I'm still not sure if I would have liked Jeff staying in longer. I was pretty ready to get rid of him by the time he disappeared into the past. And I was pretty tired of hearing about him by the time he came back for Vicki. Although, you're right, it seems like they were really in a hurry to wrap it up and make way for the new stories. I'd like to know what they had originally planned to do with Vicki and Jeff. If they'd planned that far ahead...
As I was thinking about all this, I began to realize just how many would have been avoided (for better or worse) had Vicki and Jeff stuck around.
[spoiler]- If we still had Jeff, there would have been no Ned Stuart and, presumably, no Sabrina. Which would have been a blessing.
- No matter what they did with the character of Vicki (see below), she probably would have eventually been Barnabas' love interest again, eliminating the need for Roxanne. Could Vicki have possibly been a vampire in 1840? Oh my!
- That awful stunt with Jeff/Peter during the Leviathan storyline might never have happened. Think how much better that whole period of the show would have been...[/spoiler]
I wish we could have seen Alexandra come back as Victoria later on in the series. As most of us know, they did ask her to come back, but she said she would only do so if she could play a baddie. They said no. Big mistake. Wouldn't it have been awesome if we had an evil Vicki in PT? Or, by some trick of time (possibly caused by all of Barnabas' fooling around with it?), could she have shown up in 1840? Possibly as one of Judah Zachary's followers? Or that other thought that I mentioned above? There are so many possibilities. If only the producers/writers/whoever had realized it... I'm sure Alexandra would have done a fabulous job!