Gone Day's Original Ending

I promised I would do this ages ago, and thought of it as a quick win for this week. Lately my life feels as chaotic as Todd and Colton’s, so what better time to revisit this story.

WARNING: This post obviously contains major spoilers for the end of the series. If you’re new and you haven’t read everything yet, this is your chance to click away from this until you have.

Still with me?

Okay. Here we go.

* * * 

Let’s start at the scene where Todd and Charlie sit down with Kayden following the revelation that it was him who sent the pictures of them to the Randmann show.

This is the point at which I eventually decided to change the plan. This scene was always part of it, but the original purpose of it was for Charlie to do the exact reverse and handle the whole thing badly. Allow me to explain.

The big surprise where Todd finds out Colton is back was going to happen in Phoenix following the meeting with Kayden, but Charlie wasn’t going to be part of their re-union. Colton was going to come back on the scene just as it looked certain that Todd was finished with Charlie because of how badly Charlie handled things with Kayden. (Remember the ‘bad dog’ thing? Charlie was originally going to call him that, with the same meaning behind it, just to start with.) So with this setup, Todd was going straight back to Colton, right?

Wrong. Surprise number two: Todd was going to spend a couple of weeks with Colton, go back to San Fran alone to think about what he wanted, then get Colton and Charlie together for lunch together, and then tell him his decision was that he felt that he needed to be single for a while and be with neither of them.

Now, here’s the sweet part: the one who handled that scene well was going to be Colton. Charlie was going to walk out, saying he wasn’t hungry after all, and Colton was going to stay, saying he respected Todd’s decision, and also try and convince Charlie to stay with them and just have a nice lunch. The noble gesture scene.

There was the clincher: at the end of the main story, Todd was going to be alone during that scene in Akio’s house where he Felix calls him, and Todd tells him to give Kayden a second chance, and then there would have been the major hints that maybe Todd was regretting the decision because Colton had proved with his actions that he was the right person all along.

Cue the revelation about Todd being the next pick to replace Hoffman on the USA Olympic team, and Felix telling him he should do it.

Fast-forward two years to Todd’s silver medal, and a sports complex in Tokyo, where the Olympics took place. (Anyone remember my tweet about 18 months ago about how I knew Gone Day’s final scene was going to be set in Tokyo? The holiday with Charlie at the beginning was a prefigure to this original ending.)

Colton is waiting for Todd outside of the complex, having gotten tickets to the final and gone to Tokyo. Except here’s the thing: after Colton came back, what was he going to do? Get that engineering apprenticeship going again. Why not put him on placement in Tokyo with some supercar company? (I originally didn’t have the idea that Doug Prescott was a CEO of a company like that, I built it in after a lightbulb moment where I wondered where Kayden’s obviously rich father got his money and I realised that could be plot-critical for Colton if I wanted it to.) Anyway, what Colton’s really doing here, (and there was a magic irony line planned with these exact words) is Chasing Todd’s Tail. (Get it? Full circle, motherfucker!)

Yeah, he was never going to give up after one lunchtime rejection, was he?

Has anyone followed my Spotify playlist of the songs referenced in the series? Cue up ‘Your Love’ by The Outfield if you have. From the first time I heard that song back in mid 2019, I had this scene planned where Colton gets Todd to go to some club in Tokyo, that songs comes on, and there’s this reflective scene. They hook up again (basically for sex, and maybe old time’s sake) and then comes the sweet original end: where it looks like they’re going to part ways again and then Todd gets off the plane. Just as Colton thinks he’s watching him take off from an airport window, there he appears behind him.

The marriage wasn’t going to happen originally. The last scene in Tokyo was going to be the two of them agreeing to see if things could work long distance until Todd’s eventual retirement from playing.

That’s it. Cue curtain. Wasn’t quite sure what the last line would have been.

Okay, so why did I change it?

The simple answer (admittedly a bit of a cop-out) is that the ending I wrote instead was just simply better. Why? To start with, there was a stronger message in Charlie handling that scene with Kayden well instead. I won’t explain it, you can work it through in your head. After I decided I was going to let that happen, and not have Todd and Charlie’s big falling out, I realised I was paving the course for a very different end even if Colton was ‘the one.’

Let’s face it, if the series is called ‘Todd and Colton’ then how could I possibly end it with Todd marrying Charlie? That’s why I never entertained that outcome as a possibility, but looking back on it now, if I had gone down that road (and it did look like it could head that way for a chapter or two, which was me deliberately leaving false bait) then I think the marriage would eventually have failed and back would be Colton yet again. Seems obvious, the clue is in the series name, yet I think the reason it still kept people on the edge of their seat was that element of ‘Will the author defy convention and name the series after a couple who don’t end up together?’

The strange thing is, I still wonder why I was never tempted to do that.

- T.