And again, the only times Barnabas finds any joy in life are when he's stalking and killing someone he thinks deserves it. He actually smiles.
My impression was that Barnabas was smiling simply for the purpose of spooking Sky.
I intensely enjoyed the whole Sky-killing scene, even though I have argued for sympathy for Sky Rumson - but my enjoyment had very little to do with lack of sympathy for sky. After all, I also enjoy the scene in which Barnabas killed "someone" in 1967.
There was a nice little detail in Grayson Hall's performance during her first scene with Barnabas. They were talking about Barnabas's injection-induced cravings, and Barnabas mentions parallel time out of the blue. Julia says, "What are you talking about?" in a nice undramatic way. No light has gone in Julia's head; Barnabas has just uttered what is a complete non-sequitur to her and she can barely register it. Very nice.
We learned - or anyway, I learned - today that the cravings come to Barnabas in waves, which explains why he hasn't been biting all and sundry. So that's taken care of.
Of course Carolyn had a dream in which Sky told her he would come back. We have to set up that up for possible future storylines, so now that's taken care of, too.
And with Jeb and Sky dead and Jeb primed for return, we've cleared the decks for Barnabas to go into parallel time. I suppose it has to happen, because the majority of the viewers wanted out of the Leviathan storyline, but there were possibilities here in real time. I would have liked to see those cravings of Barnabas becoming more and more frequent while Julia tried to deal with them - while, of course, she would also be trying to deal with her own feelings of guilt at having herself caused the cravings, even though her intentions had been good. I would like to have seen Julia discuss with Quentin and Willie the possibility that it would be necessary to destroy Barnabas - and of course, Dark Shadows being what it is, Barnabas would overhear them and move his coffin to a hiding place. Also, I think life at Collinwood would have been more interesting if Jeb hadn't been killed off. He knows about Barnabas, and he suspects that Quentin is the original 1897 Quentin. Barnabas decided to help Jeb because Carolyn loved him, not because Barnabas had any particular fondness for Jeb, and Quentin followed Barnabas's lead. I can't remember if we ever heard what Julia thought about Jeb most recently. But Jeb has a lot to learn about being a grown-up, and he probably still has issues with Barnabas. There are lots of interesting character possibilities here, and they have all been thrown off of Widows Hill - unless Jeb returns, as he conveniently promised Carolyn he would.
