Captain Borges

We move to Jupiter’s Legacy episode four to find a new character from the comics. In All the Devils Are Here, in the flashback part, the small group reunited by Sheldon Sampson finds the captain he’s seen in his visions: Captain Borges, portrayed by Conrad Coates. His role in the series is pretty much the same he has in the comics, but while in the final episode we see he stays on board of the ship while the others explore the island, in the comics his fate is left quite ambiguous. Maybe his story will be solved in the upcoming Vol. 3, but we can write something of what we know about him so far in the meanwhile. Let’s take a look.

Not much is known about Captain Borges, not even his first name. He was most likely born somewhere in Spain, near the end of the XIX Century, and he was a professional sailor. With time, he had enough experience, skills and resources to command his own ship. As a fisherman, he and his crew worked always in the same routes, specializing in the Atlantic Ocean, near the African coast. Getting older, he came to know those waters like the back of his hand, and believed he knew everything there was to know about them… until a bunch of weird Americans came looking for him. It was October, 1932, and Borges and his crew were anchored in Morocco. One of his men came to him saying that a crazy American was looking for a ship to take him and his friends out into open sea, and they wanted to speak with him. Captain Borges agreed to meet them, and he found in Sheldon Sampson, the group’s leader, an absolutely crazy, yet somehow fascinating young man. Sampson insisted that there was an island six hundred miles west of Cape Verde, right where Borges knew, as he had been traveling those waters his entire life, that there was nothing else but water. Yet, Sampson wanted to go there: Borges wasn’t one to refuse good money for a job, but he didn’t like to trick people either, and he tried to convince Sampson to desist.

As Sampson proved to be impervious to good sense, Borges asked his companions what they thought about it, and he was surprised in the answers: Fitz Fleton believed there was an island there just because Sheldon said it, Grace Kennedy trusted what Sheldon had seen in his dreams, George Hutchence declared himself perfectly comfortable with the craziness of the whole situation, and Walter Sampson simply remarked that there was no way to make his brother change his mind on anything. Only Richie Conrad stayed silent, but he was committed as the rest: facing this kind of faith, or maybe too drunk to continue the conversation, even Captain Borges was convinced, and agreed to take the group where they wanted to. Much to his surprise, when they arrived there, there was indeed an island, a huge one he had never seen before, one that he could bet his life wasn’t there the previous times he had visited those waters. As his ship approached the mysterious island, Borges came to see Sampson as some sort of a prophet, and asked him if he and his crewmen were supposed to be there as well. Sheldon told him that the island never made mistake, and that if they were there as well, there was a reason for it as well. As the entire group explored the island, they were transported to an other dimension, where alien creatures bestowed them with incredible powers. If the Americans came back home as the fabled Union of Justice, though, what happened of Captain Borges and his crew is still a mystery…

Captain Borges is a man of the sea, he’s seen much and he knows everything he thinks there is to know… but his facts are proven wrong by a faith he never believed to be possible, shacking his certainties. A proficient ship captain, Borges is about to experience a whole new level of existence, provided that he can make it out alive.