameon Clarke

"This, ladies and gentlemen, is the Gortys Project...and it's gonna lead us to a vault...And then I'll probably kill you."

— A.I. Jack's introduction.

Handsome Jack, past head of Hyperion, returned in the form of an AI stored in Nakayama's ID Drive.

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• A.I. Is a Crapshoot: Of course, he's Handsome Jack. Being an AI has not made a jot of difference to his basic personality. He's constantly interjecting to torment Rhys as the series goes on until taking it up a notch, either because he's not allowed to take over Hyperion or simply Narcissistic to a horrifying extreme. Even Rhys ultimately gives up on him.
• Alas, Poor Villain: The final episode emphasizes the basic tragedy of Jack's life. He breaks down and begs Rhys not to kill him after his "partner" has had enough of him.
• And I Must Scream: Rhys can choose whether or not to physically destroy the last of the cybernetics containing Jack's personality. If you decide not to destroy it, this is most likely Jack's fate.
• Ascended Extra: The AI was created by Nakayama during the events of a side-mission in The Pre-Sequel!, years before the original died.
• Ax-Crazy: As in previous appearances, he's neither mentally stable nor slow to resort to violence. One of the first things he does is try to strangle Rhys, regardless of what Rhys says. He also clearly enjoys mowing down August and Vazquez's men with the Atlas facility drones. And if the player chooses to reject Jack's offer to rule Hyperion in Episode 4, Jack will say that he should have grabbed Rhys by the skull and bashed his brains against a rock. It really shows in Episode 5 where he wants to shove Rhys' corpse into a robotic endoskeleton, murders a hapless employee who doesn't know where Rhys is... or who Rhys is, and tries to strangle Rhys to death with his own cybernetic arm.
• Badass Boast:
  Handsome Jack: Get ready to lick my boots, you raging douchebags! A-hahah-hahahaha!
  Handsome Jack: No, I am Handsome goddamn JACK!
  Handsome Jack: Take it in Rhys! Hyperion, Pandora, Elpis, oh ho ho they're just the start! We'll rule this entire freaking universe! You and me kiddo, President Rhys, and Handsome goddamn Jack!
• Bad "Bad Acting": Short of saying his name, he does an awful job at impersonating Rhys when he temporarily takes over his body in Episode 3.
• Bad Boss: Vasquez fondly remembers being used as Jack's punching bag, thinking it meant that Jack took a special interest in him whereas Rhys will recall when Jack spat on him without even looking at him. Jack finds the former hilarious, since he treats everybody like a punching bag. He's even punched his own mother! One of the first things he does with Rhys is try and strangle him to death, even telling him to stay still when his arm keeps phasing through his neck.
• Be Careful What You Wish For: Hey, Rhys, remember how much you wanted to be just like Handsome Jack? To become him, even? Here's your chance...
• Bait the Dog: Once he's past the initial shock of being revived, he seems to have mellowed from the megalomaniacal, sociopathic, rage-filled dictator he was when he died and become less dangerous, especially because he has none of his old power. As the story progresses, however, he starts working to get his power back and proves just as bad as he always was. Similarly, some of his dialog suggests that he cares about his lost friends and family. While it may be true that he loves them (or at least believes that he does), if you've played Borderlands 2 you know that he was exactly as horrible to them as he was to everyone else, just under the belief that he was helping them. Some examples:
  • When Rhys comes across Jack's picture of Angel as a child, Jack becomes quite depressed and seems to genuinely miss her. Keep in mind that Jack had Angel imprisoned, enslaved, wired into a computer network, shock-tortured when she misbehaved, and used her both as his personal databank and to charge a Vault Key using her Siren powers, a situation that she chose to escape by killing herself.
  • If you scan the hat that belonged to Nisha (who was Jack's girlfriend) in Jack's Office with the Jack-apedia, you'll only get a single line; "I miss my girlfriend." This is in direct contrast to the detail he goes into for others. Knowing what Nisha was actually like and the nature of their relationship, it's both a little bit sad and a little bit disturbing. This is made sadder by the fact that in 2, Nisha makes it clear she genuinely loves him, while Jack is utterly indifferent when she dies and makes almost no mention of her at all throughout the entire game.
  • He's all over this in his final confrontation with Rhys, giving heartfelt speeches about his own failures and praising Rhys for beating him... before going right back to trying to kill the guy and ranting about his evil plans. Rhys points this out, asking if Jack really thinks anyone's going to fall for the pity routine at this point.
• Berserk Button:
  • Not getting his way. Rhys can learn this if he chooses not to help Jack, which usually results in Jack threatening to kill him, take over his body, and kill his friends. Using Rhys' body.
  • Bringing up his daughter. He even politely warns Rhys not to speak of his daughter or to scan her photo. More troubling is that he doesn't seem to be aware that Angel's dead. Considering how he reacted to her death, it won't be pretty if his AI form discovers she's gone. Then he doesn't just find out, he relives everything that occurred in 2 upon discovering the recording Hyperion made of those events.
• Big Bad Friend: Spends most of the narrative as a devil on Rhys' shoulder, before inevitably revealing his true colors and taking over Helios.
• Brain Uploading: Upon regaining his position at Hyperion, Jack's plan to create an army of cyborg Handsome Jacks by using inserting an endoskeleton with his personality into dead bodies, with Rhys being the first subject.
• Breaking the Fourth Wall: In Episode 3, he notices the "Handsome Jack will remember that" pop-up in the top-left corner after failing to get a high-five from Rhys.
• Break the Haughty: By Episode 5, Jack has lost everything he's been trying to reclaim. His company is destroyed, Rhys loses his faith in him, and the once-feared villain finds himself begging his former fan not to remove him forever.
• Broken Pedestal: In Episode 5, he's become this to Rhys after betraying his number one fan's trust when revealing his true colors.
• But for Me, It Was Tuesday: In Tales from the Borderlands, Vasquez says he had a "special rapport" with Jack. Admittedly, that rapport was that Jack punched him in the face every time they met. Holo!Jack sees things differently and literally cannot remember Vasquez at all because he just punched that many people every day.
  Jack: I punched my mom, for Christ's sake!
• Came Back Wrong: Played with. This Jack is not exactly the real one being brought back to life in some way but an entirely different entity created by Nakayama. As a result, he doesn't act 100% like the original or remembers the events of 2 well. Despite this, he and others still refer to him as Handsome Jack, as if he returned from the dead.
• The Cameo: In Borderlands 3, the legendary submachine gun Handsome Jackhammer appears to have the Handsome Jack A.I. installed inside it. Either Nakayama had extra copies of the A.I. floating around, or Rhys ended up not destroying Jack at the end of Tales and he eventually somehow ended up installed inside a submachine gun.
• Character Development: Not of Handsome Jack himself, but of Nakayama's initial "Robo-Jack" prototype. While he's still a hateful digital lump of narcissism, recalcitrance, sociopathy, viciousness, and vice, he's much more eloquent about it and can do more than just stomp around and talk about how awesome his nonexistent abs are. Evidentially Nakayama really did work out the bugs, possibly even performing some sort of personality upload, to the point where Jack seems back from the dead.
• Contrasting Sequel Antagonist: Unlike the original who only cares for himself and prefers to manipulate others into doing his dirty work, the AI seems to care about Rhys' care being though it is mostly because he too will die if anything happens to Rhys. Also, while the original refuses to take responsibility for Angel's death and fully blames the Vault Hunters, the AI understands why his daughter betrayed him and willingly allowed herself to be killed.
• Death Amnesia: Jack has no memory of him dying or most of the events of 2 when he first awoke. It takes returning to Helios and gaining access to Hyperion's records that he is able to get in touch with the events prior to the original's death.
• Driven to Suicide: If you keep scanning mushrooms while Jack-apedia is active, you'll get an entry stating that Jack has killed himself due to Rhys' mushroom-based idiocy and that he's leaving behind a bunch of cash and a picture of his awesome abs.
  • Even more so when Rhys finally has given up his hopes for Jack, causing Jack to attempt to kill Rhys by forcing himself to squeezing his own neck, even though that means Jack dies with him.
• Disc-One Final Boss: To an extent. He 'dies' in the final episode, but right at the very beginning. The actual climax doesn't involve him at all.
• Even Evil Has Loved Ones: Despite his horrible treatment of his daughter, Angel, he is shown to miss her in a conversation with Rhys.
• Even Evil Has Standards:
  • He finds it rather creepy when Vasquez happily mentions how he'll skin Rhys' corpse to make a wallet out of or if he expresses a desire to cut off all of Rhys's hair for a very morbid toupee. Yep, the Corporate Space Mussolini who shock-tortured his own daughter frequently is creeped out by Vasquez.
  • He's also dismayed when Vasquez gleefully elbows Rhys in the gut for no reason whatsoever. Jack was a temperamental prick, but at least he had the "courtesy" of letting people anger him before hitting/strangling them.
• Enemy Within: He plays this role to Rhys with a hint of Evil Mentor, existing as an AI entity that only Rhys can see and hear.
• Electronic Speech Impediment: As a Virtual Ghost, his voice stutters and distorts when he loses his temper.
• "Eureka!" Moment: Despite Vasquez's Hero Worship of him, A.I. Jack can't for the life of him remember one of his many punching bag employees. When Vasquez admits to have started working for Hyperion in the mail room, Jack finally recognizes him as "Wallethead".
• Evil Hand: Rhys can allow Jack to temporarily power up his ECHO eye in order to remotely hack nearby electronic objects. However, doing so also gives Jack full control of Rhys' cybernetic arm. If you actually let Jack take control a second time at the end of Chapter 2, he seems to be able to control Rhys' body completely. He goes even further in Episode 3, where he effectively takes over Rhys' brain temporarily after he's knocked out. The result is Handsome Jack walking around and talking to others by using Rhys like a meatsuit. Rhys finally kills him by cutting out and crushing his cybernetic implants in Episode 5.
• Evil Mentor: He serves as this to Rhys, often trying to make him surrender more control while also making him a tougher, more adaptable individual. In Episode 4, he even states that his purpose as an AI is to find a worthy successor to Hyperion, and Rhys is a promising candidate.
• Faux Affably Evil: At first, Handsome Jack seems friendlier and much less malevolent than he was in Borderlands 2, and even shows a tiny degree of self-reflection. He also seems to have no hard feelings towards Athena, even if he's aware that she'd kill Rhys as soon as she learned about him. But it's only surface deep - his composure absolutely shatters when things don't go his way, just as easily as it did before.
• Flipping the Bird: If Rhys continues scanning mushrooms, he will appear behind Vaughn, and pulling this trope off with both hands.
• For the Evulz: If you don't tell Fiona and Sasha about him, and Rhys doesn't take control of Hyperion, he wants to use Rhys' body to strangle Fiona, simply because he finds the idea of Fiona being suddenly, senselessly and brutally murdered by "Rhys" hilarious.
• Grand Theft Me:
  • Declares in no uncertain terms he desires to do this to Rhys, particularly if Rhys hasn't been very nice to Jack.
  • In Episode 4, should Rhys refuse to accept Jack's offer, Jack simply takes control of him, has him tell Fiona that everything's fine and jacks himself into Helios.
• Guardian Entity: Acts as one off and on. He either can't or doesn't want to appear all that often, usually only when Rhys suffers some kind of head trauma, but when he's around, he usually gets quite involved, whether it be making sarcastic jokes or actually saving Rhys and Vaughn's lives from Vasquez. He can also internally upgrade Rhys's cybernetics, and even allow him to control robotics and machinery telepathically.
• Hand Puppet: In Episode 2 Jack can do this to imitate Vaughn's, erm, weiner and get Rhys' attention since Rhys has to be ignoring him for this to happen.
• The Heavy: He ends up playing a focal role in Tales, as with past installments in the franchise; it's with his help that Rhys and Fiona secure Gortys, make it to Hyperion, and ultimately re-take Helios. Him being in Rhys' head is also why most of Hyperion is after him in such force.
• Heel Realization: Rhys can give him several over the course of the game. He still tries to kill you in Episode 5, so it was either an act, or he decided that yes, he's an evil bastard, and he's going to keep being one.
• Heroic Sacrifice: A fittingly twisted example. In Episode 5, this is how he describes his last-ditch Taking You with Me attempt against Rhys. He's really not fooling anybody.
• Hypocrite: He is creeped out by Vasquez's desire to take a body part of Rhys as a trophy (either his skin to make a wallet or his hair to make a toupee), yet he keeps Tassiter's goatee as a trophy and enjoys wearing it in order to mock Tassiter.
• Ignored Epiphany: After finding out what happened to Angel, he admits that he can understand why she'd choose to die over staying with him. That doesn't stop him from trying to kill Rhys in Episode 5.
• Insane Troll Logic: So what if people died because of his actions? Everyone's gotta go some time, right? People die every day. THAT'S WHAT PEOPLE DO! (He's not wrong; it is Pandora. He's wrong in thinking it justifies everything he did, though.)
• Intangible Man: So, fun fact. In a video game, it takes a lot of resources to prevent characters passing through each other. Jack abuses his intangibility to torment Rhys in several inventive ways after figuring out that strangling him is out of the picture.
• Ironic Hell: In a myriad of ways. The man who hid behind his army and loads of defenses loses the ability to kill people with even his bare hands (something he really enjoyed). The same guy who wanted to be adored, respected, and feared by everyone winds up in the head of a Loony Fan who modeled his appearance after him, plastered posters of his image around his office, and looks back fondly on an occasion where he spat on him; Jack is understandably not very flattered. There's also the fact that he owes his existence to Nakayama, a guy he had immense contempt for when he remembered he existed at all.
• Jerk with a Heart of Jerk: Despite some slightly softer moments, this Jack does not take disagreement well at all. Rhys not listening to him after one of his more friendly, loyal moments sends him into his usual murderous rage instantly. Examples include refusing to work with him in Episode 3 or rejecting his offer of Presidency of Hyperion. Rhys is pretty abrupt in his refusal, but Jack's rage is way out of any reasonable proportion. The biggest example is his last act in existence; trying to murder Rhys after attempting to gain his sympathy one last time.
• Laughably Evil: One thing the A.I. didn't change was his iconic humor. He's still a master of the Black Comedy and comes out with some brilliant lines and petty, childish, vain moments you can't help but laugh at. He also takes full advantage of the fact that he's a hologram, one that only Rhys can see and hear, no less.
  Jack: (watching Rhys trying to remove Vasquez's face from a Psycho) Oh-ho, that is just the grossest thing I've ever seen! [...] Yeah that's right, peel off that face like a serial killer! You're sick.
• Leaning on the Fourth Wall: During your conversation with him on the caravan in Episode 3, he'll ask what the hell the "Handsome Jack will remember that." message is.
• Like a Son to Me: He even jokingly calls Rhys his son if he accepts taking control of Hyperion alongside Jack.
• Long-Dead Badass: Once the most powerful and feared man on Pandora and half the galaxy, he's now resigned to being little more than a virtual ghost tagging along with Rhys. Until Episode 4, but even then he's not really 'alive' again.
• Never My Fault:
  • Averted. Once he accepts that he's dead and finds out how he died, he comes to the realization that he perished because his pride prevented him from working "with the people (he) didn't trust," and that if he had "thrown stock options at the Vault Hunters instead of bullets", he'd have actually succeeded.
  • Double Subverted in Episode 5. Calling him out on the situation being his fault sees him agree...and then act exactly the same as before.
• Nice Job Fixing It, Villain: The cyborg armor he intended to implant in Rhys in order to take full control over him is taken by Loader Bot so he could make a new body to begin his search for his missing friends and resurrect Gortys.
• The Nicknamer: He fondly recalls that he used to call Hugo Vasquez "Wallethead", after his habit of sticking money to Vasquez's then-new, atrocious hair implants. He's also fond of calling Rhys "Dum-dum" or "Cupcake".
• The Nothing After Death: As an A.I he's painfully aware that this is what's waiting for him once he bites it, and tries to plead with Rhys to spare him in Episode 5 to avoid this fate. Whether he meets it or not is up to player choice.
• "Not So Different" Remark:
  • For all his hatred of Vault Hunters, Marcus notes that Jack is by definition a Vault Hunter in the intro of Episode 1, albeit one with "unsporting" means.
  • When he tries to butter up to Rhys in Episode 3, he describes the both of them as "two unstoppable, intelligent guys with great hair."
  • In a broader sense, he says that it's a little tricky telling your friends from your foes on a planet like Pandora, which is true.
  • Rhys fully expects Jack to give a speech like this during their final confrontation, and tells him to get it over with, only for Jack to gleefully subvert the trope. Not only does he think the two of them are different, he thinks Rhys is worse. After all, Rhys just managed to kill more people at once than Jack managed to over the course of his entire life, and he did it all to put down one hated enemy.
• Oh, Crap!: He has an incredibly cathartic one when after boasting that he'd just wait in Rhys' cybernetics until he was forgotten and then kill him when he least expected it, Rhys starts using a shard of Jacks office window to carve out his disc drive. It spirals into a full blown Villainous Breakdown as he realizes that since Rhys tore off his cybernetic arm, Jack has no way of stopping him.
• Percussive Maintenance: Rhys getting hit on the head is Jack's on/off switch.
• Pet the Dog:
  • Surprisingly. He's actually quite concerned about Rhys at times, and looks horrified when Vasquez beats up Rhys for fun in Episode 2. That said, it's probably self-interest - Rhys is currently serving as his Soul Jar.
  • Jack's a grade A narcissist but even he is impressed that Vaughn is able to keep his body in shape.
  • His Jack-apedia entry on Athena is surprisingly respectful and he excitedly outs Dr. Cassius as a former Atlas employee to her because he knows that she'd very much enjoy murdering the guy.
  • Shows genuine affection for both his deceased girlfriend and daughter. If you know all the details it's less nice than it sounds, but it's still a bit nice.
  • Depending on Rhys' actions, he sometimes gives pretty earnest compliments, and eventually calls him the only capable successor to Hyperion.
  • If the player chose Rhys to tell Jack to "just spit out" the info of the Gortys beacon, you'll get this heartwarming feedback.
    Rhys: You know, I know you love hearing yourself yammer on, but just spit it out, willya?
    Jack: Whoa-whoa-whoa... Do I seriously talk too much? Rhys? I'm sorry, man. No one's ever told me the truth before. Thank you. Thanks for your honesty. I really appreciate it, man.
    Rhys: You're welcome?
• Rapid-Fire "No!": When Rhys tells him the real Handsome Jack is dead.
• Revenge Before Reason: During their final confrontation in Episode 5, Jack attempts to kill Rhys even though he knows that this will result in his own death. Moments later, Rhys gets the upper hand and finds a way to "kill" Jack; suddenly, Jack is on his knees terrified at the idea of dying.
• Sadist: Just like the original. Here, he tends to make a lot of twisted jokes about killing people, and treats it like it's a favorite past time of his.
• Screw This, I'm Outta Here: Retreats into Rhys during the climax of Episode 3, because the abilities and upgrades he'd usually bestow would have no real effect on Vallory and her forces.
• Spanner in the Works: His entire discovery is a spanner that results to Rhys' misery as Vasquez, Yvette and the rest of Hyperion hunt him down to rip the AI duplicate out of his head.
• Split-Personality Takeover: Jack has minor control over Rhys' body and if Rhys chooses to trust Jack at the end of Episode 2, then Jack can sporadically control his body. By the end of the fourth episode, Jack's power over Rhys has increases and can even force Rhys to kill himself.
• Suspiciously Specific Denial: His Jack-apedia entry for one particular mushroom includes its correct scientific name. He claims he only knows what it is because it's an active ingredient in the ENGORGE! penis enlargement drug, which he's totally never used or even heard of for that matter.
• The Svengali: His mentoring of Rhys is really him just trying to convince Rhys to do what Jack wants, which is mostly handing Jack more power, either over Rhys' body, or Helios itself. Of course, Jack doesn't see it that way. If you were buddies with him the whole time, he takes Rhys's unwillingness to become the very first Robo-Jack pretty hard, as if he doesn't understand how anyone could not want to be killed and have a robotic endoskeleton shoved into their corpse for Jack's AI to inhabit.
• Taking You with Me: In the final episode, after jacking back into Rhys' mind, he makes Rhys strangle himself with his own arm, forcing Rhys to pry the arm off.
• Techno Wizard: Just like his former self, Jack's AI copy is a master of machines and technology, able to take over an entire Atlas Facility with a few hand movements. This especially comes in handy at Helios, which he mostly designed and programmed personally.
• Token Evil Teammate: The main antagonist of Borderlands 2 and still one of the nastiest villains in franchise history, he fits the bill despite everyone else being morally questionable at best.
• Took a Level in Kindness: Played With. While he is much more benevolent to Rhys, even having calm discussions with him and encouraging him as he progresses (albeit with a healthy dose of trolling), it becomes evident in Episode 4 that this version of him was programmed before Angel's death and does not know it occurred, so he's yet to develop the extremes of rage he showed after that point. All of this said, he's still an insane murderous douchebag, as is noted by basically every last one of the protagonists at one point or another. However, Episode 5 reveals that all of it was likely a ruse and once he's out of Rhys' head he has no problems with having him killed, either out of rage or as his own idea of a "reward".
• Villainous Breakdown:
  • If Rhys refuses his offer to rule Hyperion, Jack completely loses it, dispensing with all niceties and just straight-up hijacking Rhys' body before raging at him as Helios' new AI.
  • In his final moments, he begs Rhys not to tear out his cybernetics, stating that he doesn't want to go back to being nothing.
• Villain Has a Point: He's adamant that Rhys keeps the AI a secret because Athena will kill him on the spot and Fiona and Sasha will sever all ties to him. If Rhys does tell Fiona and Sasha that he has an AI of Handsome Jack then they proceed to lose all respect for him. Good intentions or not, Handsome Jack is not someone they want back.
• Virtual Ghost: He's an AI with an exact copy of Jack's mind, personality, and memories created by Professor Nakayama as a way for Jack to live on if he ever died, and was stored inside Nakayama's ID chip (after all, Nakayama was planning on cloning Jack when he met his embarrassing demise, can't have the body without the mind). He can apparently see and feel independently of Rhys, which makes him a bit of a fuzzy example. It took him a rather long time to accept that he isn't the real flesh-and-blood Jack, and since he was programmed (cut dialog suggests he's more of a digital snapshot of Jack's neural patterns that Nakayama took and plugged into the AI he'd been working on) shortly before 2, he also lacks the real Jack's memories of that game's later events.
• Walking Spoiler: Doesn't appear until the very end of Episode 1, and his appearance is somewhat of a twist.
• We Can Rule Together: At the end of Episode 4, Jack offers Rhys the chance to take over Hyperion with him by jacking himself into Helios. If Rhys refuses, Jack angrily takes over his body and does it anyway. Either way, he wasn't planning on letting Rhys live for long]].
• Wiki Vandal: When Jack is active, the scan function of Rhys's ECHO-eye can't connect to the Hyperion database for analysis. Jack is forced to provide the information himself via the "Jack-apedia". Of course, he doesn't know any of the information, so it's usually just snarky remarks, rating the hotness of Rhys's party members, praise for himself, etc. Pretty much what you'd expect from Jack.
• Your Mom: Should Rhys choose to trust him at the end of episode 2, but refuse an alliance in Episode 3, he'll try to send him a dream of him "doing someone that looks just like (his) mom".

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