ex_break829 | timeline

the unauthorized biography

borderlands is a mess. this isn't a full history of the franchise, just jack's part in it, cobbled together from sources ranging from the games, to interviews with writers, to straight up imaginative interpretation aka headcanon (which i mark). feel free to correct me if i've made an egregious error.

CHILDHOOD

Born "John". When he's just a kid, his dad dies, and his mother leaves him to be raised by his grandmother.
(semi-headcanon) They live on a shitty backwater planet in what was basically the equivalent of a Pandoran bandit town.
His grandmother is loving, but abusive: she disciplines him with a buzz axe, and killed his cat because he didn't make his bed.
(semi-headcanon) Somehow gets a decent education despite being poor. Probably books, given his library as an adult.
(headcanon) Determined to get the hell out of hicksville, Jack gets a job with the local weapons company as soon as possible. Maliwan teaches him about the creation of elemental weapons, the power of aesthetics, and corporate culture.
People mostly dismiss him as a weird nerd, but at some point he falls in love, gets married, and has a daughter named Angel.
(headcanon) At this point, Hyperion is just a small, weak company, trying to compete with more established brands by focusing its business on the difficult outer planets. Jack, smelling opportunity offers to sell Maliwan secrets to Hyperion, and moves his family to Pandora.

PANDORA (AND BORDERLANDS1)

Jack starts out as a low-level programmer, spending his time hacking servers to get blackmail information and watching porn.
The space station Helios is under construction, and Jack helps in the design and construction.
Angel manifests as a siren and kills her mother. Jack has her contained in a facility on Pandora, using Hyperion resources.
Jack works his way up to Hyperion upper management, high enough that he has a direct line to the CEO. Mostly his work is overseeing bot-run customer service and managing various other projects around the facility, including designing guns, creature experimentation, and robotics.
At some point he is married a second time, but it isn't a happy marriage. He also kills anyone who mentions his first wife.
Jack hacks and hijacks a Hyperion satellite, and Angel is given access to the ECHO network. She runs surveillance over Pandora for Jack as a kind of ghost in the machine, collecting ECHO recordings and compiling anything interesting.
Jack gets a "hunch" about eridium and the vaults on Pandora and Elpis, whether from his extensive reading, intel from Angel's monitoring, her connection to the Eridians through her siren nature, or some as yet unrevealed source.
The first Borderlands happens. Angel guides the original Vault Hunters (Roland, Lilith, Brick and Mordecai) to the Vault of the Destroyer, where they open it with a Vault Key and kill the monster within.

ELPIS (AND THE PRE-SEQUEL)

Jack takes the remnants of the Destroyer and uses it to build The Eye of Helios, a giant living laser.
Jack dates Moxxi, but is too "clingy" when she just wants casual fun. When she dumps him, he destroys her Holodome with the Eye, forcing her to take up bartending on Pandora's moon, Elpis.
Jack sends a survey team of Hyperion employees to Elpis to investigate rumors of another vault — one that was already discovered by former Dahl employees Colonel Zarpedon and the Lost Legion four years earlier.
Colonel Zarpedon believes any interest will inevitably generate more interest, and has seen first hand the power of the vault and the way it has started to change her men. She decides to overtake Helios and use the Eye to destroy the entire moon rather than risk letting it fall into human hands.
The Pre-Sequel happens! Jack hires a new crop of Vault Hunters to stop Zarpedon, and reclaim Helios, including Athena, Nisha, Wilhelm, Aurelia Hammerlock, a Claptrap he has programmed with fighting capabilities, and his surgically altered body double, Timothy Lawrence.
Along the way Jack discovers he can program LoaderBots to use lethal force, and that he can use supply drop "moonshots" to send them quickly wherever he wants, and best of all how good it feels to inflict violence on others.
Though also recruits the assistance of Moxxi, Lilith and Roland, they see how paranoid and dangerous he is becoming, and after killing Zarpedon, destroy the Eye, saving Elpis from being destroyed but also betraying Jack and earning his ire.
With Zarpedon gone and Helios back in his control, Jack gains access to the Elpis vault, and touches the symbol there, which gives him visions of Pandora's future and the locations of stores of the alien element eridium, as well as knowledge of how to use it to open more vaults, including one on Pandora.
He resolves to use the vault symbol to wake the Warrior, and use it to scourge Pandora clean of its inhabitants.
Lilith shows up and punches the Vault symbol into his face.
With a mask to cover his scar, Jack strangles the Hyperion CEO Tassiter to death, and takes over the company, immediately distributing propaganda that claims he is the Hero of Pandora responsible for destroying two Vault Monsters. He rebrands himself "Handsome Jack".

DICTATORSHIP (AND BORDERLANDS2)

Jack shores up his power as Hyperion CEO by making lucrative decisions and building a cult of personality within his company, killing anyone who he even suspects of disagreeing with him.
Hyperion begins mining eridium, heedless of the injury the excavations do to the environment and nearby Pandoran towns.
Hyperion begins to build military bases, facilities and prisons over the remnants of old Dahl and Atlas facilities on Pandora.
It's discovered that even the excess "slag" that was lost during eridium refinement can mutate creatures into having special abilities or be used in weapon production.
Hyperion destroys the Claptrap line and starts mass-producing combat-capable loader bots.
Construction is started on Opportunity, Jack's vision of a modern city that would resist the chaos of Pandora.
Jack helps his new girlfriend Nisha clear out Lynchwood and sets her up as Sheriff of a law-heavy town.
Having seen the vault of the Warrior in the heart of a volcano, he begins to drill down to it which he had seen at the heart of a dormant volcano. He uses his daughter's powers and a steady supply of eridium to charge the Vault Key faster than would be normal.
Angel monitors Pandora for resistance such as the Crimson Lancers and the city of Sanctuary, and helps Jack stamp it out if it becomes too troublesome.
Fearing competition, Jack deliberately hires Vault Hunters to come to Pandora so that he can have them killed, kicking off the events of Borderlands 2.
Angel convinces some surviving vault hunters such as Maya, Zer0, Axton, Salvador, Krieg, and Gaige, that she wants to help them, and guides them first to Sanctuary, then to a power core that Sanctuary needs.
Jack poisons Wilhelm so that the vault hunters can kill him easily, tricking them into overconfidence and allowing him to use the power core to gain access to Sanctuary's defences and lower their shields. Lilith saves the city by using her siren powers to teleport the whole city out of Helios' moonshot range.
Moxxi and Claptrap guide the new vault hunters through fucking up Opportunity, as part of a quest to infiltrate Jack's most strongly defended bunker.
The bunker holds Angel, who instructs the vault hunters to kill her. Jack, devastated by his daughter's betrayal and her death, kills Roland and captures Lilith, using her to continue charging the Vault Key.
Jack summons the Warrior, but the vault hunters kill first it, and then him.

TALES FROM THE BORDERLANDS

After Jack's death, Hyperion attempts to continue to produce armaments and make money even though the CEO chair is empty. The company creates a memorial museum for Jack and many young employees dream of one day being just like him, and maybe even running the company themselves.
Cue Tales from the Borderlands: one such ambitious Hyperion employee finds himself on Pandora, and plugs an AI replication of Jack's personality into his cybernetics.
The unstable AI coaches/threatens/bribes Rhys through taking him back up to Helios and plugging him into the mainframe in Jack's office, giving him access to the entire space station.
Regardless of Rhys' loyalty up until that point, Jack explains he plans to create a grotesque army of immortal robot skeletons sewn inside human bodies, each with a copy of his AI controlling them. And he's going to start with Rhys.
Understandably, Rhys decides to crash the whole space station to stop AI Jack's monstrous plans.
In the ruins of Opportunity on Pandora, Rhys mutilates himself to remove his cybernetics from his body and either destroys them ("killing" Jack) or keeps them (which still essentially condemns him to the void.)
Meanwhile Athena is saved from Lilith's wrath by a weird ass alien talking about war? That's right, the entire pre-sequel framing device takes place after she's kidnapped in TFTB.
And yet she still goes and helps the gang open the Vault of the Traveller, which Rhys and Fiona step into and disappear?
Jack is super dead by this point so this isn't relevant to his history but seriously what the fuck.
Borderlands 3 when.