Remember "The Golden Man" episode on Lost in Space, Onyx? The one that guest-starred our very own Jason Maguire/Paul Stoddard as the handsome alien? Didn't you just love the scene where he rescues Judy from a "mine field," and the "mines" are nothing more than - some underinflated - beachballs? Oh, those were the fun days of watching LIS. As a kid, I never missed an episode and so desperately wanted to be a Robinson if I couldn't be a Collins. I miss watching LIS on Sci-Fi again, just as I miss watching DS. Of course, the first season b&w LIS episodes were far superior to the next two seasons of color tales, both in stories, filming, and even special effects.
Anyway, there could have been so many more stories to tell on DS. I did my own version of CDT's what-would've-happened-if-it-had-continued, drawing up elaborate plot lines, stretching out the series for quite a few more years. It was all just for fun, and took me months to do. I started off by having, following the 1841PT story, of having Barnabas, Julia and Eliot returning to Collinwood 1971. However, because they so drastically changed history (by changing the lineage), that they found an entirely different family living there. Now what do they do? While pondering their fate, Collinwood becomes haunted by the ghost of Tad Collins who, it turns out, became a very vile man who appeared to be an abolitionist in 1860, but instead imprisoned, tortured and returned runaway slaves for a hefty profit. As the members of the family are popped off one-by-one by the vengeful spook, our three heroes go back in time to 1860 to stop the massacre and also manage to set things right and return back to the family they know and love in 1971. Then followed many, many more tawdry tales, including the return of Jeb Hawkes, Barnabas' return to PT to see how things have fared with Roxanne, Quentin and Maggie (not very well, mind you), Angelique's return (in which she is totally and absolutely good), the haunting of not just Collinwood but all of Collinsport by the angry ghosts of a liberty ship shoddily built in 1944 by Collins Shipping which sunk in a storm during her sea trials, the arrival of a vampire and his teenaged human son in Collinsport, both trying to keep his "condition" a secret and live normal lives, another story in which Roger and Elizabeth temporarily move to London where Roger accidentally becomes involved in a conspiracy of political murder and mayhem ala Manchurian Candidate (and in which Burke Devlin returns, again helping to save the day), Vicki's return, the now-very-popular concept of having a Collins from the future pop back to the present to prevent a catastrophe, a sci-fi diddly in which human-disguised vanguard aliens preparing for an invasion get caught up in Collins intrigue (Willie falling in love with one of them - an alien I mean, not a Collins), the return (again, oh-so-popular) of Count Petofi, and a big blowout in which the family is very literally and completely destroyed by an ancient curse stemming back from the 16th century resulting from the very Irish Collins clan betraying their very Irish copatriots to the occupying English, leaving it to Barnabas to somehow save the day. I had many, many more stories and plots, but you get the gist.
Oh, my, yes, it was so much fun!
Gerard
