Saw what was billed as the “season finale” of HBO’s damnedest-thing-you-ever-saw drama Carnivale. The pay channel seemed reluctant to commission even a second season, so it’s anybody’s guess whether there’ll be a third. Enough plot threads and hints were left at the end to make the basis of more episodes. Yet enough plot threads were resolved that it could have also been the official series finale.

HBO deliberately scheduled Carnivale‘s second season so the 12th and last episode, billed as “the ultimate battle between good and evil,” would air on Easter. And sure enough, it had at least one character (possibly) coming back to life, along with some grisly deaths, a good character turning evil, and a lot of subtext about the Goodness of grisly showbiz types (the 1930s traveling carnival/freak-show people, as possible metaphors for the filmmakers or uncensored cable channels) and the Badness of the forces of repression (the secretly demonic Fundamentalist revival preacher, as a possible metaphor for America’s current religious-political regime).

The show has a very ’90s David Lynch feel to it, and not just because Michael J. Anderson (the Man From Another Place on Twin Peaks) plays the carnival’s boss. It’s full of art, violence, and the seedy underside of nostalgic small-town America. Its sideshow milieu appeals to a ’90s Seattle art-culture aesthetic of the Jim Rose/Moe’s nightclub era. And it’s more chock full of religious/mystical/paranormal secrets and legends (both historic and made-up) than The Da Vinci Code.

Carnivale is delicious epic entertainment, but it will probably work better in DVD form, where viewers can re-view scenes and try to figure out the complex layers of symbolism.