Brother Justin Crowe

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Brother Justin Crowe is a fictional character in the American television series Carnivàle. The drama, set in the 1930s American Midwest, aired on HBO from 2003 to 2005. Brother Justin was played by Clancy Brown.

[edit] History

Born Alexi Belyakov, son of Lucius Belyakov. Alexi and his sister Irina (later Iris) were rescued at a young age by Reverend Norman Balthus, a Methodist minister who raised the two children as his own after their mother was killed in a train derailment.

Even as a child, Justin was apparently gifted with strange powers. Once, shortly before coming under the care of Reverend Balthus, he telekinetically snapped a man's neck. He eventually forgot about this incident, but Iris remembered, and kept the knowledge from Justin throughout most of his life.

As a young man, Justin became infatuated with a gypsy woman named Apollonia Bojakshiya. Sensing his true nature she repeatedly spurned his advances. Eventually Justin forced his way into her home and brutally raped her. Unbeknownst to Justin, Apollonia would later give birth to a child, a little girl named Sofie, before falling permanently into a catatonic state.

As an adult, Justin followed in his adoptive father's footsteps and became a minister, eventually tending his flock in Mintern, California. The worst was yet to come.

[edit] The Avatar of Darkness

In 1934, Justin once again began exhibiting strange supernatural abilities, including the power to force people to relive their greatest sins in the form of terrifying, traumatic visions that Justin himself would also experience. Despite the anger and self-interest that often lay at the heart of these episodes, Justin initially believed himself to be doing the work of God.

After his church was destroyed in a fire that took the lives of several innocent children (an act, unbeknownst to him at the time, committed by his sister Iris), Justin became a desperate, disillusioned wanderer, keeping company with migrants and hobos before finally ending up in a sanitarium following an unsuccessful suicide attempt. While hospitalized, Justin discovered he had the ability to manipulate and control those around him through sheer force of will, eventually commanding rooms full of people to fall silent simply by uttering the words "be still" (even though, in some cases, the people affected were not even within earshot). After using his newfound abilities to secure his release and return to Mintern, Justin quickly began the work of rebuilding his ministry.

Shortly thereafter, during a service, Reverend Balthus attempted to baptize Justin, who wanted to be 'reborn' in the eyes of God, and was shocked to see the water from the baptismal font turn to blood as it touched Justin's forehead. Suspecting that Justin might be possessed by a demon, Reverend Balthus confronted his surrogate son, but Justin became enraged and tried to make Norman relive his worst sin. To Justin's horror, Norman's 'greatest evil' turned out to be saving Justin's own life as a little boy. Devastated, Justin begged the priest to kill him, but Balthus could not bring himself to do it.

After discovering his true nature, Justin quickly began to embrace the evil within him, reasoning that "perhaps God has a different plan for some of us." Gathering a huge flock of worshippers (mostly migrants and Okies) outside Mintern via his nightly radio sermons and newfound abilities of persuasion, Justin was also approached by a scholar named Wilfred Talbot-Smith, who identified Justin as 'the Usher' and told him that, in order for him to gain his full measure of power and fulfill his destiny, he must find and kill a man named Henry Scudder (unbeknownst to Justin, the father of his counterpart, Ben Hawkins, and the previous Avatar of Darkness). With the help of escaped convict Varlyn Stroud, whom he was able to influence telepathically via radio transmissions, Justin eventually managed to kill Scudder.

Meanwhile, unbeknownst to either of them, father and daughter were reunited, as Sofie Bojakshiya came to work at Justin's house in New Canaan (the site of his growing ministry) as a chambermaid.

Shortly thereafter, in a cornfield outside New Canaan, Justin at long last met his adversary, the Avatar of Light, in battle, a battle in which his enemy was badly injured and Justin himself was slain. However, Sofie, the Omega, the Final Avatar, quickly arrived and placed her hands on Justin's chest, causing the corn stalks around them to wither and fall away highly reminiscent of what happened when Ben healed a crippled little girl's legs in the show's first episode.

[edit] The Usher of Destruction

According to Wilfred Talbot-Smith (as well as Daniel Knauf, the show's creator), Justin is not only the final Avatar of Darkness, but also the Usher of Destruction, a figure whose coming was foretold in the Gospel of Matthias (an ancient book filled with Avataric lore and mythology). Unfortunately, the show was cancelled before the ultimate purpose of the Usher (as well as that of the Omega, Justin's daughter) could be explained. During a recent convention appearance, however, Knauf revealed that had the show continued, Brother Justin would have come back, with Sofie and his sister Iris apparently still at his side. He also claims that Justin would have continued to struggle with the darker side of his own nature, and that ultimately the audience would have been left in doubt as to whether Justin was truly evil or his counterpart truly good. Knauf followed up in an online forum that Justin and Sofie would eventually marry, and that a child would be involved. Future plot development would revolve around the parentage of the child and Sofie's coming into her own as the Omega to Justin's Usher.