Howling:Burning Jack

The Howling → Burning Jack

There be spoilers about un-released stories here.
Run back to the forums if you're scared.

In Miracle Day, the non-dying can be killed by burning them completely into dust, so why hasn't anyone done this to Jack yet? Why bothered trapping him in a block of cement and creating massive explosions and stuff when you can incinerate him into dust? But his existence is also fixed...so what happened to his consciousness? If it takes him a long time to gather together, then it would still have been worth it to burn him, yet people don't do it. Certainly disintergrating him into atoms would make it at least extremely troublesome and takes a long time for him to recover. Yet, he was still physically relatively unharmed after travelling through the time vortex unprotected. Jack certainly can't be truly immortal if time is finite, when Jack travels back in time every time he reaches the end of time, there would be infinite copies of Jack at every instance. --222.166.181.234 22:28, November 21, 2011 (UTC)

Jack does seem to have died eventually, in Gridlock. Anyway, the difference between Jack and the category ones is that Jack can heal. The Daleks incinerated him in Journey's End, and Jack just came out of the incinerator unharmed (even his clothes were okay somehow). Same in Utopia-stet radiation instantly turns people into dust, but it seems to have just caused Jack minor discomfort. Containing Jack is much more practical than trying to kill him.Icecreamdif ^{talk to me} 05:16, November 22, 2011 (UTC)

The Daleks didn't incinerate Jack. They put what they thought was a dead body into the incinerator and assumed that it would be incinerated. Jack wasn't even unconscious at that stage, however. (We'd already seen him wink at the Doctor, while he was lying on the deck of the Vault.) He simply played possum until the Daleks left, then got out of the incinerator PDQ, which is why his clothes were undamaged. --89.240.242.174 12:08, November 22, 2011 (UTC)

I thought he wasn't able to get out until after he was incinerated. Anyway, the worst that burning him could possibly do would be to make it take longer for him to come back to life. Burning presumably didn't even kill the category ones, but just disposed of their bodies. Burning Jack would kill him, but not for long.Icecreamdif ^{talk to me} 18:48, November 22, 2011 (UTC)

"the worst that burning him could possibly do would be to make it take longer for him to come back to life": Exactly. And, in Journey's End, he was up and running almost instantly. The scene with the incinerator was pretty much in real time, so he was in there only for seconds. --89.241.66.83 03:37, November 23, 2011 (UTC)

That would already be good enough to enforce a lot of plans. It took him relatively long to recover from the explosion, burning him down to ashes or even disintegrating him into particles would almost certainly mean that they could do other safety measures. Not to mention that disintegrating him and sealing each particle in cement blocks and scatter the blocks would by this implication means an effective measure of keeping Jack from interfering. --222.166.181.222 22:14, November 27, 2011 (UTC)

Burning isn't instant though. He could start healing before he was reduced to ashes.Icecreamdif ^{talk to me} 00:29, December 2, 2011 (UTC)

Depends on the temperature and the area. You can claim explosion isn't instant if you moves at the speed of light and we clearly see it worked somewhat well and delayed his complete healing by quite a bit of time. --222.166.181.239 08:15, December 2, 2011 (UTC)

The reason that they tried the explosion was because they assumed that his immortality had something to do with the rift, and they thought destroying the hub would render him mortal. Once they realized that putting a bomb in his stomach wasn't enough to kill him, they would have also realized that burning him would be useless. He would still heal eventually. Putting him in the cement, however, was a pretty effective way of containing him. Remember, they weren't trying to stop other people from breaking him out. Johnson's other men were supposed to kill Gwen and Ianto, and then they didn't expect either of them to make it past the guards. They just figured that Jack, being Jack, would probably be able to break out of an ordinary prison cell, but nobody could possibly escape being encased in cement by themselves. Burning his body, and then encasing the ashes in cement would have just seemed like overkill.Icecreamdif ^{talk to me} 15:58, December 2, 2011 (UTC)

It sucessfully took him long enough to regenerate so burning him down into ashes would theoretically take longer, and cementing it and distributing it would effectively prevent him from interfering. The cement plan failed so encasing ashes in cement is certainly not overkilled. --222.166.181.230 16:59, December 2, 2011 (UTC)

Yeah, but they didn't think it would fail. They had Jack encased in a cement cell, at a secret complex in the middle of nowhere. He certainly can't escape by himself. The rest of his team is on the run without any resources. They didn't think that Gwen and Ianto would be able to find Jack, much less free him. Gwen only made it their because someone who Johnson had never even heard of defected, and Ianto only made it their because he managed to get their license plate number, which she didn't know he did, and because he was able to get his sister's car and laptop, despite the fact that her house was being watched. Even then, they only managed to free Jack since they both coincidentally showed up at the same time. That turn of events was completely unforseeable, and at the time it would have seemed like overkill to burn jack and encase his ashes is cement. Of course, in hindsight it might have been a good idea.Icecreamdif ^{talk to me} 20:06, December 2, 2011 (UTC)