Post by kitekrazyIn the flashback, after Josette and Jeremiah are wed, Barnabas kills him
in a duel. Angelique puts a spell on them to marry.
What's interesting is not how much they changed the backstory, but how
*quickly* they seemed to have done it.
It was on the night that Burke's plane crashed, only a few short
episodes before the 1795 Story began, that Barnabas told the original
version to Julia on Widow's Hill, about how he had never met Josette
until the day that he found himself with the unpleasant social
obligation of going to meet his middle-aged uncle Jeremiah's new
bride. About how he had loved her at first sight, but she had no
interest in him until many years had passed, and she began to realize
that she was still young but was married to a much older man. In all
the early tellings of the story, Josette died before Jeremiah did.
Then bammo, just a few weeks later, Jeremiah and Barnabas are the same
age, and Josette came to Collinwood, never having met Jeremiah, and
for the purpose of marrying Barnabas. It's most confusing when they
do it that way. The "Joshua Rewrote The Family History" schtick is
used to explain away a lot of inconsistencies, but that explanation
doesn't cut it when Barnabas himself is telling his own backstory.
It's possible that the writers were just flying by the seat of their
pants, but it's also possible that something happened that required a
major change in the storyline. If that's the case, then the most
likely thing would be the knowledge that they were about to lose
Anthony George. He had originally signed up for a 6 month contract,
which was going to expire a few weeks into 1795. The original plan
might have been to have Jeremiah in the story much longer, maybe
having him act as Vicki's defender during her trial. Then when they
knew that George was leaving, they wrote him out early, and created
the Peter Bradford character to fill the gap. (Some of this is
speculation, but it would explain why they changed the story so much
so quickly).