8 and 12? ^^
dark shadows ask game!
8. Favorite arc?
the pen arc, obviously <3 no, I kid, much as I do think the long and winding road to keeping Lou employed is much maligned. my favorite is hands-down the Laura arc. I think she's a marvelous antagonist, probably my favorite of all the Dark Shadows villains supernatural-or-not. Diana Millay is just fantastic, and I find the premise for the Phoenix as a supernatural creature to be endlessly fascinating especially because of the obscurity of just what, exactly, the rules are. it's a great blend of the supernatural (ghost Josette!) and par-for-the-course divorce melodrama: the Laura arc strikes such a great path to interweave the psychological (60's Freudianism) with the supernatural, which I find makes it very compelling. also I think Roger, Laura, and Burke being wrenched by their entanglement ten years ago (maybe just a love triangle, but you'd have to be consciously ignoring significant subtext to think that's all it was) is just fantastic. it's a really interesting magnifying-glass-to-the-ant of motherhood, and the extent to which a mother's attachment can go before it becomes corruption or violence; it forces Vicki to confront her unshakeable belief in the enduring, unquestioned good founded in blood ties; it forces Burke to choose between trying to replicate (reincarnate) the life he might have had ten years ago or to create a better path forward; and we reveal more dimensions to Carolyn when she's forced to step into the role of Collins matriarch that she's born to, that she's thus far been rejecting. and Dr. Guthrie is there! and the locket! and the Stockbridge crypt! and this is significantly more interpretive-icing-on-the-cake, but Vicki's love life becomes ten times more interesting weighing either Roger or Burke as potential suitors. she's dating Roger and Laura's divorce lawyer. she's stepping into the role of David's mother, and it's anyone's guess between Roger or Burke who is his biological father. there's so much weight attached to the locket with Collins marriage as a (literal) chain about the throat, and the protection of the Collins ancestors, and the threat of ancestors who are more similar to you than they should be. and she spends so much time trying to avoid outright begging Burke to stop thinking with his cock in a NAB-honoring way.
I suppose my only disappointment is that Liz is only there for a short period of time, I do miss her, though she also has some great scenes with Laura in the time before contract-mandated Joan vacation. but then — you do need Liz's absence for some of the character alchemy to take place, so it's a necessary sacrifice.
12. Opinions on the movies?
simply put: I think HODS has a dull plot but fantastic execution, and I think NODS has a fascinating plot but horrible execution. I enjoy HODS quite a bit and I've seen it many more times! I love vamp!Carolyn, I love the five seconds we get of vamp!Roger, I love the more obvious element of disgust and rot and repulsion that's really only hinted at with the effects available to the television production. I would say like most every other extension of the original show, it depends on your existing attachment to the characters to give it the emotional stakes it really needs, but part of the appeal for me is getting to see the characters and actors in a feature film, lit and color-graded and widescreen. the Barnabas-arrival and Josette-psychosexual-dollmaking is a plot that's played out to excess, really, but there are a number of things that make it interesting in HODS — like Barnabas turning on his own blood, or becoming sharply more degraded and animalistic over the runtime, rather than civilized, and honorable. mostly I regret we didn't get a longer scene with vamp roger. or a less homophobic death at the hands of Roger Davis'... arrow... shaft.
NODS has a great story underneath some baffling editing, and they're striking out in unfamiliar narrative territory, which is an overall plus for me. I think the possession plot is really interesting, and the way they're trying to blend time periods through that possession says something about the permeable fabric between past and present and the hold of ancestral blood, both ongoing themes in the original series but here highly distilled. I do love a discourse on marriage-as-horror, especially in the 70's, and what I'll say for NODS is it achieves, for me, personally, distressingly uncomfortable horror in the scenes with Quentin and Tracy that nothing else in the world of Dark Shadows remotely approaches. it's uncomfortable for me to watch both for those scenes as well as the Unique editing, so I have not seen it very many times, not enough to speak intelligently, but I do think the ensemble cast is used very well: Diana, Pennock, Storm, Lara, Karlen and Nancy, Grayson, all fantastic. I'm not the biggest fan of Selby and Jackson in this type of hero-role overall, but as I said, some of their scenes are the most chilling by far, so they're accomplishing what they set out to do.
overall I think the films get a worse reputation than they really deserve (as extensions of the show; as standalone works there's a lot more to criticize) but I enjoy leaning into the gothic-horror-revolting side of it all. so I have fun :)
