#as much as i live for reading the fanfic good endings where jack and ennis are endgame i dont really thing thats the way things wouldve gone

[nopefer-art-tu]

Another day, another question I'd like to throw out to the fellow Brokeback Mountain tag lurkers. This time, I wanna preface my question with a little background info:

When I first saw Brokeback Mountain I maintained the belief that, when Jack's father tells Ennis about how Jack's plans to bring a rancher up with him didn't "come to pass", it was because the rancher (who we can presume is Randall) backed out, and it was just one more disappointment in a string of failures that was Jack's life before he died. The final knife twist to the gut.

After reading a ton of fics and listening to a ton of podcast reviews abt the movie, though, I've come across a lot of different perspectives about the whole Randall thing. A popular idea amongst the Jack-was-murdered crowd is that Jack and Randall were somehow discovered and that is what led to Jack's death. Interestingly enough, there's actually an entire deleted scene of the film dedicated to this perspective—we don't have any footage of it, but as far as I could tell, the gist was that Jack and Randall were either coming back from or on their way to having one of their own "camping trips", when the camera focuses on a good ol' boy mechanic watching them very closely, foreshadowing the scene of Jack being beaten bloody that happens during Ennis' call with Lureen. This scene was deleted most likely because the filmmakers thought it was leading the audiences too much to a firm conclusion of Jack's death, and they wanted to maintain the tragedy of it's ambiguity from the short story.

Anyways, all this aside, I'm just kind of curious to know what others think went down with the whole Randall/Jack thing. What, exactly, did John Twist mean when he told Ennis that it didn't come to pass—was it actually a sure thing that they were going to move on up there, or was Jack putting his time and effort into another futile effort?

In relation to that, I'm also curious to know what y'all think about how the Ennis/Jack dynamic would have continued in the event that Jack didn't die? Like, if you think Randall and Jack were actually going to make a go of it, do you think that Jack would still sneak off to get his hits of Ennis twice a year while living at his parent's ranch with Randall? If he lived and still didn't get Randall, would Jack have moved on? After their last fight, would Ennis have heard from Jack ever again?