All the promise of that serial was totally blown in the following story where the supernatural was minimized and the banal soap plotting given its usual airing.
But the following 3-4 arcs were not good. Caleb was off the show for a year, after he'd appeared in a second arc, Tempted. Without him, the show had no magic at all.
I may not be the best judge because I watched PC from day one. (Watching was something I did with my mom while we were eating dinner. Because of complications from heart disease and Emphysema (smoking
WILL get you
EVERY time, people - don't kid yourselves!), she was on 24-hour oxygen and wasn't able to cook for herself, so nearly every day after work I'd go to her house, cook, and then start the VCR with the soaps she'd taped while watching others. Mom was a HUGE soaps fan!
). But I'd enjoyed the mixture of traditional soap and supernatural elements in some of the arcs between Caleb's appearances. I've even mentioned on the forum that I think DS might have had a much longer life had it blended more traditional soap elements with the supernatural rather than sometimes going so far afield from the soap norms. (Think early fall 1968 with an artificial man and woman (both of whom were amazingly unlikable characters (he much more so than she), one who also happened to be a time travelling, reincarnated bitch), an egomaniacal - not to mention misogynistic warlock/tyrant (though I'll always have a warm spot in my heart for him), a former-witch-turned-vampire (though I LOVED that twist), and last but surely not least - the likes of Jeff Clark (the unintentional horror -yet more horrifying than ALL of the other characters put together!). Thank heaven things calmed down and all that was followed by the superb late fall/winter 1968/1969 build-up to 1897!)
Caleb returned for the show's final four arcs, Naked Eyes, Surrender, Desire and The Gift. They also included demonic worship & a female werewolf. These episodes were quite good, but the show had lost half it's audience by then. It was too late.
I stopped watching PC during the whole candle-making/lady-in-the-portrait/Rafe-come-back-to-me period (not sure what that arc was entitled). But not because I'd thought there was anything wrong or uninvolving with the story - it was solely because life circumstances changed. About that time my responsibilities with the forum increased at least three-fold because the forum was no longer hosted on a forum hosting Web site that handled everything except content for us - we were hosting/maintaining our own forum system/Web site. TV watching became a premium that PC simply didn't survive. I had all I could do to keep up with a few once a week nighttime shows (like Buffy & Angel), forget about a five-days-a-week soap.
I really missed watching PC. But with only so many hours in the day, other priorities had to take precedence...
Had Caleb not left the show for a year, Port Charles would have lasted.
Perhaps. Or perhaps not. Granted, my specific reasons for no longer watching PC were unique. But there's always that possibility that I wasn't necessarily the only member of the audience who hadn't deserted intentionally because of lack of interest but because of changing life circumstance. (I've advanced a similar theory as to why DS' ratings sometimes ebbed and rose. It's no secret that DS' audience was comprised of a lot of students - and when students gratuate, move on to a new school, go out into the world, etc., TV viewing habits can change drastically with disinterest having very little to do with it. But that's a much bigger discussion than I've the time to get into now...)
Anyone think the dark, sexy, younger than Ben Cross Michael Easton(Caleb) might make a good Barnabas on the WB DS?
Well, Easton/Caleb certainly had the Ben-Cross/Barnabas-Snarl-In-The-Woods down pat:
![[b003]](http://www.dsboards.com/SMF/Smileys/classic/b003.gif "Wink/Smile")
