what one can expect, and tolerate, from a daily, shot live, on the cheap soap opera from 45 years ago and what's acceptable in a 100+ million dollar movie five years in development are two totally different things.
if the deleted scenes and extras on the blue-ray help make sense of it than good. but otherwise it's just sloppy writing.
and as to whether or not there were "clues" in retrospect as to carolyn's being a werewolf is somewhat beside the point. it meant nothing to the plot of the movie. it was just plain stupid.
I agree that things should've been more, shall we say, "practical" or "logical" after all that, but again, every version of DS has been smitten with the impractical and illogical bug. As I said before, we've had three television and three cinematic versions of it and all have been filled with impracticalities and "illogicalities." Dan Curtis, in making his '91 version, more than two decades after the original, should've also figured that out (and he was given an open check), but he didn't. I've simply accepted the impracticle and illogical things are part and parcel of DS. Who knows? Maybe Depp and Burton did it deliberately as an homage to the original and all its other manifestations. Cameron, in his blockbuster
Titanic deliberately allowed a historical faux pas just for us
Titanic oficiandoes, despite wanting it to be completely and historically accurate (he showed smoke coming out of the fourth funnel which was a dummy that stored deck chairs). He wanted to see if us
Titanic fanatics would catch it. So, if the Maggie-changing-her-name-to-Vicki-after-she-applied-and-accepted-the-position was accidental or deliberate, or had some reasonable explanation, so what?
As for Carolyn-as-a-werewolf, I'll be the first to admit, as one who loved the movie, it was an example of tossing in everything including the kitchen sink. To me, it was another tribute to the original. We got lots and lots, even if bits and pieces, of much that was offered in the original that never appeared in any of the other four different versions. We got a werewolf. We also got Laura. None of it was fleshed out, but we got it. Thankfully, we didn't get John Yaeger's Lucy-meets-Bill-Holden-paper-mache-nose, or boring Adam, or that terrible Daphne/Gerard plotless plot-line. We should count our blessings.
Was the movie far from perfect? Heavens, no. Did it succeed in bringing back the atmosphere of the original? Heavens, yes. I think that some of what it did, from Carolyn as a werewolf to Julia resurrecting as a vampire was also done in the hope of a sequel. Studios do that. I don't care if any version of DS is imperfect. I just want more.
Gerard