Carnivale is an epic story set in the '30s
about the struggle of good and evil
and I guess that's it in a nutshell.
Let's shake some dust!
For every unclean spirit and hateful birth.
It is.
One of the reasons the show was kind of fun to do
is that it's a time - the Dust Bowl era -
that you heard about but didn't know much about it.
We had a very cursory knowledge of the Dust Bowl.
I grew up in Texas, you'd think I'd know more,
but it, for some reason, hadn't been a subject that was deeply covered
in my history classes, and so we really dove in.
lt's one of the things we love as writers anyway
is to sort of learn the new world that we have to write
and there was so much to learn.
I thought that in a carnival there's magic. There's also fakes,
and also people maybe with real abilities.
It was the perfect place to set a show
where you didn't know who was good or evil, who was real and who was fake.
So I thought that was a brilliant part of the concept,
it wasn't just on the streets of Chicago, or the streets of any city,
it was really in a place where there is magic
or people thought there could be magic.
We operated the show no different than any other show.
I think the creator of the show has a vision
and it's everybody else's job, non-writers and the staff of writers, to help realise that vision.
Everybody realised that Dan knew what this show was
and had this huge vision for the show.
A lot of times we would sort of take the attitude of
"we don't even fully understand it,
"we're only seeing a small piece of the puzzle."
And we would rely on Dan to step in and say,
"No, I don't want to do that" or "This doesn't quite fit. "
All you have to say is, "Dan, I'm confused about this."
or "What do you think about Brother Justin doing this?"
And he would spew forth, you know, this really interesting stuff
and then we would build on it.
He had done a lot of research and had had all this information for many years.
So I just tried to put myself in the position of the viewer
and sort of doling out information to them.
I would have to understand it first
to be able to help transform it into a television show.
As a room full of writers,
that was probably the most exciting writer room that we've ever been in
in terms of the kind of ideas that were expressed.
And so many times a writer would come bursting into the room saying, "I got it!"
You know. And this complex mythology finally evolved.
And it was a wonder to behold, you know,
because it was, you know, sometimes you felt you were going crazy
because there was so much stuff to think about and bring in.
It was funny, when the show started
I remember people arguing about, "OK, wait, is Ben evil and is Justin good?
"ls Justin evil? ls Ben good?"
Cos we saw Justin taking care of the poor and all these nice things,
and it's so funny because to me the thesis was set out in the very first episode.
We see Ben lay hands on a little girl and heal her.
We see Justin make some poor old lady vomit coins.
I have sinned!
When you're dealing with avatars,
dealing with people with god-like or devil-like abilities
you're trying to let people understand it
so you want to be consistent - whatever the rule is, be consistent.
So we had in our mind what we thought their talent was, their abilities,
whether good or bad, and tried to be consistent.
People appreciate it cos we're honest.
But it's open to some interpretation.
One thing that I've noticed in this show
is they set up an expectation and then they invert it.
For instance, at the beginning you have Justin, he's a priest.
You think of priests as good people.
Ben has escaped from a chain gang and is wanted for murder.
That's not a very nice thing.
So you start out with this expectation of Ben as someone not very good,
Justin being somebody good,
then over the course of the two seasons, they swap.
Ben's the creature of light, Justin's the creature of darkness.
His background is completely different from Justin's.
Justin's educated, Justin has a moral and ethical structure around him.
He has any number of lessons
and quotes to fall back on to support whatever he wants to do,
any number of rationalisations.
And he also is a respected member of society.
Ben, on the other hand, is not. He's a forgotten member of society.
He's never been inculcated with any hope.
Why should he rise up?
There's nothing that's helping him rise beyond who he is and what he is
which is, you know, just some of the flotsam and jetsam of that time.
And so he would naturally be reluctant to think
that he is destined for some kind of universal purpose.
The black blizzard episode... there really was such a thing.
That black blizzard actually occurred.
And at the time people thought it was the wrath of God.
That God was smoting the Midwest and America for hubris or whatever.
I thought it was kind of cool that
in the CGl that they did of the blizzard, you know,
it kind of looked like the towers at 9/11 .
With the smoke and the billowing and...
and I know that I had a kind of a visceral reaction
when I saw the CGI of it.
Like, oh, my God, that's scary, that's, you know, God punishing us.
Hawkins.
- What the hell are you doing? - Welcome.
I almost got dead out there!
You were not in any real danger.
I think we both know that.
What Lodz was saying to Ben was
"You have the power to stop the blizzard."
Which Ben did not believe. At that point Ben didn't believe -
he barely understood - what he was about.
That was supposed to show the audience
what could be possible in future seasons,
you know, if Ben became a master of his craft.
Make it stop.
Stop it now!
Open the door.
Lodz was trying to say, look what you could do
if you had the knowledge that I have and that I can impart to you.
So Lodz was playing a game with him, trying to manipulate Ben.
Samson sees how the character of Lodz is sort of sniffing around Ben
for his own benefit.
So Samson sort of takes Ben under his wing
to try to help guide him a little bit
through the pitfalls of the dynamics that exist in Carnivale.
He's the helper to the reluctant saviour.
Does that mean anything to you?
Ben, I mean, not only is the healing
one aspect of his power, physical healing,
but when we got into the second season we saw it more.
We saw a piece of it in the first season,
when he heals the woman with the baby
but in the second season we began to see what Ben's true power was,
and that it was not healing people's bodies, it was healing people's spirits.
I'm sorry.
Don't do that no more.
No. I won't.
Ever again.
And really that's where Ben's real power is.
lt's the mirror image of Brother Justin.
ls this the ramped entrance, here? At the rear of the temple?
Yes, sir, I believe so.
You see? That way you won't miss a single service.
Norman is Justin's last link to humanity.
He is the man that found Iris and Justin as children
just after the train wreck.
He took them in,
you know, gave Justin his appreciation for religion,
and that's the reason Justin went and joined the ministry.
I am a changed man.
I can see that.
Norman becomes the benevolent father figure.
And that concerns you?
Yes, it does.
Probably Justin didn't know his father much at all.
And so a male in a male's life is very important.
And who could have a better example than Norman Balthus, a man of God?
And so Justin would want to emulate him
but he would never feel worthy of him because of what's brewing inside of him.
It wouldn't matter to Norman because he's such a good man
that he would forgive his adopted son anything and try to bring him to Christ.
Justin, please...
you must turn away from all this before it's too late.
Turn away from what?
Say it.
Justin, there is a demon within you.
Let me help you.
And just sort of provides this human link.
Where Iris and Justin have the avataric blood,Norman's just human.
And I think that's the importance
of the last scene between Justin and Norman in the tent.
Justin finally severs his ties with humanity when he kills Norman.
The power of Christ compels you.
Behold! The holy evil is come!
With Justin and Iris, they were the children of Belyakov, from Russia.
Iris was first-born, she's about six years older than Justin,
so she's the protective older sister.
Since she's the child of an avatar she has avatar blood in her
but only first-born males can be avatars as far as anybody knows,
so she's a vectori, where she carries the blood
so, you know, her children will have blood as well,
and if a dynasty dies out a new avatar can pop up somewhere
out of a family that has avataric blood within it.
So at some point when a mother gives birth to an avatar
she becomes crazy.
Something to do with the power of the avatar,
something renders the mother barren and insane.
So all we really know about the childhood of Iris and Justin
is their mother said that Belyakov was an evil man.
So she took them and fled to America.
And they were in a train accident,
everybody died on the train except for Iris and Justin.
They found a Russian survivor and Justin used his powers to kill this man
and then blocked it from his memory.
But Iris knew about it, so she knew that Justin could do great things.
You really should have knocked.
For a very long time she was completely devoted to her brother
and to everything Brother Justin stood for and everything he believed in,
and in fact she was sort of the power behind...
in some ways the power behind the man.
And then at a certain point, I think she changed.
I'm sorry, Alexi.
I can't give you what you want.
What is it you think I want?
Remorse.
Regret.
And I would do it again for you.
The relationship between Iris and Justin is so complicated
and has so many elements to it.
I mean, there's the implication of the incest between them
and there are the competing desires that they each have
to fulfil their own needs.
I think that in this case, yeah, that episode was kind of a turning point
where Iris started to feel like Justin was going to basically hang her out to dry
and she wasn't gonna stand for that.
Iris is an interesting character because,
again it's the dual nature of the character,
on the surface she's this God-fearing, you know, a spinster.
But underneath she's probably the most evil character on the whole show.
When he discovered that she had set the fire that killed the kids
she became a liability
- and so he began to... - Cut her out.
And that betrayal went to her core.
And I think that it then challenged her loyalty
and that's why, you know, she acts pretty crazy that second season.
Because she's grasping at things. She's looking for her own power.
I need to speak with you.
I was proud of what you did today.
Such courage.
Only you and I know his true nature.
Our knowledge is his weakness.
But Amy - this is how good an actress she is in the final scene -
when she's feeding Norman she says...
When I die I'm going to hell.
And if I'm very, very fortunate
my brother will be waiting for me with an embrace.
And it is the creepiest moment in the whole show.
You realise that she does love him.
She realises how bad he is
but she knows that they're both doomed.
But maybe, if we're lucky, we'll both die, we'll have peace
and we'll spend eternity in hell together.
That's really scary.
I feel that you haven't quite surrendered to the call.
There's still some doubt within you...
Sofie.
So Sofie becomes the most interesting character in season two.
Obviously in season one she was the familiar of Ben
and we see the relationship between her and her mom.
Apollonia's an interesting character.
She has powers of her own - the ability to see the future, see the past.
And when she gave birth to Sofie as the Omega
she had the same problem that any mother of an avatar has,
of being rendered insane.
ln the case of Apollonia, her insanity seems to take the case of catatonia.
She's conscious but she's not able to interact with the world around her using her body
except for the one instance where she says to Ben "You're the one".
She knows Ben's an avatar.
You know, probably knows that he's a creature of light.
Probably knows he has a role to play with her daughter.
She's the only character that knows Sofie's the Omega.
Apollonia definitely was trying to keep
my character from realising what she was
and realising her responsibility.
You best be careful what you say to me, Momma.
I'm not in a very forgiving mood today.
She's trying to drive Sofie mad, trying to drive Sofie to suicide,
that's what she's doing. And...
she's trying her best to keep her from fulfilling any kind of destiny
or going any further along that path.
Just before Appy had decided to try to kill Sofie at the end of season one
she had told Lodz something, and Lodz was sort of,
"That's impossible. That can't be true."
So what we think is, she had told Lodz
that Sofie is the Omega, she's an avatar.
As far as Lodz and anybody else steeped in avatar lore is concerned,
avatars could only be male, so he was like,
"Well, that's stupid. That's idiotic."
But with the extra knowledge gained from dying
cos he died at the end of season one but he's still around,
so he has a new perspective on things so he knows Sofie is the Omega.
The beginning of season two she is bereft,
she has none of what she was familiar with.
As awful as that situation might have been with her mom she has nothing left.
It left my character with so many questions
and so much, you know, sadness and anger and confusion
that, you know, not understanding why she would do something like that.
And at the same time being the only thing I really had.
And with her being gone it sort of made me think
like, what am I doing here? I have no connection to anything now.
What?
We can't stay in this truck all night.
It was finally a culmination after two years
and we knew that people wanted to see them do this.
You know, have sex, and we knew that they were both avatars
so we'd joke about avataric sex.
And we talked about, OK, if they are gonna have sex
then something big is gonna have to happen.
lt's going to affect the heavens, which is why we have a huge rainstorm.
We hadn't had rain in the show up until that moment.
Rain.
The heavens burst open and suddenly it's like a miracle.
The light and the dark have come together.
I think part of the way we sort of structured the whole episode too,
we put them in the truck together
for the majority of the episode so that we could build the sexual tension.
Before this episode these characters had gone off and done so much else
that we had to really bring them back together
and really have to be exposed to each other,
and share their own sense of isolation
and being different from everybody else.
And that also brings them together.
There's a little bit of an exorcism... There's definitely that element of it.
Sort of freeing me from being haunted by my mother.
But it's also because we are opposites.
Like, we both have that kind of...
supernatural power, the combination of the two is, like...
explosive.
We felt that that is the moment that releases her.
Almost, you know, she had to sleep with... She sleeps with Ben,
and then after that there is nothing left.
That was... There are no more connections.
And just as the rain stops Brother Justin comes on the radio.
Let the wicked man forsake his ways.
Suddenly the darkness again.
Trees are really open to symbolic manifestations.
lt's got its roots in the soil, its leaves reaching to the sky.
And so, darkness reaching for light.
You have the mythologies of the Tree of Life,Tree of Knowledge.
The branching of the trees,
the dark heart dwelling within the tree.
lt's the tree of good and evil at the centre of the garden.
lt's one of those iconic things, a dead twisted tree like that.
There's a meaning there
and that was really what prompted me to place it on the chest.
You know, this is where you will build your empire,
this is what it all boils down to, is this tree.
And it just had a certain power.
At the end of season two our two main characters have come together
and have had what amounts to their first battle.
Both those characters, whose avatars are adolescents,
you know, they've really just hit puberty.
They become more complex as time goes by,and the question becomes -
who's really serving light and who's really serving darkness?
And what are their destinies in their worlds?
Everything had been building up to that point and then the revelation of Sofie as the Omega.
And by raising her father at the end, bringing him back to life,
it was going to indicate that she was truly evil.
What's interesting is she is the Omega so there's good in her too.
There was a lot of discussion as to what Sofie feels about her powers.
Does she understand that she's evil or not?
Who will she be? And I think at the end of the season we weren't sure.
We knew that she was going to be pivotal.
And I think season three would have been pretty much centred on Sofie
and the internal struggle of her good versus evil.
Thinking that things have tied together, and just that little bit at the end
saying, "No, it's not what you think."
Ben was left bleeding
and found by the carnival driving away but still breathing.
Jonesy had gotten shot but if you look at it closely
he wasn't shot in a specific place. He collapsed.
They just opened up what happens from this point forward.
I don't know, as writers, if we'll ever have the chance to work on a show
that was that unusual, that creative.
And it just had these characters that I think were deeply human.
- And... - Flawed and complicated.
And real.
It was a special series. It will always be in my heart.
There were a lot of people that had creative input into the show
and it was sort of like, what I brought to it was a vessel.
And it's like, does this fit in that vessel?
Does this enhance it? Does it make it work better?
I had an itinerary for the show and where I wanted to take it
but, you know, creating it was a collaborative process.
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