in the fest topics i was surprised to read that lara was 30 when she joined the series.
"angelique" seemed like a much younger girl(despite being 200 years old).

i recall in 1795 that vicki tells the countess dupres during some sort of inquisition that she was 22 years old.

burke,barnabas and roger always seemed "middle aged" to me even though they were supposed to be younger.

i found leiticia to be somewhat campy and unsubtle and just sort of a knockoff of nancy's popular "pansity" character from 1897.

perhaps it's just that i'm not that fond of the 1840 storyline in general.

indeed carolyn gyrating at the blue whale was a great introduction to the character.it's an image that will be burned onto my retina forever.

i always loved the spoiled and petulant carolyn of the 1966 episodes and adored her catty,mean-spirited turn as vampire assistant in 1967.

but,as has been suggested here,my respect for nancy barrett as a great actress grew exponentially with the 1970 parallel-time storyline as well as the 1995 episodes.she was very moving in both sequences.

nancy said in one of the books that she had played eight characters by the time the series ended.i can only count six:carolyn,millicent,charity,pt-carolyn,leiticia(her only portrayal i disliked)and melanie.is she counting 1995 as being a separate character perhaps?

sometimes i forget that after the series had fully embraced the supernatural with the laura collins storyline that for several weeks it actually returned to "regular" soap opera storytelling before the introduction of barnabas.

i often think of one storyline leading directly to the other but these episodes deal with the conclusion of the burke devlin manslaughter plot and the introduction of the jason mcquire blackmail storyline.after laura i recall finding these episodes slightly odd when just a few months earlier there were totally within the show's original context.i also thought the devlin story was wrapped up rather hastily in just a few episodes.i got the impression they knew the series was about to go off in a totally new direction and they just wanted to tie this up.

here we also,for all too brief a moment,meet the lovely lovelady powell.

some of my favorite scenes are the nights of 1967.

julia is working late at the old house and she and barnabas engage in some delicious cat-and-mouse dialogue.
i just love it.so if not necessarily "enemies" i prefer them at least in some way conflicted.it's more complex and interesting to me than when she's sort of functioning as his assistant and time travel companion.

i'm also a fan of this often maligned storyline.

i appreciated barnabas' return to evil ways and more than that his antagonistic relationship with julia in the early episodes.it was fun to see them squabbling again.

it was very creepy and atmospheric and i loved the antique shop set.in general i'm also quite fond of storylines set in the "present" more than the past.

but yeah the vicki and peter thing was unnecessarily infuriating and by the end it was that kitchen sink storytelling that the show often falls prey to but the first two thirds or so were quite compelling.

do i even have to answer this question?