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letterbladeI am rather proud of some of this, I must admit. Written at work while bored.
A few notes in advance:
I am rather unusual amongst the fen (or at least the fen I know) in that I don't like Suzie much more than Gwen, and I don't entirely dislike Gwen. Also, I like Owen. More below.
On Suzie: she is smoking hot, I admit, but she is still a backstabbing manipulative bitch. Interesting character, yes, more so if they'd gotten into just what was up with her father, but I do not stand in the 'Jack should've let her live instead of Gwen and put her back on the team' camp. She was playing Torchwood from the start, one long game with no regret. Not a friend who overstepped boundaries out of desperation, like Ianto; not a friend who got caught up in their emotions and acted out of impulse, shortsightedness, or incompetence, like Gwen, Owen, or (her one mis-step in Greeks Bearing Gifts) Tosh. You can trust neither her actions nor her intentions. And you'll notice that Jack shot her without hesitation, and while he's had a gun on Ianto in Cyberwoman and everyone in End of Days, I don't think he was seriously intending to shoot, at least not to kill. I don't think that's a line Jack's going to let her cross and still keep her around.
(Think of the difference between the Doctor's attitude towards most of his companions--at worst it veers towards "funny little humans, must patronize"--and his attitude towards Adam. And I suspect more than a few parallels could be drawn between the Doctor's treatment of his companions and Jack's treatment of Torchwood staff. Funny that.)
On Gwen: here we see the sad fate of a character upon which nobody can quite agree what she's supposed to be. Voice of human reason? Ordinary girl falling apart under alien stress? Inadvertantly abusive and manipulative hysteric? Jack's attempt to find a substitute Rose? Pure Mary Sue? A few of those might have been interesting. But instead she jackrabbits all over the place, and the characterization that I would have gone with--a combination of 2 and 3 under the to-be-broken delusion that she's 1--doesn't work because she's too often written, and thought of by other characters, as 1, 4, or 5. Pick a non-sucky characterization option and make it consistent, and don't overuse her as the viewpoint character simply for cabbagehead exposition purposes, and I personally think we're fine. End result? Gawky girl with a thick Welsh accent (still <3 the accent!) struggling with a scary and alien new world, a job that's killing her (sometimes literally), the way she can't stop hurting the man she loves, newly-discovered bisexuality, and an embarassing crush on her boss. Not bad, IMHO. But then again, I do have a bad habit of attempting to rewrite to be interesting canon characters whom everybody hates. (See: Kaoru Kozue, Roze Thomas, Neelix.)
I also happen to like Owen. Not as a person, but as a character. And as a character, he's my second-favorite of the lot. (To Jack, of course.) *And* he has a fairly coherent and clear character arc, as opposed to an incoherent one, like Gwen, a never-mentioned one, like Jack, a fragmented one, like Ianto, or none at all, like Tosh.
So, that given, How End of Days (and Some of the Rest of Torchwood) Could Have Been Better.
First off, can we say "two-parter?" Ditch Random Shoes, shove Out of Time, Combat, and Captain Jack Harkness all back a slot in the lineup, and take two episodes to do this story at leisure.
Second, can we say "make this the capper to a tightly-plotted first season?" Look at the first season of Doctor Who. There is hardly an extraneous episode there. Five episodes are necessary to fully set up just the single plot point of Rose prying open the TARDIS to save the Doctor in Parting of the Ways. (Unquiet Dead to set up the Rift, Aliens of London/World War III to set up the Slitheen, both to set up Boomtown which in turn sets up the Heart of the TARDIS, and then Father's Day to enable Rose to convince Jackie to help her!) Now this is specifically a "how to make End of Days better" rant, not the more general "how to make Torchwood better" rant, but End of Days did need more set-up. The 'thing moving in the dark' had been foreshadowed, yes, but they need to have set up Billis from very, very early on. Have him in a crowd scene in Everything Changes. Have him in the background in photographs from the past in Ghost Machine and Out of Time. Slot in tiny moments of him following Torchwood quietly as they're out and about, so that when he turns up openly in Captain Jack Harkness, everyone's scratching their heads thinking 'haven't I seen him before?'
Oh, and give him a personality.
Speaking of giving people personalities, *ahem,* Tosh. Specifically, they needed to set up her vision in End of Days. Ianto's and Owen's are both very well set up, and Gwen's of course is blatantly so, but Tosh's comes out of left field and has no real resonance. I'm going to go ahead and assume that her mother's dead, but some meaning had to be associated with that, some personal history. And ideally not just 'oh, dead mother,' but some sort of conflict with dead mother, something unresolved, something that would make Tosh unusually desperate to contact her again if possible. Easily enough mentioned; if nothing else, she can spill it to Mary at some point.
So then, assuming these threads are woven into the rest of the series...
End of Days, as originally written and aired, was good up to a point, a very specific point. Roman soldiers falling through time? Good. Infectious diseases falling through time? Utterly brilliant. (Could've gone further: something incurable from the future follows the Black Death.) The rifts, no pun intended, between Jack and his staff coming to a head? Wrenching, well-played. Billis' manipulation of Gwen--no dead lover to haunt her with, so he'll just have to make one? Chilling.
Lack of explanation for who Billis is or why he's doing what he does? Lack of explanation for how the Torchwood staff were seeing dead people?
Bad, but easily dealt with.
Demon Godzilla?
...
BAD. Left turn with no signals down the autobahn of bad. So bad it burns like hydrochloric acid. Seven donkey-ball-sucking shades of bad.
So.
First off, the Rift isn't some bizarre attempt to seal some critter. Let's not repeat the mistakes of the Satan Pit. (Similar, in fact--fantastic buildup, crap resolution. A lack of Ood, but what can you do?) The Rift is a natural byproduct of some space-time muckery or another, probably the Time War. This sort of thing happens.
Second off, Abbadon isn't a giant city-stomping creature. It isn't a devil, it isn't anything like that at all.
Abbadon is just what Billis calls something he's been assembling, picking up bits and pieces of, wants to open the Rift so he can get at all of it. Which, during the course of the first episode and his manipulation of Torchwood staff, he does.
Abbadon is a suit of armor. With one missing gauntlet.
One hand to give life, one hand to take it away. Torchwood had the less dangerous bit. The rest of it is now in Billis' hands, and, fully assembled but for the one destroyed part, he has access to a huge range of power, missing only the capacity to give life. Still with the capacity to take it, drain people into death just as Suzie did Gwen. Only probably a lot faster.
And, also, Abbadon isn't the much-hinted-at Thing Moving In The Dark. Abbadon is a completely inanimate piece of advanced alien equipment being glorified by a madman. Powerful, sure, but it ain't moving anywhere, at least not until Billis puts it on.
Yeah, this is a two-enemy story. It has to be.
In this universe, as established in Father's Day, when Time is violated too egregiously, it produces creatures to sterilize the wound. Here, now, in Torchwood canon, it isn't Time being violated, but the lines between life and death. The Moving Thing is another pack of Reapers, a different sort, coming for those who have been messing with that boundary.
Of the three--well, four, but one's not onscreen in this show--people who've been doing so... Suzie's protected by the fact that she's well and truly dead, out of the story. Rose is of course protected by the lonely little TARDIS who let her be the Bad Wolf in the first place. Jack may or may not be protected by the same--I'd veer towards not, just 'cause it's more fun.
Gwen ain't protected by anything at all.
Oh, yeah, and once we stack up Billis in the armor and the death-Reapers, we have another thing to take into account: with the Rift going haywire, Weevils are spilling in by the dozens, maybe even hundreds. And Torchwood's loose cannon can communicate with them. (I assumed, given how Combat ended, that they were going to go there in the finale. I was utterly shocked that they didn't. Way too spiffy a thread not to pick up.) A crucial power, in the hands of somebody himself more animal than man. That will be fun to play out, no?
So Reapers, Weevils, and a suit of armor with a dramatic name in the hands of a peculiar little villain who really needed more characterization. Which, of course, if I'm writing the show, he gets. Plot resolution is not, however, my forte.
So let's assume the plot gets resolved. Owen talks the Weevils out of eating half of Cardiff. Tosh frantically hacks cures for incurable diseases out of bits of alien computer cores tumbling about in the Rift. Ianto does, erm, something (perhaps he's contracted one of the diseases from the future?), and Gwen has hysterics at Reapers. Jack overloads the suit, which is not built to handle the life force of a half a million Daleks. (Because that's generally my interpretation--Rose kills the entire Dalek fleet, pours that energy into Jack.) In general, shit goes down.
(Fully realizing the Reapers, y'see, and what might be done there, requires something which Torchwood kinda needed to do but which it was understandably reluctant to: conclusively establish a Whoverse metaphysics of Death. I won't presume to go there myself, but it is necessary to make this episode work.)
Leaving us with Tosh making frantic phonecalls to hospitals from the scorched Hub, in between finally mourning her mother. Owen huddled in the corner hissing to himself before a shaking Ianto tugs him up to autopsy Billis and disassemble the suit. Gwen driving an exhausted and bewildered Rhys home and coming back to sit dead-eyed next to dead Jack.
Ohhhhhh, yes. We may have gotten out of the Sucky Godzilla Section, but there's still a scene in the original End of Days which definitely needed fixing.
Sure, Gwen can keep hope after the others have given up, keep her vigil over Jack's body. But she doesn't keep it in silence. Instead of a montage of her waiting in that room, it's a montage of her gradually having the nervous breakdown that's been on its way for months. She's taken the red pill and can never go back to her comfortable life where humans are alone in the universe and people stay dead when they die. She's inadvertantly murdered somebody. She's carrying on an affair with an asshole because of the sheer amount of unresolved issues with her boyfriend, who, by the way, she is retconning regularly and may have driven irreperably insane. She's here because she's supposed to be the voice of common sense, and she's failing, she's falling apart, her whole life is falling apart, and she doesn't know how to stop it. She's completely lost touch with reality and life itself; her only touchstone this past while has been Jack, and Jack is lying there dead. And so on. And so on.
So the time-lapse montage of Gwen screaming and crying and hiding in the corner like a dead thing, the full spectrum of breakdown, interspersed with Owen and Ianto gingerly dissecting both Billis and the armor, making comments like "well, he won't get up again after this" and skirting around the question of whether to autopsy Jack or put him in the morgue. And Tosh hovering, back and forth, not hardly doing well herself.
A moment of Gwen, hollow-eyed and grim, looking at Jack and murmuring, "You're an alien too, aren't you? I mean, you have to be. Nothing else makes sense."
Owen realizing that Billis consumed so much energy because the suit had been constantly killing him--the life-support unit doing exactly what it was supposed to and maintaining his body temperature ten degrees below human tolerance and his heartbeat twice human normal. Constant hypothermia and fibrilliation. We don't need to make it overt--we can't, Owen wouldn't hardly know what species has those life-signs--but the Who maniacs will recognize it easily enough. They were not exactly pleasant people before Rassilon came along, after all, and only somewhat since.
Some of the images of Gwen are intercut with moments of just black screen, distorted muffled sound of Gwen's voice. Jack's POV.
'Cause he's alive. Barely. Only just enough energy to keep his mind going. Can't move. Can't talk.
Oh, by the way, Gwen's suicidal at this point.
Just black screen as we hear, "That's it. That's it, Jack, I know what I'm going to do." Footsteps, distant, doors creaking. "Give me the glove."
Yelling, incoherent arguing. Scuffle. One gunshot.
Cut back away from Jack's POV. Gwen comes in slowly, closes the door, tucks her gun back into her pants and sits back down by the table. Forces the left gauntlet of the armor onto Jack's stiff fingers. Breathes slow, in and out, holds his hand, closes her eyes.
Slides to the floor as Jack stirs.
Jack yanks off the gauntlet, smashes it against the wall with a look of pure revulsion. Gathers himself, tries to warm his cold, cold hands, checks Gwen's pulse, lays her out on the table to recover from losing just enough of her life to shake his paralysis. Wraps himself up in a morgue sheet and staggers out alone.
Here was about where End of Days entirely stopped sucking. We can play almost exactly the same scene. Tosh runs up to hug him. Ianto looks up from where he's cleaning out the bullet graze Gwen left on his arm, comes up, kisses him. Owen skulks in with some bit of equipment, and the exchange between Owen and Jack just then, and how it's played, is probably actually my single favorite moment in the entire show, so no way am I messing with that.
The denoument conversation between Gwen and Jack does change entirely, because it's hardly about the Rift, only just enough to set up whatever they might do next season. It's Gwen waking up from a few days of coma with Jack at her bedside, returning the favor. And it's Jack gently, but very firmly, letting her know that he heard everything she'd said to him. Taking her off active duty. She needs a few months off, a few months in therapy, a few months to work things out with Rhys. She panics, of course, but eventually accepts. And so her character arc is resolved. (I actually have this whole scene written out in my notebook, word for word and action for action, along with the lead-in to the ending, but I'm not going to bother typing it up--summary covers the necessary points, and I'm not sure it's quite perfect anyway.)
And of course Jack isn't going to mention that he spent more than a few hours conscious but paralyzed, wondering when his people were going to cut him up or bury him alive, stuck in a living nightmare. But of course Gwen knows.
And of course Jack is reading the notes Owen and Ianto took on the armor and being profoundly disturbed, but he isn't going to mention that either.
And Jack in the Hub catches an unexpected beep and his little blue bus to the stars. (Assuming it's not a grandfather clock to hell, but that's another problem.) Gwen of course still assumes he's been kidnapped, and so ends the New and Improved (I hope!) End of Days.
*must...make...Jack...icons*
A few notes in advance:
I am rather unusual amongst the fen (or at least the fen I know) in that I don't like Suzie much more than Gwen, and I don't entirely dislike Gwen. Also, I like Owen. More below.
On Suzie: she is smoking hot, I admit, but she is still a backstabbing manipulative bitch. Interesting character, yes, more so if they'd gotten into just what was up with her father, but I do not stand in the 'Jack should've let her live instead of Gwen and put her back on the team' camp. She was playing Torchwood from the start, one long game with no regret. Not a friend who overstepped boundaries out of desperation, like Ianto; not a friend who got caught up in their emotions and acted out of impulse, shortsightedness, or incompetence, like Gwen, Owen, or (her one mis-step in Greeks Bearing Gifts) Tosh. You can trust neither her actions nor her intentions. And you'll notice that Jack shot her without hesitation, and while he's had a gun on Ianto in Cyberwoman and everyone in End of Days, I don't think he was seriously intending to shoot, at least not to kill. I don't think that's a line Jack's going to let her cross and still keep her around.
(Think of the difference between the Doctor's attitude towards most of his companions--at worst it veers towards "funny little humans, must patronize"--and his attitude towards Adam. And I suspect more than a few parallels could be drawn between the Doctor's treatment of his companions and Jack's treatment of Torchwood staff. Funny that.)
On Gwen: here we see the sad fate of a character upon which nobody can quite agree what she's supposed to be. Voice of human reason? Ordinary girl falling apart under alien stress? Inadvertantly abusive and manipulative hysteric? Jack's attempt to find a substitute Rose? Pure Mary Sue? A few of those might have been interesting. But instead she jackrabbits all over the place, and the characterization that I would have gone with--a combination of 2 and 3 under the to-be-broken delusion that she's 1--doesn't work because she's too often written, and thought of by other characters, as 1, 4, or 5. Pick a non-sucky characterization option and make it consistent, and don't overuse her as the viewpoint character simply for cabbagehead exposition purposes, and I personally think we're fine. End result? Gawky girl with a thick Welsh accent (still <3 the accent!) struggling with a scary and alien new world, a job that's killing her (sometimes literally), the way she can't stop hurting the man she loves, newly-discovered bisexuality, and an embarassing crush on her boss. Not bad, IMHO. But then again, I do have a bad habit of attempting to rewrite to be interesting canon characters whom everybody hates. (See: Kaoru Kozue, Roze Thomas, Neelix.)
I also happen to like Owen. Not as a person, but as a character. And as a character, he's my second-favorite of the lot. (To Jack, of course.) *And* he has a fairly coherent and clear character arc, as opposed to an incoherent one, like Gwen, a never-mentioned one, like Jack, a fragmented one, like Ianto, or none at all, like Tosh.
So, that given, How End of Days (and Some of the Rest of Torchwood) Could Have Been Better.
First off, can we say "two-parter?" Ditch Random Shoes, shove Out of Time, Combat, and Captain Jack Harkness all back a slot in the lineup, and take two episodes to do this story at leisure.
Second, can we say "make this the capper to a tightly-plotted first season?" Look at the first season of Doctor Who. There is hardly an extraneous episode there. Five episodes are necessary to fully set up just the single plot point of Rose prying open the TARDIS to save the Doctor in Parting of the Ways. (Unquiet Dead to set up the Rift, Aliens of London/World War III to set up the Slitheen, both to set up Boomtown which in turn sets up the Heart of the TARDIS, and then Father's Day to enable Rose to convince Jackie to help her!) Now this is specifically a "how to make End of Days better" rant, not the more general "how to make Torchwood better" rant, but End of Days did need more set-up. The 'thing moving in the dark' had been foreshadowed, yes, but they need to have set up Billis from very, very early on. Have him in a crowd scene in Everything Changes. Have him in the background in photographs from the past in Ghost Machine and Out of Time. Slot in tiny moments of him following Torchwood quietly as they're out and about, so that when he turns up openly in Captain Jack Harkness, everyone's scratching their heads thinking 'haven't I seen him before?'
Oh, and give him a personality.
Speaking of giving people personalities, *ahem,* Tosh. Specifically, they needed to set up her vision in End of Days. Ianto's and Owen's are both very well set up, and Gwen's of course is blatantly so, but Tosh's comes out of left field and has no real resonance. I'm going to go ahead and assume that her mother's dead, but some meaning had to be associated with that, some personal history. And ideally not just 'oh, dead mother,' but some sort of conflict with dead mother, something unresolved, something that would make Tosh unusually desperate to contact her again if possible. Easily enough mentioned; if nothing else, she can spill it to Mary at some point.
So then, assuming these threads are woven into the rest of the series...
End of Days, as originally written and aired, was good up to a point, a very specific point. Roman soldiers falling through time? Good. Infectious diseases falling through time? Utterly brilliant. (Could've gone further: something incurable from the future follows the Black Death.) The rifts, no pun intended, between Jack and his staff coming to a head? Wrenching, well-played. Billis' manipulation of Gwen--no dead lover to haunt her with, so he'll just have to make one? Chilling.
Lack of explanation for who Billis is or why he's doing what he does? Lack of explanation for how the Torchwood staff were seeing dead people?
Bad, but easily dealt with.
Demon Godzilla?
...
BAD. Left turn with no signals down the autobahn of bad. So bad it burns like hydrochloric acid. Seven donkey-ball-sucking shades of bad.
So.
First off, the Rift isn't some bizarre attempt to seal some critter. Let's not repeat the mistakes of the Satan Pit. (Similar, in fact--fantastic buildup, crap resolution. A lack of Ood, but what can you do?) The Rift is a natural byproduct of some space-time muckery or another, probably the Time War. This sort of thing happens.
Second off, Abbadon isn't a giant city-stomping creature. It isn't a devil, it isn't anything like that at all.
Abbadon is just what Billis calls something he's been assembling, picking up bits and pieces of, wants to open the Rift so he can get at all of it. Which, during the course of the first episode and his manipulation of Torchwood staff, he does.
Abbadon is a suit of armor. With one missing gauntlet.
One hand to give life, one hand to take it away. Torchwood had the less dangerous bit. The rest of it is now in Billis' hands, and, fully assembled but for the one destroyed part, he has access to a huge range of power, missing only the capacity to give life. Still with the capacity to take it, drain people into death just as Suzie did Gwen. Only probably a lot faster.
And, also, Abbadon isn't the much-hinted-at Thing Moving In The Dark. Abbadon is a completely inanimate piece of advanced alien equipment being glorified by a madman. Powerful, sure, but it ain't moving anywhere, at least not until Billis puts it on.
Yeah, this is a two-enemy story. It has to be.
In this universe, as established in Father's Day, when Time is violated too egregiously, it produces creatures to sterilize the wound. Here, now, in Torchwood canon, it isn't Time being violated, but the lines between life and death. The Moving Thing is another pack of Reapers, a different sort, coming for those who have been messing with that boundary.
Of the three--well, four, but one's not onscreen in this show--people who've been doing so... Suzie's protected by the fact that she's well and truly dead, out of the story. Rose is of course protected by the lonely little TARDIS who let her be the Bad Wolf in the first place. Jack may or may not be protected by the same--I'd veer towards not, just 'cause it's more fun.
Gwen ain't protected by anything at all.
Oh, yeah, and once we stack up Billis in the armor and the death-Reapers, we have another thing to take into account: with the Rift going haywire, Weevils are spilling in by the dozens, maybe even hundreds. And Torchwood's loose cannon can communicate with them. (I assumed, given how Combat ended, that they were going to go there in the finale. I was utterly shocked that they didn't. Way too spiffy a thread not to pick up.) A crucial power, in the hands of somebody himself more animal than man. That will be fun to play out, no?
So Reapers, Weevils, and a suit of armor with a dramatic name in the hands of a peculiar little villain who really needed more characterization. Which, of course, if I'm writing the show, he gets. Plot resolution is not, however, my forte.
So let's assume the plot gets resolved. Owen talks the Weevils out of eating half of Cardiff. Tosh frantically hacks cures for incurable diseases out of bits of alien computer cores tumbling about in the Rift. Ianto does, erm, something (perhaps he's contracted one of the diseases from the future?), and Gwen has hysterics at Reapers. Jack overloads the suit, which is not built to handle the life force of a half a million Daleks. (Because that's generally my interpretation--Rose kills the entire Dalek fleet, pours that energy into Jack.) In general, shit goes down.
(Fully realizing the Reapers, y'see, and what might be done there, requires something which Torchwood kinda needed to do but which it was understandably reluctant to: conclusively establish a Whoverse metaphysics of Death. I won't presume to go there myself, but it is necessary to make this episode work.)
Leaving us with Tosh making frantic phonecalls to hospitals from the scorched Hub, in between finally mourning her mother. Owen huddled in the corner hissing to himself before a shaking Ianto tugs him up to autopsy Billis and disassemble the suit. Gwen driving an exhausted and bewildered Rhys home and coming back to sit dead-eyed next to dead Jack.
Ohhhhhh, yes. We may have gotten out of the Sucky Godzilla Section, but there's still a scene in the original End of Days which definitely needed fixing.
Sure, Gwen can keep hope after the others have given up, keep her vigil over Jack's body. But she doesn't keep it in silence. Instead of a montage of her waiting in that room, it's a montage of her gradually having the nervous breakdown that's been on its way for months. She's taken the red pill and can never go back to her comfortable life where humans are alone in the universe and people stay dead when they die. She's inadvertantly murdered somebody. She's carrying on an affair with an asshole because of the sheer amount of unresolved issues with her boyfriend, who, by the way, she is retconning regularly and may have driven irreperably insane. She's here because she's supposed to be the voice of common sense, and she's failing, she's falling apart, her whole life is falling apart, and she doesn't know how to stop it. She's completely lost touch with reality and life itself; her only touchstone this past while has been Jack, and Jack is lying there dead. And so on. And so on.
So the time-lapse montage of Gwen screaming and crying and hiding in the corner like a dead thing, the full spectrum of breakdown, interspersed with Owen and Ianto gingerly dissecting both Billis and the armor, making comments like "well, he won't get up again after this" and skirting around the question of whether to autopsy Jack or put him in the morgue. And Tosh hovering, back and forth, not hardly doing well herself.
A moment of Gwen, hollow-eyed and grim, looking at Jack and murmuring, "You're an alien too, aren't you? I mean, you have to be. Nothing else makes sense."
Owen realizing that Billis consumed so much energy because the suit had been constantly killing him--the life-support unit doing exactly what it was supposed to and maintaining his body temperature ten degrees below human tolerance and his heartbeat twice human normal. Constant hypothermia and fibrilliation. We don't need to make it overt--we can't, Owen wouldn't hardly know what species has those life-signs--but the Who maniacs will recognize it easily enough. They were not exactly pleasant people before Rassilon came along, after all, and only somewhat since.
Some of the images of Gwen are intercut with moments of just black screen, distorted muffled sound of Gwen's voice. Jack's POV.
'Cause he's alive. Barely. Only just enough energy to keep his mind going. Can't move. Can't talk.
Oh, by the way, Gwen's suicidal at this point.
Just black screen as we hear, "That's it. That's it, Jack, I know what I'm going to do." Footsteps, distant, doors creaking. "Give me the glove."
Yelling, incoherent arguing. Scuffle. One gunshot.
Cut back away from Jack's POV. Gwen comes in slowly, closes the door, tucks her gun back into her pants and sits back down by the table. Forces the left gauntlet of the armor onto Jack's stiff fingers. Breathes slow, in and out, holds his hand, closes her eyes.
Slides to the floor as Jack stirs.
Jack yanks off the gauntlet, smashes it against the wall with a look of pure revulsion. Gathers himself, tries to warm his cold, cold hands, checks Gwen's pulse, lays her out on the table to recover from losing just enough of her life to shake his paralysis. Wraps himself up in a morgue sheet and staggers out alone.
Here was about where End of Days entirely stopped sucking. We can play almost exactly the same scene. Tosh runs up to hug him. Ianto looks up from where he's cleaning out the bullet graze Gwen left on his arm, comes up, kisses him. Owen skulks in with some bit of equipment, and the exchange between Owen and Jack just then, and how it's played, is probably actually my single favorite moment in the entire show, so no way am I messing with that.
The denoument conversation between Gwen and Jack does change entirely, because it's hardly about the Rift, only just enough to set up whatever they might do next season. It's Gwen waking up from a few days of coma with Jack at her bedside, returning the favor. And it's Jack gently, but very firmly, letting her know that he heard everything she'd said to him. Taking her off active duty. She needs a few months off, a few months in therapy, a few months to work things out with Rhys. She panics, of course, but eventually accepts. And so her character arc is resolved. (I actually have this whole scene written out in my notebook, word for word and action for action, along with the lead-in to the ending, but I'm not going to bother typing it up--summary covers the necessary points, and I'm not sure it's quite perfect anyway.)
And of course Jack isn't going to mention that he spent more than a few hours conscious but paralyzed, wondering when his people were going to cut him up or bury him alive, stuck in a living nightmare. But of course Gwen knows.
And of course Jack is reading the notes Owen and Ianto took on the armor and being profoundly disturbed, but he isn't going to mention that either.
And Jack in the Hub catches an unexpected beep and his little blue bus to the stars. (Assuming it's not a grandfather clock to hell, but that's another problem.) Gwen of course still assumes he's been kidnapped, and so ends the New and Improved (I hope!) End of Days.
*must...make...Jack...icons*