I'm not sure that the Buffy finale and CoE are really all that comparable regardless of whether or not one viewed CoE as the ultimate Torchwood finale, simply because the ensemble cast of Buffy was so much broader. Quite aside from the victory/defeat dichotomy, Buffy viewers has many different characters they could identify with, and all of them had been developed in interesting and complex ways. It's very unlikely that viewers watching the end of Buffy would be left with NO character they could identify with, even if their favourite had died, and also, if their favourite did die, there would still be a whole heap of episodes for them to look back on.
With CoE, on the other hand, with the team reduced to three people -- the audience doesn't have those sorts of options. If you're lucky enough to identify with Jack or Gwen, that's great, but for those of us who can't (which is not to fault Jack or Gwen as characters, but they are rather inaccessible to many of us), there isn't really anywhere to go -- the entire show shuts down. With the Buffy finale, I felt that we were left with a living world, with a living mythology that I could still inhabit. But after CoE I was left with a show that I couldn't inhabit any longer, at least not in the deeply personal way that I had done before. For me, there's no getting past the fact that Ianto's story ended in defeat, regardless of what comes after.
Having said that, in a structural sense, I think that in a structural sense, CoE is probably more comparable to the S3 finale of Buffy, insofar as it represents the destruction of the structured environment that had given shape to the early part of the show. But the S3 Buffy finale still had that broad range of characters to relate to (and from what I recall, it didn't kill off anyone major), so it didn't risk shutting people out of the show like CoE did.
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With CoE, on the other hand, with the team reduced to three people -- the audience doesn't have those sorts of options. If you're lucky enough to identify with Jack or Gwen, that's great, but for those of us who can't (which is not to fault Jack or Gwen as characters, but they are rather inaccessible to many of us), there isn't really anywhere to go -- the entire show shuts down. With the Buffy finale, I felt that we were left with a living world, with a living mythology that I could still inhabit. But after CoE I was left with a show that I couldn't inhabit any longer, at least not in the deeply personal way that I had done before. For me, there's no getting past the fact that Ianto's story ended in defeat, regardless of what comes after.
Having said that, in a structural sense, I think that in a structural sense, CoE is probably more comparable to the S3 finale of Buffy, insofar as it represents the destruction of the structured environment that had given shape to the early part of the show. But the S3 Buffy finale still had that broad range of characters to relate to (and from what I recall, it didn't kill off anyone major), so it didn't risk shutting people out of the show like CoE did.