Oh. My. Gods.

[firefly124]

The Devil and Miss Carew was, imo, only okay. Submission was better, in that it gave at least some character development.

But The House of the Dead? That had me sobbing. In a very good way.

There are things it fixes that needed addressing. The timing, six months after Thames House, so obviously right before Jack meets Gwen to retrieve his vortex manipulator and leaves the planet, is very telling. It adds something to Jack's gutted statement that the planet has become nothing but a graveyard to him. It suggests he's done more than just wander around feeling sorry for himself, though clearly he's done plenty of that I wouldn't say it makes it all better, not least because it completely ignores the grief and guilt he was also carrying regarding Stephen, but it definitely ties up some things that needed saying and doing.
One of which loose ends is why the hell Cardiff would be, in Andy's words to Gwen, "quiet" with nobody minding the Rift. Ah, it's been sealed. That also casts Jack's departure from the planet in a slightly different light. He did, at least, ensure that he wasn't leaving the damned Rift unattended with nobody but a pregnant Gwen to even know about it. Though it'd be nice if he'd told her. (I suppose he may have, when he contacted her to set up that meeting.)

I still think RTD glossed over something he'd set up seemingly deliberately: that the Rift is inextricably tied to Jack's presence there. (Aside: for about two seconds, I thought he'd completely removed all possibility from what I'm trying to do with my tw_bigbang fic, which I am trying to keep reasonably canon-compliant considering how AU it's going to go, but then I saw it actually added some options. /cryptic)

I'm going to need to re-listen to that one multiple times. It is, in some ways, the perfect flip side to The Dead Line's coin. I may need to listen to them back to back, actually.

I still don't accept the outcome of CoE, but as I said in my previous post, fandom has made it easier to follow multiple parallel and different stories within the same universe. I'm actually a bit more okay with this particular storyline. Not totally, and despite it's being actual canon, it's no more "official" in my head than any number of the fix-its out there. But it's a bit better than it had been.

Now I see one of the reasons they delayed the UK premier. IMO, they should've delayed the US premier as well. Not only because the hard-core fans all downloaded it ASAP, as will always happen when they pull these stupid international release gaps, but because hearing those plays first does, actually, make a difference.