I'd like to think Charity remained possessed by Pansy, and that eventually, Carl would come back to her by inhabiting someone else's body. I had planned on writing a fanfic about that, but never got around to it.
That would have shown encouraging initiative on Carl's part. Sad though, if he only managed to come out of his shell and take charge of his own destiny after death. Well, it takes a traumatic event to bring life into focus, sometimes....
I hope Pansy Faye actually did love him. We didn't really see enough of her to find out, though "she" cared about Carl after inhabiting Charity, if that counts. That may not have been her. It could have been a simulation of Pansy that Petofi inserted into the minister's daughter, for kicks and for revenge. I doubt a butler's ghost possessed Edward... was that butler even dead, or just someone Petofi met in England?
What happened to your old avatar? That was great!
I never saw the 1897 storyline until recently on my own tapes, not counting when I saw them as a kid at the time. So, since my tapes start with the fire Shaw saves the kids from, the appearance of Carl suddenly, with Ms. Faye, was a total and welcome surprise. I didn't remember the character at all. I never expected such a monkey wrench to be thrown into the seriousness of this program, like that.
If Karlen wanted to leave, why even bring him back from Atlantic City at all? It wasn't all that long between when he returned, and when he was killed. Sudden job offer, I guess.
By the way, JK got considerably better at doing accents other than his own, with time, didn't he? He strikes me as one of those golden-age-of-television type actors, someone who might have been on Playhouse 90 or shows like that, doing working-man roles but wanting to do a lot more. His Carl wasn't that good but starting with the accent he had it was a good try.... and by the end of DS he was able to do a "straight" (sorry, Southerners, nothing personal) northeast American accent, with even a sort of aristocratic dignity to it, in a perfectly natural-sounding way... though this continued to not be his natural speaking voice, as we know from interviews.