( TRJ ) APP
Feb. 19th, 2022 01:47 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
dopplemanOOC Info
Player: Xel
Contact:![[plurk.com profile]](https://plurk.com/favicon.ico)
piasora / tevinter#3439
Age Confirmation: it's crazy how over 18 i am tbh
Other Characters: n/a
IC Info
Character: Timothy Lawrence (aka "Jack")
Canon: Borderlands
Canon Point: BL3, just before the start of the Handsome Jackpot DLC.
Age: 34 (approximate)
History: Wiki entry here but it's pretty sparse, so here's a breakdown of his actual history:
CRAU: n/a
About: marie kondo ilovemess.gif
On a mission to the very heart of Claptrap's psyche, Claptrap's Consciousness calls Timothy a "man-inside-a-man." Yeah, the joke writes itself. But especially considering the source, it's pretty poignant, too. Timothy is the invertebrate inside Jack's nacreous shell, vulnerable meat calcifying around a foreign irritant. Timothy is an "extreme method actor" (Claptrap again) and Jack is the role of a lifetime, literally, because he was hired to be Jack and now being Jack has forcibly overwritten anything else Timothy might've been before he started to be Jack. Timothy is stuck.
The good(?) news: Tim's really good at tolerating all kinds of distress, ill-treatment, and overall bullshit. Like, really good. Like... pathologically good. One might even call it earliest coping mechanism good. It's the reason he's been known to ghost people who show him real compassion, since his idea of love involves being treated just a little bit like crap sometimes. It's how shy, meek, dweeby Timothy melded into the role of brash, confident, handsome Jack with surprising ease.
It's how his upset conscience could so easily disappear into the background hum of Jack's escalating violence, allowing him to carry on in his employ for years. The contempt he shows for Jack's depravity is toothless and his self-reproach for participating in it is decidedly anemic. Tim is often too comfortable in his resignation, ever-ready to pass the buck back to Jack with a quick "I don't really have a choice" or "look, I just work here." Years of pushing through the pain have made him pessimistic and lonesome and susceptible to occasional surges of malice that he is far too eager to blame on Jack's DNA.
So yeah, it's probably true that he used to be nicer. But there's also a kindness present in Timothy that Jack has never shown. He is generally good-natured and unpretentious, with a soft spot for animals and a healthy appreciation for beauty. He's quite open in the way he speaks about himself, often to the point of oversharing, because he wants so badly to be seen for who he is. He's not exactly moral, but he has morals—and while they're definitely flexible, the basic gist is "you shouldn't screw the people who help you."
Unfortunately, Tim's job was always to obey Jack, to emulate Jack, to look and move and speak and think like Jack, and to just kind of... deal with all the ways you'd expect that to mess somebody up. In short: Tim may have been released from Jack's service at this point, but he's far from free. Having spent the majority of his adult life as someone else, the face Tim sees when he looks in the mirror simultaneously is and isn't his own. As time continues to pass, he clings to whatever scraps of authentic self he can—scrawls it on the walls if he has to. It's unfortunate that his concept of self now revolves more around "not being Jack" than "being Timothy," but Timothy Lawrence has been dead on paper for almost a decade.
And if he's honest with himself, take away Jack as a frame of reference and the reality is Timothy doesn't totally know who he is anymore. Not yet, anyway.
Skills and Abilities:
Innate/acquired skills include: experience with a wide variety of firearms/artillery, high adaptability to hazardous and/or frankly insane situations, guerrilla-style combat tactics (includes low gravity environments), survival skills, heist planning, method acting/imitation (Handsome Jack; highly adept), method acting/imitation (general; atrophied).
Aside from those, Tim's got a couple gadget-based bells and whistles, basically all of which he either won't have or can't use: he can summon semi-holographic copies of himself via a digital wristband, has a cybernetic hand capable of controlling an entire space station, and ostensibly has his own copy of Jack's pocket watch, which would allow him to deploy stealth/cloaking tech for limited periods of time.
Finally, this is headcanon, but I think Tim's mask could contain tech that is assistive as well as cosmetic. Jack completely lost an eye when his face was branded, but both eyes appear intact and functional with the mask on. It's a reasonable assumption that Tim was given the same or similar treatment, so I have tended to infer that there's some kind of feature to Tim's mask that may be compensating for any loss of sight that occurred when his face was branded to match. While I liken this very loosely to Rhys's ECHO-eye technology, there's nothing to suggest his vision is enhanced beyond normal.
Why does your character need to be redeemed?
You know that old chestnut about evil, and how the only thing necessary for its triumph is for good men to do nothing? Well... Timothy Lawrence is that good man. Make no mistake, Tim's case is a complicated and tragic one: it's not possible to suggest that he's complicit in Jack's villainy without acknowledging that it has never not been under at least a little bit of duress due to the questionable nature of his employment. It's clear he was not fully informed about everything the Doppelganger gig would entail before he signed up. And once he signed up, his old identity was erased; he claims, variously, that he is legally forbidden from telling people his old name and that there's a bomb in his face that might explode if he says it*, so it's not as if there's much recourse for him besides keeping his head down and doing as directed. And even if he were to leave Hyperion's employ, being identical to Jack all the way down to the DNA would seriously restrict his career options, wouldn't it?
Tim's all too happy to tell you as much, too, because he tells himself the same thing all the time. Whenever Jack ordered him to jump, he had no choice but to smash down his terrible acrophobia and ask, "how high, boss?" When Jack hired him to hunt a Vault and put a gun in his hands, he had no choice but to mow down every poor asshole in his way (and occasionally have a fun time doing it). Jack made him betray his conscience to complete the job he was hired to do. Jack made him stay after the job was done. Jack made him do it all. It's been seven years since Jack's death and he still needs to believe this enough that he treats it like some sort of affirmation: "It's not YOUR fault."
Thing is, he's not exactly wrong about that... but he's not exactly right, either. That's the heart of it: was Timothy coerced onto the path his life has taken, or are his choices all his own?
The least complex answer I can possibly give is "both." It's both at once, coexistent, concurrent. Tim is stuck with Jack's face, but he didn't have to stick around in his orbit. He could've left when Athena or Aurelia did, sought help, taken any risk at all to distance himself from Jack's numerous ambitions and abuses—but he didn't. Instead he did nothing, or at least nothing but his job, and in doing his job he knowingly supported Jack in causing further harm. Tim watched Jack vent innocent scientists into space and felt horror and disgust, and then did nothing; instead, he picked up his gun and later executed an unarmed soldier just because Jack told him to. Tim helped Jack painfully erase the personhood of an AI with thoughts and desires and feelings of her own and afterward felt haunted by the regret, and then he did nothing; later, he stood by while an entire robot genocide was carried out before his eyes.
Because Tim always chooses the path of least resistance. Other Doppelgangers tried to help the people locked inside the Handsome Jackpot and were savagely murdered for it—mostly by angry mobs. (Some by Timothy himself. He is not convincing when he claims it was self-defense.) Time and time again, Tim has proven himself to be someone who values the quickest, easiest route to self-preservation. Because hey, it might hurt people around him who don't deserve to be hurt, but it works. It might cause a part of his soul to corrode away over time, but it's a super effective way to survive.
I wanted to bring him in prior to the start of the Handsome Jackpot DLC because the main storyline culminates with Timothy attempting to commit one selfless act and succeeding at committing another. With the station hurtling toward a neighboring black hole and Tim unable to reach the controls to stop it, he urges the Vault Hunters to run to their ship and and escape while they still can. When they refuse to abandon him, he screws up the courage to sever his own hand so it can be used to halt their trajectory. This is a really important turning point for him, but I think the mere arrival of Moxxi and her Vault Hunters gave him the sliver of renewed hope he needed to ultimately get there. Coming from his current canon point, Tim has no such hope.
*One final note about The Face Bomb: there is no actual concrete evidence given in canon that the bomb is a real thing that exists. Timothy himself seems uncertain, saying things like "pretty sure there's a bomb" or "might explode." By BL3, he's repurposed this as an explanation for why he hasn't attempted to escape. It really seems to have a powerful psychological hold over him, irrespective of the fact that its existence is never explicitly confirmed by anyone else. Not his surgeon. Not Jack. Not anyone. Not once. Point being... I veeeery much want to use this for Tim's arc in-game. He'll be concerned enough to ask about it at some point and I think the revelation that there was never any bomb at all will be a MAJOR catalyzing event for him. I love and want this because it exemplifies in such a perfect little nutshell exactly why Tim is here—he sold everything he is to a man he could've walked away from at any time, and he would've realized that if only he'd bothered to question it, but instead he didn't even try. I think he needs to recognize that before he can genuinely start owning the part of him that served as one of Jack's enablers. It'll be a catastrophe and I can't wait. 🙏
Charges:
Pick and Choose:
– What would push your character to "act out" on the ship?
So here's the thing: for all intents and purposes, Timothy just came from prison. The only difference is that this prison is way calmer, way safer, and hugely improved in terms of overall living conditions. Tim has spent the last seven years in a near-perpetual state of fight-or-flight, and compared to that, the Peregrine is a vacation. What I'm saying is... Tim probably won't want to go home. If he thinks it's the only way to remain comfortable, that might mean he'll deliberately try to seek out ways of sabotaging his own progress toward release.
Of course, it's also possible that he won't have to try. Tim has a lot of trauma—10 years' worth, give or take—and all of it has gone unprocessed because he's never been safe long enough to address it. This is going to be a sudden and radical shift in environment for him and it could get messy.
While he probably won't present much of an overt danger to wardens or other inmates, he is absolutely willing to defend himself if he feels threatened and rather problematically tends to blame his more aggressive impulses on his "Handsome Jack" conditioning. However, his natural inclination is to "fawn" or "flee" rather than fight, so he's most likely to behave badly in situations where he's following the lead/backing up the bad behavior of a primary instigator. Old habits.
Graduation:
Although he doesn't know it, Timothy is about to embark on the very last leg of his imprisonment in the Jackpot once he returns to his world, and it will be a painful act of sacrifice that ultimately secures his freedom. And from there, well, that's the question, isn't it? We know his surgeries are irreversible, and at this point in his life Tim most likely knows it too. As long as people remember Handsome Jack, to some degree or another, for better or worse, he's going to get treated like him. Morality in the Borderlands has always skewed strongly toward self-interest and survival; if Tim just said "screw it" and hauled ass to a corner of space where no one would recognize him, it's not like anyone could really fault him for it.
But like it or not, Tim is wrapped up in Jack's legacy. He contributed to it, is himself part of it, and has become its unwitting sole beneficiary. If he chooses not to run and hide, he stands to catch a lot of blame for Jack's actions—only a fraction of which had anything to do with him personally. Unfair? Absolutely, but that's nothing new. The difference is now, for the first time, he has the agency and responsibility to choose whether and how he wants to deal with it. For the first time, he has the opportunity to prove rather than merely protest that he is more than his face. He could fall in with Moxxi (super easy), dust off his skills as a Vault Hunter (bit more challenging)... hell, maybe eventually he could even set aside his misplaced resentment toward Lilith enough to help carry on her important work (hard).
The point is that he gets to decide for himself what kind of person Timothy Lawrence is going to be. Good might be stretching it a little—it just be like that in the Borderlands—but "better than Jack" is the next best thing, and it probably matters more.
Sample: TDM; Timothy & Rhys
Player: Xel
Contact:
Age Confirmation: it's crazy how over 18 i am tbh
Other Characters: n/a
IC Info
Character: Timothy Lawrence (aka "Jack")
Canon: Borderlands
Canon Point: BL3, just before the start of the Handsome Jackpot DLC.
Age: 34 (approximate)
History: Wiki entry here but it's pretty sparse, so here's a breakdown of his actual history:
- Born Timothy Lawrence on an unknown planet. Nothing is known about his father, but we are told he lived with his mom. She was seemingly not fond of him and he has remained somewhat in denial about this fact.
- At some point in his youth Timothy attends college (ostensibly for theatre/performing arts, as he mentions being a trained actor) and it leaves him with a colossal mountain of student loan debt. His professors talk him into working for one of the big corporations that rule the galaxy, and eventually he accepts a gig to act as a body double for Jack, a Hyperion programmer.
- Tim is subjected to extensive surgeries to make him look and sound like Jack. He apparently had Jack's DNA grafted into his body as well. While initially led to believe this role would only last a few years, he comes to learn after the fact that these changes are going to be long-term, if not permanent. "Timothy Lawrence" is considered legally dead (to his mother's apparent joy and relief) and he is contractually forbidden to share his real name.
- After a brief period of recovery and test-acting, he gets sent to Helios Station at Jack's request. Along with Jack's other Vault Hunters, Timothy goes on to save Elpis from the Lost Legion incursion. During this period, Jack reveals himself to be increasingly malevolent and unstable and Tim becomes increasingly disgusted with his employer's behavior.
- Important: Toward the end of the story, Tim is presented with a choice: obey Jack's order to shoot an enemy soldier who is trying to surrender (he apologizes profusely to the dead guy) or refuse (he angrily retorts "I'm not you, Jack."). This version of Tim took the shot.
- Jack and his team defeat the Lost Legion and open the Vault on Elpis. Believing Jack is too dangerous to be allowed access to the Vault's treasure, Lilith destroys the artifact and permanently brands Jack's face in the process.
- Sometime after he recovers from his injuries, Jack finds a massive data cache containing top-secret Hyperion plans and information hidden inside a CL4P-TP unit. Timothy is sent inside a rendering of Claptrap's psyche to retrieve the data, which Jack then uses to terminate the entire CL4P-TP line in one fell swoop. Although Tim repeatedly states that he hates Claptrap, finds him incredibly annoying, and hopes he dies, he observes that this is just about the darkest thing Jack's done to date.
- Tim's face is branded to match Jack's.
- A few years pass. During this time, the jobs Tim does as Handsome Jack's body double are varied and numerous. Eventually, as a reward for his good work, Jack puts Timothy in charge of the Handsome Jackpot, a luxury casino (and secret mobile weapons platform). His right hand is replaced with a cybernetic version that acts as a key to the station. Unbeknownst to anyone but Jack, the casino was rigged to seal itself in the event of his death—so when Jack is killed during his attempt to plunder the Vault on Pandora, the Jackpot enters lockdown, leaving thousands trapped inside.
- Over the next seven years, the situation inside the Handsome Jackpot deteriorates: starvation and squalor are rampant; former guests and workers form violent gangs and kill one another for food, territory, weapons, and sometimes just for kicks. One by one, other Jack Doppelgangers are picked off by angry mobs who blame Jack for their predicament until Timothy is the only one left. Since then, Tim has been perpetually on the run from the aforementioned mobs as well as a prominent gang leader named Pretty Boy, who needs Tim's cybernetic hand to gain full control over the casino and its riches and does not intend to let the rest of Tim stay attached to it.
- As Tim arrives in-game, the last thing he remembers is being caught in yet another firefight. He basically figures he was gunned down at last by Pretty Boy's thugs.
CRAU: n/a
About: marie kondo ilovemess.gif
On a mission to the very heart of Claptrap's psyche, Claptrap's Consciousness calls Timothy a "man-inside-a-man." Yeah, the joke writes itself. But especially considering the source, it's pretty poignant, too. Timothy is the invertebrate inside Jack's nacreous shell, vulnerable meat calcifying around a foreign irritant. Timothy is an "extreme method actor" (Claptrap again) and Jack is the role of a lifetime, literally, because he was hired to be Jack and now being Jack has forcibly overwritten anything else Timothy might've been before he started to be Jack. Timothy is stuck.
The good(?) news: Tim's really good at tolerating all kinds of distress, ill-treatment, and overall bullshit. Like, really good. Like... pathologically good. One might even call it earliest coping mechanism good. It's the reason he's been known to ghost people who show him real compassion, since his idea of love involves being treated just a little bit like crap sometimes. It's how shy, meek, dweeby Timothy melded into the role of brash, confident, handsome Jack with surprising ease.
It's how his upset conscience could so easily disappear into the background hum of Jack's escalating violence, allowing him to carry on in his employ for years. The contempt he shows for Jack's depravity is toothless and his self-reproach for participating in it is decidedly anemic. Tim is often too comfortable in his resignation, ever-ready to pass the buck back to Jack with a quick "I don't really have a choice" or "look, I just work here." Years of pushing through the pain have made him pessimistic and lonesome and susceptible to occasional surges of malice that he is far too eager to blame on Jack's DNA.
So yeah, it's probably true that he used to be nicer. But there's also a kindness present in Timothy that Jack has never shown. He is generally good-natured and unpretentious, with a soft spot for animals and a healthy appreciation for beauty. He's quite open in the way he speaks about himself, often to the point of oversharing, because he wants so badly to be seen for who he is. He's not exactly moral, but he has morals—and while they're definitely flexible, the basic gist is "you shouldn't screw the people who help you."
Unfortunately, Tim's job was always to obey Jack, to emulate Jack, to look and move and speak and think like Jack, and to just kind of... deal with all the ways you'd expect that to mess somebody up. In short: Tim may have been released from Jack's service at this point, but he's far from free. Having spent the majority of his adult life as someone else, the face Tim sees when he looks in the mirror simultaneously is and isn't his own. As time continues to pass, he clings to whatever scraps of authentic self he can—scrawls it on the walls if he has to. It's unfortunate that his concept of self now revolves more around "not being Jack" than "being Timothy," but Timothy Lawrence has been dead on paper for almost a decade.
And if he's honest with himself, take away Jack as a frame of reference and the reality is Timothy doesn't totally know who he is anymore. Not yet, anyway.
Skills and Abilities:
Innate/acquired skills include: experience with a wide variety of firearms/artillery, high adaptability to hazardous and/or frankly insane situations, guerrilla-style combat tactics (includes low gravity environments), survival skills, heist planning, method acting/imitation (Handsome Jack; highly adept), method acting/imitation (general; atrophied).
Aside from those, Tim's got a couple gadget-based bells and whistles, basically all of which he either won't have or can't use: he can summon semi-holographic copies of himself via a digital wristband, has a cybernetic hand capable of controlling an entire space station, and ostensibly has his own copy of Jack's pocket watch, which would allow him to deploy stealth/cloaking tech for limited periods of time.
Finally, this is headcanon, but I think Tim's mask could contain tech that is assistive as well as cosmetic. Jack completely lost an eye when his face was branded, but both eyes appear intact and functional with the mask on. It's a reasonable assumption that Tim was given the same or similar treatment, so I have tended to infer that there's some kind of feature to Tim's mask that may be compensating for any loss of sight that occurred when his face was branded to match. While I liken this very loosely to Rhys's ECHO-eye technology, there's nothing to suggest his vision is enhanced beyond normal.
Why does your character need to be redeemed?
You know that old chestnut about evil, and how the only thing necessary for its triumph is for good men to do nothing? Well... Timothy Lawrence is that good man. Make no mistake, Tim's case is a complicated and tragic one: it's not possible to suggest that he's complicit in Jack's villainy without acknowledging that it has never not been under at least a little bit of duress due to the questionable nature of his employment. It's clear he was not fully informed about everything the Doppelganger gig would entail before he signed up. And once he signed up, his old identity was erased; he claims, variously, that he is legally forbidden from telling people his old name and that there's a bomb in his face that might explode if he says it*, so it's not as if there's much recourse for him besides keeping his head down and doing as directed. And even if he were to leave Hyperion's employ, being identical to Jack all the way down to the DNA would seriously restrict his career options, wouldn't it?
Tim's all too happy to tell you as much, too, because he tells himself the same thing all the time. Whenever Jack ordered him to jump, he had no choice but to smash down his terrible acrophobia and ask, "how high, boss?" When Jack hired him to hunt a Vault and put a gun in his hands, he had no choice but to mow down every poor asshole in his way (and occasionally have a fun time doing it). Jack made him betray his conscience to complete the job he was hired to do. Jack made him stay after the job was done. Jack made him do it all. It's been seven years since Jack's death and he still needs to believe this enough that he treats it like some sort of affirmation: "It's not YOUR fault."
Thing is, he's not exactly wrong about that... but he's not exactly right, either. That's the heart of it: was Timothy coerced onto the path his life has taken, or are his choices all his own?
The least complex answer I can possibly give is "both." It's both at once, coexistent, concurrent. Tim is stuck with Jack's face, but he didn't have to stick around in his orbit. He could've left when Athena or Aurelia did, sought help, taken any risk at all to distance himself from Jack's numerous ambitions and abuses—but he didn't. Instead he did nothing, or at least nothing but his job, and in doing his job he knowingly supported Jack in causing further harm. Tim watched Jack vent innocent scientists into space and felt horror and disgust, and then did nothing; instead, he picked up his gun and later executed an unarmed soldier just because Jack told him to. Tim helped Jack painfully erase the personhood of an AI with thoughts and desires and feelings of her own and afterward felt haunted by the regret, and then he did nothing; later, he stood by while an entire robot genocide was carried out before his eyes.
Because Tim always chooses the path of least resistance. Other Doppelgangers tried to help the people locked inside the Handsome Jackpot and were savagely murdered for it—mostly by angry mobs. (Some by Timothy himself. He is not convincing when he claims it was self-defense.) Time and time again, Tim has proven himself to be someone who values the quickest, easiest route to self-preservation. Because hey, it might hurt people around him who don't deserve to be hurt, but it works. It might cause a part of his soul to corrode away over time, but it's a super effective way to survive.
I wanted to bring him in prior to the start of the Handsome Jackpot DLC because the main storyline culminates with Timothy attempting to commit one selfless act and succeeding at committing another. With the station hurtling toward a neighboring black hole and Tim unable to reach the controls to stop it, he urges the Vault Hunters to run to their ship and and escape while they still can. When they refuse to abandon him, he screws up the courage to sever his own hand so it can be used to halt their trajectory. This is a really important turning point for him, but I think the mere arrival of Moxxi and her Vault Hunters gave him the sliver of renewed hope he needed to ultimately get there. Coming from his current canon point, Tim has no such hope.
*One final note about The Face Bomb: there is no actual concrete evidence given in canon that the bomb is a real thing that exists. Timothy himself seems uncertain, saying things like "pretty sure there's a bomb" or "might explode." By BL3, he's repurposed this as an explanation for why he hasn't attempted to escape. It really seems to have a powerful psychological hold over him, irrespective of the fact that its existence is never explicitly confirmed by anyone else. Not his surgeon. Not Jack. Not anyone. Not once. Point being... I veeeery much want to use this for Tim's arc in-game. He'll be concerned enough to ask about it at some point and I think the revelation that there was never any bomb at all will be a MAJOR catalyzing event for him. I love and want this because it exemplifies in such a perfect little nutshell exactly why Tim is here—he sold everything he is to a man he could've walked away from at any time, and he would've realized that if only he'd bothered to question it, but instead he didn't even try. I think he needs to recognize that before he can genuinely start owning the part of him that served as one of Jack's enablers. It'll be a catastrophe and I can't wait. 🙏
Charges:
- Attempted murder
- Premeditated murder
- Unpremeditated murder
- Depraved indifference murder
- Unintentional homicide
- Negligent homicide
- Vehicular homicide
- Conspiracy to commit murder
- Contract killing
- War crimes
- Assault/battery
- Arson
- Arms trafficking
- Petty larceny
- Grand larceny
- Aiding and abetting [insert crime here]
- Identity fraud
- Racketeering
Pick and Choose:
– What would push your character to "act out" on the ship?
So here's the thing: for all intents and purposes, Timothy just came from prison. The only difference is that this prison is way calmer, way safer, and hugely improved in terms of overall living conditions. Tim has spent the last seven years in a near-perpetual state of fight-or-flight, and compared to that, the Peregrine is a vacation. What I'm saying is... Tim probably won't want to go home. If he thinks it's the only way to remain comfortable, that might mean he'll deliberately try to seek out ways of sabotaging his own progress toward release.
Of course, it's also possible that he won't have to try. Tim has a lot of trauma—10 years' worth, give or take—and all of it has gone unprocessed because he's never been safe long enough to address it. This is going to be a sudden and radical shift in environment for him and it could get messy.
While he probably won't present much of an overt danger to wardens or other inmates, he is absolutely willing to defend himself if he feels threatened and rather problematically tends to blame his more aggressive impulses on his "Handsome Jack" conditioning. However, his natural inclination is to "fawn" or "flee" rather than fight, so he's most likely to behave badly in situations where he's following the lead/backing up the bad behavior of a primary instigator. Old habits.
Graduation:
Although he doesn't know it, Timothy is about to embark on the very last leg of his imprisonment in the Jackpot once he returns to his world, and it will be a painful act of sacrifice that ultimately secures his freedom. And from there, well, that's the question, isn't it? We know his surgeries are irreversible, and at this point in his life Tim most likely knows it too. As long as people remember Handsome Jack, to some degree or another, for better or worse, he's going to get treated like him. Morality in the Borderlands has always skewed strongly toward self-interest and survival; if Tim just said "screw it" and hauled ass to a corner of space where no one would recognize him, it's not like anyone could really fault him for it.
But like it or not, Tim is wrapped up in Jack's legacy. He contributed to it, is himself part of it, and has become its unwitting sole beneficiary. If he chooses not to run and hide, he stands to catch a lot of blame for Jack's actions—only a fraction of which had anything to do with him personally. Unfair? Absolutely, but that's nothing new. The difference is now, for the first time, he has the agency and responsibility to choose whether and how he wants to deal with it. For the first time, he has the opportunity to prove rather than merely protest that he is more than his face. He could fall in with Moxxi (super easy), dust off his skills as a Vault Hunter (bit more challenging)... hell, maybe eventually he could even set aside his misplaced resentment toward Lilith enough to help carry on her important work (hard).
The point is that he gets to decide for himself what kind of person Timothy Lawrence is going to be. Good might be stretching it a little—it just be like that in the Borderlands—but "better than Jack" is the next best thing, and it probably matters more.
Sample: TDM; Timothy & Rhys
