CARNIVALE: New Canaan, CA

By Jason Davis     March 29, 2005

Wither CARNIVALE? The story expected proves to be only the opening act of something far more complicated and intriguing. The point to which the audience was driven seems not to be its intended destination. Messrs. Knauf and Torme have wrought a season finale that forever alters the shape of things to come, and only next year's premiere will offer any clue as to the circumference of this epic tale.

After last week's interrupted action and pause for reflection, the impetus of the narrative returns with a vengeance as Ben Hawkins, Samson, and Clayton Jones plot to lure the wicked Brother Justin to his demise. Brother Justin, avatar of evil, has discovered that his maid, unknowingly his daughter, knows the boy he seeks to kill in order to fulfill his destiny of bringing about hell on Earth. Justin's treacherous sister, Iris, has brought the carnival to their very doorstep and Good and Evil prepare for their imminent confrontation.

As the seeds for this season's revelations were laid in the preceding year, it's probably the case that the show's future rests hidden within the twelve installments just concluded. The genius of Knauf et al is their capacity for offering the future before the audience's eyes while misdirecting them from the truth with the skill a stage magician employs in his own illusionary art. The first season reveals that Sophie is the product of her mother's rape by a tattooed man. The second explains the nature of Scudder, Belyakov, and their inheritors. When Justin receives the mark of the Usher, Sophie's place in the story should become evident, but the viewers remain transfixed by what they perceive as the crux of the story: Will Ben find Hack Scudder before Justin? These ancillary plot threads feel like tributaries diverging from the stream of the narrative, but the writers have worked their magician's trick: the tributaries feed the main narrative rather than divert its torrent.

Now, in the aftermath of "New Canaan, CA", the shape of what's come before is made clear, the pieces on the chessboard have found new homes, and characters have been spent in unexpected ways to serve a story that writhes in the mind like the dreams with which the series first revealed its theme. Rarely does TV aspire to a narrative of this premeditated complexity, even rarer is such a series presented to a network with the wisdom to air it, and rarest of all does it succeed in loosing that story upon an audience erudite enough to appreciate its intricacies. These fortunes would seem to have come to pass and, HBO willing, the next chapter of this incredible tale will place new mysteries before its audience with the surefooted assurance that the answers to each twist of plot are fairly presented for all to see... if they know where to look. Good and Evil continue their dance, and rarely has the dance been orchestrated with such skill and aplomb as tasteful viewers will find in the depths of the Great Depression, where two bits offered admittance to the mysteries of the travelling carnival.