By PATRICK McCRAY
Taped on this day in 1967: Episode 356
Julia secrets her notebook from Carolyn and Barnabas. It’s location? The foyer’s grandfather clock. Barnabas tells Julia that she’s a dead woman as soon as it’s found, but Julia counters by saying it will be released to the outside world if it’s found. She and Carolyn come to a stalemate over it… until the Collinwood clock refuses to chime.

There are other reasons, related to production, as to why this section of the series is so stagnant. Burke is dead, and with him, the last of the pre-Barnabas tension is forever gone. Barnabas can’t remain a villain, and Julia is too interesting a Jiminy Cricket to do away with. Besides, Grayson Hall's husband, Sam, was about to see his first script for the show filmed the very next day! Yep, on November 3, episode 357 was Sam’s debut on the show. It wouldn’t be long before his punchy gravitas vitalized the show. I think what we’re seeing are the last gasps of Barnabas-as-villain winding down. We are just less than two weeks from the 1795 flashback, a storyline that would humanize Barnabas, bring in two real villains, and wind up back in a future where Barnabas would be cured quickly before he and Julia would team up against years of truly malevolent foes. I’m sure that the staff had figured out this general tonal shift. At the same time, they were stuck with two more weeks of programming. No storyline could be so vast as to be unsolvable in two weeks… nor could it be so innocuous that viewer tension would drain away before the great experiment of the 1795 origin story.
In the top 10 charts at this time was the Strawberry Alarm Clock’s “Incense and Peppermints,” a song that is an immediate ambassador to the era, used for great effect in BEYOND THE VALLEY OF THE DOLLS and AUSTIN POWERS: INTERNATIONAL MAN OF MYSTERY.
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