msmemory and I are famously always behind on our media -- magazines, books, and movies, but most especially television. We time-shift entire seasons routinely, and catch up with them when we get a chance. So it is that we only tonight finally got to the last episode of Carnivale, which ran on HBO last year.This is a remarkable show. It is a story of Good and Evil writ both large and small, the story of two men wrestling with what it means to have power beyond what men should. It is a tale of the most sacred and the most profane. It is the apocalypse, told in the travels of a small carnival scrabbling for life during the Depression, and in a small town that is not quite as innocent as it would like to be. It is a show with enough confidence in its pacing that the two primary plotlines do not even intersect, save metaphorically, in the entire first season.
It is quite possibly the best single season of television I've ever seen -- by far the best first season of any show.
And dammit, it's been cancelled...
