Ben Hawkins

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Ben Krohn Hawkins is a fictional character from the HBO drama Carnivàle played by Nick Stahl.

[edit] History

Ben Hawkins was the child of Henry Scudder and Flora Hawkins. His father left when Ben was an infant, leaving him in the care of his mentally unstable mother.

Ben was born with a gift, the Christ-like ability to heal. He managed to hide his abilities throughout most of his childhood and early adulthood, most likely because of his mother, who was terrified of her son's power and proclaimed him to be 'marked by the Beast.'

Ben was also a wanted chain-gang fugitive. According to Daniel Knauf, the show's creator, 'Ben was imprisoned for assaulting a bank officer. He subsequently killed a guard while escaping'.

[edit] The Avatar of Light

After his mother's death from dust pneumonia, Ben was picked up by a traveling carnival that 'just happened' to be crossing through town, on orders from the leader of the group, a dwarf named Samson (who in return reports to a mysterious, unseen figure known only as Management.)

While traveling with the carnival, Ben sought to learn about his past, and the origins of his strange powers. Among other things, he learned that the power came with a price; to give life, he must also take life in return. (Mostly from small animals and crops). He could raise the dead, but only by deliberately killing someone else.

Management eventually revealed to Ben that he was the Avatar of Light, and that in order to prevent the Apocalypse, he must track down and destroy his opposite, the Avatar of Darkness (a preacher named Brother Justin Crowe).

Ben also sought out Henry Scudder, both for Management, and for his own curiosity about the man who fathered and then abandoned him. After a number of near-misses and harrowing encounters, Ben finally came face to face with his father during the latter part of the show's second season.

Eventually it was revealed that even though Ben was the creature of light, his father was the previous creature of darkness. When he brought his father before Management (the previous creature of light, and Scudder's old nemesis, a man named Lucius Belyakov), a fight ensued in which Ben was forced to kill Management, fatally stabbing him with a WWI trench knife, his avataric weapon acquired from his grandmother and passed down to him by his father, and thereby infusing the weapon with avataric blood, transforming it into a weapon powerful enough to kill his own adversary.

Scudder ran from the trailer after the fight and was kidnapped by Varlyn Stroud, an escaped convict and acolyte of Brother Justin. As Ben had killed Justin's father to receive his powers, Justin killed Ben's by decapitating Scudder with a sickle.

Now understanding his powers more fully (having received his 'Boon,' the sum of his predecessor's knowledge, after killing Belyakov), Ben set out to confront Brother Justin on the grounds of his new ministry in New Canaan, California.

Ben and Brother Justin finally met in battle in a cornfield outside New Canaan, a battle in which he slew the minister, after which he passed out from his own grievous wounds on top of the fallen Justin's body, only to be found the next morning.

As the carnival left New Canaan, however, Sofie, a former lover of Ben's (and, unbeknownst to Ben, the daughter of his mortal enemy), came to her father and laid her hands upon him. Immediately the cornfield around them began to whither and die, highly reminiscent of what happened when Ben healed a crippled little girl's legs in the show's first episode.