YMMV / The Confessions of Dorian Gray

• Alternative Character Interpretation:
  • Is Dorian a scared immortal clinging on to life? Or does he know about the damage he's inflicting and he doesn't care?
  • How much of what he said to Toby at the end of season 3 was a lie? How much was true?
• Audience-Alienating Ending: Series 5 ends with an Or Was It a Dream? story where Dorian is in mental hospital, where it's implied that he's a delusional drug addict named Charlie White who imagined the entire series. After brutally attacking another patient, he's forced into a surgery that seemingly kills him for real. It's left unclear whether his portrait would eventually bring him back, whether he lost his immortality, or if he was a normal person and truly died at the end.
• Harsher in Hindsight: At the very end of All Through The House (released December 2015) Lucifer/Toby remarks that he thinks that 2016 will be very 'interesting' in such a way that it's clear he intends to make it as awful as possible. Given how 2016 went on to be a memetically awful year it's hard to listen to.
• Platonic Writing, Romantic Reading: Well, platonic is a stretch since having Toby feed on Dorian has always had sexual undertones. But Scott Handcock always intended for the relationship between Dorian and Toby to be about companionship and friendship, but Alexander Vlahos and the listeners felt their bond was firmly romantic, which is how Vlahos treated their relationship when writing "The Mayfair Monster".
• Sleeper Hit: While nobody was expecting it to fail, the success of the series was a surprise to everyone. Starring an actor who at the time was only recently known because he joined Merlin (2008) and created by a man who while popular due to some prior successes was yet to be as highly respected by Big Finish as he is now, the series was hoped to simply draw in more modern listeners and to experiment with original content, and it even had a Backdoor Pilot in order to draw in Bernice Summerfield/Doctor Who fans. It arguably became their most successful non-Doctor Who related series with a very passionate fanbase and as part of its Milestone Celebration got a ten minute long Live-Action Adaptation.

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