Im sure I am not the first person to ask this but had they decided to go with the I guess I call it 2nd original plan cause the original plan was to never introduce the supernatural, that was done as an act of desperation but for the 2nd plan was to kill barnabas and never redeem him, it basically would have been house of dark shadows, obviously we can go down the speculation of the shows viewers getting lower, but I mean had he died before his flashback of 1795, it could have esentially changed most of the show, I mean angelique would have no reason to show up other than to bring him back since she loved him, nicholas could have come only to force julia to make his frankenstein type creatures but even julie was originally supposed to die and supposed to be a man character. Quentin and chris I suppose could have still shown up but a different character would have had to go in the past to stop quentin dying, the leviathan story could have happened with that character, same for parallel time story maybe to escape their world for a better one. The gerard/1840 story might have happened with two different characters, and technically jonathan could still have come back to do his bramwell thing. Overall to me it would have been worse but not tremedously worse, I love barnabas but he was kind of a one note character after a while, this is a guy who spent most of his life in a coffin and just spent most of his arc trying to survive being a vamp, curing himself of vamp or getting a new love interest, I think a reason so many people remember him fondly is he was sort of a first of his kind, a vampire who felt remorse.

But yeah would the original plan to kill him have been better, worse or the same quality of what we got?