I'm not sure... Best as I can tell, Jack has Hyper-Advanced Cellular Regeneration - Not immortality, exactly, just an off-the-charts-powerful Healing Factor (which also serves to keep him looking young).
Thus, he could recover from any injury, but an instant-death ray, like the Daleks have, would bypass the regeneration, killing him instantly (example: War Trolls in D&D only take Lethal Damage from acid, and they can regenerate damage from anything else - But if one fails its save against a Death Effect, it's still going to die).
The implication is, of course, that whatever happened to him occured during the 'missing months' that Jack alludes to in The Empty Child/The Doctor Dances. The fact that he didn't tell The Ninth and Rose about it fits with his unwillingnes to tell anybody about it, not even the other Torchwood employees (he'd not have told Gwen if she hadn't seen it happen so clearly)
Also, since The Doctor hasn't seen Captain Jack since the stand-off aboard Satellite Five, Jack couldn't know that he was raised by the power of the Phoenix Force Time Vortex; thus, when he came back after being killed by the Daleks, he merely attributed it to his own immortality.
I still think that, during his Missing Months, he was up to no good on the planet Zeist, and got on the wrong end of their Exiling Process as a result. If Sean Connery turns up pretending to be a Conquistador, then we'll know for sure...
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Date: 2006-11-13 02:19 am (UTC)Thus, he could recover from any injury, but an instant-death ray, like the Daleks have, would bypass the regeneration, killing him instantly (example: War Trolls in D&D only take Lethal Damage from acid, and they can regenerate damage from anything else - But if one fails its save against a Death Effect, it's still going to die).
The implication is, of course, that whatever happened to him occured during the 'missing months' that Jack alludes to in The Empty Child/The Doctor Dances. The fact that he didn't tell The Ninth and Rose about it fits with his unwillingnes to tell anybody about it, not even the other Torchwood employees (he'd not have told Gwen if she hadn't seen it happen so clearly)
Also, since The Doctor hasn't seen Captain Jack since the stand-off aboard Satellite Five, Jack couldn't know that he was raised by the power of the
Phoenix ForceTime Vortex; thus, when he came back after being killed by the Daleks, he merely attributed it to his own immortality.I still think that, during his Missing Months, he was up to no good on the planet Zeist, and got on the wrong end of their Exiling Process as a result. If Sean Connery turns up pretending to be a Conquistador, then we'll know for sure...