of "the Ancient Blood"
Oooh, is that what I am? I must say in all humility that this makes me much cooler than I thought I was. I'm putting that on my business card. (I watched from 1967 on.)
My respect for a storyline seems to depend on whether I know the films being stolen from. I realize my perspective must be warped, because it was all lifted from somewhere. I guess what I care about most is not the plot necessarily, but whether intelligence and perspective is put into the dialogue. There are long stretches of DS where it's all plot, all "things happening", and bare-bones dialogue, which only serves the minimal function of moving plot along. That brings 1840 down to Earth, when there's more than enough there for it to soar.
Then again, there are stories like 1795, where the writers are invested and immersed in it all, and actually are thinking about the insides of these characters, and what their inner worlds are like. At unexpected times, too, during other bare-bones-plot stretches, DS will "remember" what it can be, and will suddenly "tower" again. It becomes more than TV, more than the medium, and leaps out at you... right now I'm thinking of Ang re-appearing in 1897, and the bleak,surreal, poetic feel of things in 1795, after Barnabas has risen.