A to Z Challenge: Jack Baker and Janice Em

Jack Baker

A couple of characters never shown on TV because they were part of the Sentinels books and comics.  Jack Baker was a hotshot young ensign who joined up with the SDF-3 expedition to Tirol.  He and another young ensign Karen Penn are supposed to be sort of a new generation of Rick Hunter and Lisa Hayes as he's the hotheaded pilot and she's more by-the-book.  Though it's never quite the same.  It's kind of like the new Star Wars movies where it's harder for older fans to care about Rey, Finn, and Poe as much as they cared about Luke, Leia, and Han.

Jack goes down to Tirol to fight the Invid when the SDF-3 first arrives.  He and Karen break away from their unit to find the old scientist Cabell and his young assistant Rem, who provide vital intelligence to help the REF win the day.

From there Jack and Karen wind up going with the Sentinels to free alien planets from Invid control.  On the mostly mechanized world of Haydon IV, Jack leads a team into the planet's core, where they find the intelligence operating the place.

Afterwards, Jack falls under the influence of the evil Invid scientist Tesla.  He becomes Tesla's go-fer basically.  Karen Penn realizes he's acting weird and to snap him out of it kisses him.  That works a little while but it's not until he's badly wounded in the battle on Spheris that Tesla's control of him ends.

He and Karen are caught up in the battle on Periton and Optera, but don't really do anything important.  Afterwards they're on the SDF-3 to go back to Earth when it makes its disastrous fold attempt.  Jack is the first to explore "newspace" but otherwise he and Karen don't do a whole lot.  They eventually join Dana, Marie Crystal, Sean Phillips, and Lunk in a new exploratory company.

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Janice Em

Janice Em is first introduced (chronologically) in the book The Zentraedi Rebellion.  She was made in Tokyo by scientists as an attempt to make an android that could pass as human.  Dr. Emil Lang decides to use her as a spy on the Southern Cross and as part of this she becomes a singing partner with Lynn-Minmei.  When Minmei decides to stow away with the SDF-3, Janice goes with her.

Lang sees Janice later and basically reprograms her so she'll go with the Sentinels to help him keep an eye on things there.  When the Sentinels are stranded on Praxis, she, Jonathan Wolfe, and Vince Grant use some local lifeforms to boost a Veritech into orbit and go back to the SDF-3 for help.

Later on Haydon IV Janice is drawn by the artificial intelligence running the place.  She finally finds out she's not a real girl.  Everyone else finds that out too and it weirds some people out--except for the kid from Tirol named Rem, maybe because he's a clone of the brilliant alien Zor.  I mean how weird is an android when you're a clone, right?  Kind of six of one, half-dozen of the other.

Janice goes with the Peritonian Buryk to help him figure out how to end the curse there.  Later on Optera she uses the shape-changing ability she acquired on Haydon to look like Lynn-Minmei and get close enough to TR Edwards that she can jump into a Genesis Pit with him and kill them both, thus ending the war.

So in the end she's the one who saved the day.  Suck it, normal people.

In The Shadow Chronicles it says she was built by the Haydonites as an "emissary" who's also an unwitting spy.  She has no relationship to Minmei but does sing a couple of Minmei songs.  So there's that.