In the pilot, Willie's girlfriend Kelly mentions her university professor...
Kelly: Stokes..
Willie: The freak with the beret?
Kelly: Bow-tie. He has some pretty wild theories about the Collins family...
She then explains that he's told her about the hidden fortune in the mausoleum and has worked out the location from rare papers he's assigned her to index. So, indirectly, Stokes is the reason that Barnabas is released this time around, and I'm sure that wasn't coincidental.
Yes, I saw this. I believe that Stokes would've become a more crucial character as time went on, perhaps spurred by Kelly's death by Barnabas' hands to come to Collinwood to look for her. I think it would've made a particularly good plot point to have Vicki and Stokes or Julia and Stokes to become close somehow. They could have late night meetings at the college. And with college being a HUGE turning point for any TV show nowadays, it would provide an additional setting for exploration of and speculation about those strange goings-on at the Collins mansion.
As for the original Stokes, I too loved his character. I just wished that he would've been brought farther into the fold and become even more close to Barnabas and Julia. It can be debated as to whether or not Stokes truly ever found out that Barnabas was a vampire. And given all the times he helped them out whether advertantly or inadvertantly, he deserved to know. But, Julia and Barnabas were probably correct in keeping the secrets from him, as much as possible, because as moral and upstanding as he was, there's no telling what he would've done with the information once he knew it.
Just look at HODS, and how his character was there. And while the characters weren't exactly the same in the movies, I can safely say that they pretty much possessed most, maybe all in some cases, qualities that the characters possessed in the actual series. This goes for HODS more that NODS.
