Daphne I always assumed was from another branch of the family, a second cousin or something. Given how large Collinwood is, and how the family's seat of power rests in the town, I think it's easy to believe the extended family would have lived in the house until around the turn of the century, and then still live in the area.
I wish I had my VHS tapes here, and am going to have to figure out how to rip the tapes to my computer, because I really miss the "missing scenes". The scene where Vicki sees Barnabas out the window always struck my as genuinely creepy. The color correction really is something of a bother. I hope at sometime in the future MPI does a proper release of the series.
Joanna Going really is quite striking. She's beautiful, but still very innocent looking. I think they cast her quite well. (interestingly enough, she was raised in Newport, Rhode Island, so she must have been very aware of a certain semi-famous mansion in town). I wish they had elaborated on her past though, because really, unless the Collins family was offering her a substantial amount of money, what reasons would she have for going there?
I'll raise my hand and say that I too was always bothered by Roger sending Willie, drunk and slovenly, to pick up Vicki at the train station in a beat up pick up truck. Though, I took it that Roger wasn't too keen on having Vicki there in the first place, so he might not have cared to roll out the red carpet for her. It'll be fun to speculate about Roger's wife in the future - but at this point we know that she went crazy because of David and a fire.... which still isn't really telling us much.
David is a little monster. He's probably extremely lonely, if he's "been without his Father" for six years, where was Roger? Did he dump him off at Collinwood? Carolyn strikes me as pretty lonely as well. She probably revels in the thought of another woman around her age coming to the estate - and someone whose whole world isn't the town of Collinsport and it's surrounding area.
Ben Cross - I'm still kind of torn about. He just kind of sticks out to me, which could be a good thing, because his character hardly blends in with the locals so to speak.