with such a great regular cast it's strange that the writers felt that they needed to come up with a new monster,or gimmick,or time travel element every few months.
I would have like to know what the writers came up after the 1841 Parallel Time. We have read about a possible return to 1971 where Liz and Roger finds out that Barnabas was a vampire and Julia travels to Asia to search for Adam. That would have been a great story.