Now, how would James Hall have played Carl?? Forget it, not a serious question...
Jeannie... I guess it was hard to process it that way for me (Q placating Barnabas when saying it wasn't his fault) because TV rarely, even now, skips the exposition as to what a character is actually thinking. In real life, someone in Q's position would say something incomplete or cryptic and we'd have to figure the meaning out ourselves, if we were in the room with him. But on TV, if the writers wanted us to believe that version of Q's motives for saying what he did, they'd generally have him go off to some other character and say, "You know, that Barnabas is more dangerous than I thought... I'd better humor him..."
Of course, he probably had no one to say that to. I'm not criticizing. I love it when a program trusts the viewers to have brains and figure things out for themselves. But it throws you (or it did me) when so many other shows spell everything out and DS doesn't. It leads one to look only at what's explained on-screen.