Further along into "The Beginning."
I take back everything negative I previously had to say about writer Francis Swann. Once Art Wallace stopped writing for the show, Ron Sproat came on and I can no longer immediately tell while watching who wrote the episode. What I think was happening with the earlier Swann episodes is that Art Wallace as the "head writer" was keeping the meatier episodes for himself and telling Swann to keep the car in Neutral for his episodes.
Roundabout episode 100, Wallace gets replaced by Ron Sproat and the story seems to start moving at a slightly less glacial pace. They finally reveal who'd killed Bill Malloy. The funny thing is that despite us now knowing the answer, the story didn't just end in one or two episodes. It's now headed into what seems like a slowish unwind. That secret panel behind the bookshelf, has that ever been used later on in the series after [spoiler]Matthew Morgan[/spoiler] leaves the show?
Vickie and Carolyn remain insufferably stupid. Roger remains the resident shitheel/boor. Jerk Devlin remains sort of dashing and cool but you know, he's written as the villain that some fans might be rooting for. It's interesting to me as someone who's watched the entire show and a shorter summary of these earlier episodes before, Burke's character as originally portrayed was kind of the blueprint for Barnabas. He's a villainous type. An ex-con! Wrongfully framed, to be sure, but he's vengeful and tries to destroy the rest of the Collins family beside Roger. He's written as the show's OTHER bad guy. You think his little friend David is going to turn out fine if the family lost the cannery business like he'd planned?
Vickie gets a new boyfriend who doesn't even live in town and doesn't seem to be on the same page with his boss/dad. Those two getting in one another's ways clumsily and nothing really come of it struck me as clumsy writing.
Where I think the writers went wrong was that they rarely came up with B stories in this era. And if they do, they typically got resolved in relatively short order leaving the whole show being about an unsolved murder mystery.
