#2 Dark Shadows: The Flip Side

After setting down my thoughts on Wrath of the Iceni, I gave my Selectortron another spin and hit...

Dark Shadows: The Flip Side

Starring: Nancy Barrett as Carolyn Stoddard
Format: one full-cast CD (or download) with no episode breaks
Silly? Dark and serious. Even a moment of metafiction isn't played for laughs.
Standalone? No. Previous Dark Shadows audios are needed to understand some dialogue.
Recommended? No by itself, but yes in its place as part of Big Finish's "1973 arc".

My reflections on this story contain spoilers for it and for the Dark Shadows TV series.

Before listening 

While Doctor Who and direct spinoffs from it are the foundation of Big Finish (and the bulk of my own collection), Big Finish grew to be more than "the Doctor Who audiodrama company". Another franchise Big Finish has revived for audio with original cast members is Dark Shadows, an American soap opera of the late 60's and early 70's. While short-lived relative to more famous American soaps, Dark Shadows aired five episodes a week and accumulated over a thousand episodes. It began with a slightly haunted mansion, got popular when it added a vampire, and continued to add supernatural elements in a sort of Castlevania-esque manner. Eventually, Lovecraftian ancient beings were exploiting the vampire's ability to time travel, the mansion had a magical room enabling travel to a parallel universe version of the mansion where the same actors played different characters, and a portrait in the attic slowly aged and turned into a portrait of a wolf every full moon, among other things.
The range Big Finish calls "Dark Shadows Audiobooks" isn't just single-reader prose. Most releases in the range, including The Flip Side, have full sound production and at least two cast members. This release happens to be part of Big Finish's "1973 arc", a series of loosely interconnected audio releases set shortly after the end of the television series.
I remember enjoying this story. I remember it referring to a lot of past events which I assumed were from the TV show but might have been from other Big Finish audios. The main plot didn't depend on those details in a way that prevented me from following what was happening and what the characters' immediate motivations were. I remember the story expressing on several different levels a motif of the supernatural versus the normal, which differs from many Big Finish Dark Shadows audios in that a lot of the protagonists Big Finish uses are themselves supernatural.

After listening

The Flip Side opens with many characters in a bar chit-chatting about dangling plot threads of previous Dark Shadows audios. If you were to listen to the story in isolation, this opening scene would quite possibly seem completely impenetrable. It is, however, not long before the supernatural serial killer shows up.
One of the first things the killer does is to nudge people into leaving the bar one at a time by making silent magical suggestions that poke their personal buttons. This reminded me of the kind of thing the protagonist of a point-and-click adventure game does, treating people as puzzles and sociopathically "solving" their interference. This isn't the only thing about the story that reminds me of the kind of storytelling in games: the killer has been traveling to alternate timelines looking for one in which his (insane and essentially pointless) plan can succeed, in a manner not unlike saving and reloading a game state. I don't think writer Cody Schell intended a deliberate link to adventure games, but I found a familiar and appealing resonance in the story.
The killer seems nigh-omnipotent, but he wants one particular person to make one particular choice, and he is unwilling to use his powers to simply puppeteer her into performing an action without actually making the choice. This manifests as a verbal cat-and-mouse dynamic perfectly suited to the audio medium. The very end of the story, where the verbal conflict turns physical and the action leaves the bar, is weaker than the strong middle.
I enjoyed this audio, but I wouldn't recommend it as anyone's first Dark Shadows audio simply because there are better starting points. You might, for instance, start at The House by the Sea, the start of the 1973 arc. [For reference, the 1973 arc is The House by the Sea, Dreaming of the Water, Beneath the Veil, The Enemy Within, The Lucifer Gambit, The Flip Side, Beyond the Grave, The Harvest of Souls, and The Happier Dead.]