Carl / contains spoilers

A little thing that I need to vent.... [spoiler]"heroic" Barnabas I Chings his way back to the late 19th century, to help two people, and ends up rather unapologetically slaughtering a relative, Carl Collins, as inoffensive a guy as one could imagine.     And Q merely says "Well, you had no choice!"    Yes, there was no other way to handle the situation, Barney Baby.     What a very understanding guy Q was.     No gain for Barney, since David is saved yet Carl gets sacrificed, and Chris Jennings is the same as he was.[/spoiler]

  Very true.  That's why I'd never really Barnabas a full-fledged hero.  He starts as a villain, and eventually attains the status of anti-hero.  His moral code remains rather skewed.  As someone was discussing on one of the online horror movie forums awhile back, Barnabas always decided who lived and who died, even after he became a "good guy."
   

Although the loyalty and love he shows for the present day family is commendable.

Please.  Barnabas Collins left enough corpses lying around to suggest the Black Death had arrived in Collinsport.  The fact that he hesitated to slaughter his relatives with the same abandon as he did other folk does not assuage his guilt nor diminish his responsibility. The death of Carl Collins was lazy writing, in my opinion, and a pretty lousy way to let John Karlen go do something else.

     Totally agree, Raineypark.  He could have left for Atlantic City to look for his missing Pansy.  It all seemed so brutal to kill a relative.

As John Karlen wanted to leave DS at the time, they never should have brought Carl back at all just to permanently write him off 1897.  They should have done a Tony Peterson on him and never show him again as Carl was not important to the 1897 story.

Loved Carl, however I thought the scene where Quentin locked him in the mausoleum was pretty damn cool.

I was very fond of the humorous Carl Collins with his ever so funny pranks, even in the face of heartfelt sorrow, never really understood by his family.
Wouldn't it have been wonderful if only the writers had allowed for Carl and Pansy to return to Atlantic City, marry, then opened a taffy sweet shop sending the occasional prank taffy box to Edward for his amusement! (and he would fall for it every time too!)
I'm sure had Carl survived he would have invented the Carl Cushion.. causing the person sitting on it to express how Carl felt towards his turned up nose ancestors... 

Wouldn't it have been wonderful if only the writers had allowed for Carl and Pansy to return to Atlantic City, marry, then opened a taffy sweet shop sending the occasional prank taffy box to Edward for his amusement!

Well, the real issue was getting John Karlen out of the production.  But if that had not been the problem, the possibilities for the character of Carl are limited only by our imaginations.  I, personally, would have had a gentle hearted lady of the evening drag him out of town to some safer place.....say, the Theatre district in Manhattan.  He was a natural for vaudeville. 

 I'd like to think Charity remained possessed by Pansy, and that eventually, Carl would come back to her by inhabiting someone else's body.  I had planned on writing a fanfic about that, but never got around to it. 

     That would be such a sweet, romantic story,  PennyDreadful.  Let me know if you ever write it.

I'd like to think Charity remained possessed by Pansy, and that eventually, Carl would come back to her by inhabiting someone else's body.  I had planned on writing a fanfic about that, but never got around to it.

That would have shown encouraging initiative on Carl's part.    Sad though, if he only managed to come out of his shell and take charge of his own destiny after death.    Well, it takes a traumatic event to bring life into focus, sometimes....

I hope Pansy Faye actually did love him.   We didn't really see enough of her to find out, though "she" cared about Carl after inhabiting Charity, if that counts.    That may not have been her.   It could have been a simulation of Pansy that Petofi inserted into the minister's daughter, for kicks and for revenge.     I doubt a butler's ghost possessed Edward... was that butler even dead, or just someone Petofi met in England?

What happened to your old avatar?   That was great!

I never saw the 1897 storyline until recently on my own tapes, not counting when I saw them as a kid at the time.    So, since my tapes start with the fire Shaw saves the kids from, the appearance of Carl suddenly, with Ms. Faye, was a total and welcome surprise.    I didn't remember the character at all.   I never expected such a monkey wrench to be thrown into the seriousness of this program, like that.

If Karlen wanted to leave, why even bring him back from Atlantic City at all?     It wasn't all that long between when he returned, and when he was killed.    Sudden job offer, I guess.

By the way, JK got considerably better at doing accents other than his own, with time, didn't he?     He strikes me as one of those golden-age-of-television type actors, someone who might have been on Playhouse 90 or shows like that, doing working-man roles but wanting to do a lot more.     His Carl wasn't that good but starting with the accent he had it was a good try.... and by the end of DS he was able to do a "straight" (sorry, Southerners, nothing personal) northeast American accent, with even a sort of aristocratic dignity to it, in a perfectly natural-sounding way... though this continued to not be his natural speaking voice, as we know from interviews.

Please.  Barnabas Collins left enough corpses lying around to suggest the Black Death had arrived in Collinsport.  The fact that he hesitated to slaughter his relatives with the same abandon as he did other folk does not assuage his guilt nor diminish his responsibility. The death of Carl Collins was lazy writing, in my opinion, and a pretty lousy way to let John Karlen go do something else.

LOL! Too true! And well said! They do that a lot on tv, don't they? You know, I felt they did that with Quantum Leap when it was cancelled... It was axed abruptly so they had to quickly think of a way to end it. Of course, you can never please everyone, but what
they came up with was just wholly unsatisfying, imo. Such was the case with Carl Collins. That only renewed my hatred for Barnabas Collins... but I'm over that now... or AM I?  ~DJ

Still, it shows Barnabas's completely independent sense of right and wrong, that had little or nothing to do with society's standards, for better or worse, no matter how "good" he became.    He was judge jury and executioner and never deviated from this.    I don't think we ever saw him stopping to think about the morality of this, which is part of what made the character interesting.    Otherwise, he might have become too much of a standard boring TV hero.     This might also show a more realistic or responsible morality in a way, since each individual really does decide right and wrong for her/himself anyway, no matter how much one may try to yield or defer to society's "rules" to decide right and wrong--- so we might as well own up to it, to the fact that it's our individual decision.   He did.

Still, it shows Barnabas's completely independent sense of right and wrong, that had little or nothing to do with society's standards, for better or worse, no matter how "good" he became.    He was judge jury and executioner and never deviated from this.    I don't think we ever saw him stopping to think about the morality of this, which is part of what made the character interesting.

  I've always thought that his utter lack of remorse was precisely what made him loathsome. A minority oppinion, to be sure....