All the Prophets in the House

Carnivale has opened a mighty big metaphysical can of worms on its viewers as the battle to inevitably be waged between good and evil begins to unveil itself. This is a show with an almost painful patience at revealing its characters, as if it's saying "You are about to witness one of the most collossal conflicts in the history of the universe. Let's make sure you fully understand what brought every piece into place for it to happen." The allure of, say, the Sopranos is in waiting to see what will become of Tony Soprano... Sure, hints have been dropped that the show will end in Big T's demise, but we have no idea where that will come from. Also. Tony has been working towards remedying his feeling of the end being nigh both practically and psychologically. So, there are no guarantees. Instead we watch to see where the characters will bring themselves. Carnivale is different in that we have the feeling that we are seeing a history of the story; we don't have a full character sketch for any of the major players at this point, but revelations to who they are gradually given. Even within an episode we see this structure; we don't understand the relevance of things until the conclusion (even then, we oftentimes are only assured that items will have relevance to the grand conclusion).

Anyway. We've hit a point where we know enough that we can actually talk about what's going on in the show and not just stare at each blankly and say, "What the hell just happened?"