Pushing Daisies is three for three. Tonight's third episode of the series was just as good as the first two, maybe even a little funnier. Olive Snook has made her way into the main action (or will so soon) after staying mostly on the sidelines in episodes one and two. Chuck learns more about why she was revived, and the consequences her revival incurred. Ned shows off his childhood light saber skills. A conversational pirate motif is discussed in detail. An extended Winnie the Pooh riff is provided by Chuck. A pie laced with anti-depressants is eaten for breakfast. And, we witness perhaps the only Asian descended from Confederates in TV history. Sounds like your typical episode of
Pushing Daisies, right?
We start with Young Ned again, back at the boarding school. He stands next to a bug zapper and resuscitates. Again, this is here to remind the audience of Ned's powers. I won't rehash them for y'all. Young Ned experiments and figures out the one-minute time line. So, to answer another question: Chuck keeps a lot of flowers in the pie making area, and when he revives the fruit for the pies, some flowers die. While making pies, Chuck wraps some saran wrap around Chuck's head and kisses him. Olive watches this from out front. She's not happy about it.
Alfredo Aldarisio sits in a booth and asks for espresso. When Olive asks him if he ever feels like all the oxygen is about to leave the room, the two bond. Alfredo is infatuated. Alfredo is a traveling anti-depressant salesman. He uses his own stuff. Olive gets upset with Emerson for telling her the truth about Ned's lack of feelings for her. Emerson does not like Chuck. He is extremely annoyed by her, and the fact that he can't get a private conversation in with Ned. Emerson demands a private meeting the next day with Ned.
Emerson waits for Ned at the coroner's, when Ned and Chuck show up. The body they are there to look at is the funeral director who died in the pilot as a result of Chuck's revival. He was a grave robber. This is why Emerson wanted to speak with Chuck alone. We get a lot of clips from the pilot explaining the situation.
Emerson puts Ned on the spot about who killed the coroner in front of Chuck. Instead of lying, Ned tells the truth. He explains the heretofore unexplained to Chuck aspect of his abilities. Chuck is clearly distraught and upset.
Back at The Pie Hole, Alfonso shows Olive his homeopathic anti-depressant products, offering it to Olive, whom he observed is unhappy. Ned is upset with Emerson for letting the proverbial cat out of the bag. Emerson explains that he took this case just so nobody else will solve it...and so they can find where Lawrence Schatz (the funeral director) hid all his grave booty. Chuck tells Ned that she wants to talk to Schatz during his one minute to apologize and say thank you.
The Darling Mermaid Darlings canceled their comeback tour. Chuck's aunts were plunged back into a relapse of their agoraphobia thanks to a late postcard they received from Chuck.
Louie Schatz, Lawrence's twin brother, has a hypothesis on how his brother died. His brother confessed to Louis that he stole all those things. He believes that one of the family members of a robbed deceased person came back and killed his brother in the name of revenge.
Louis shows the three to Lawrence's body. Ned wakes him up and apologizes. Chuck says thanks for giving her life. Emerson asks where he hid all the stuff he stole. Lawrence says that it was a family business, the stealing, and Louis has everything now. Chuck is sad about her aunts' relapse.
Ned, Chuck and Emerson look through all of the hate mail that Lawrence received for his grave robberies. We learn that although Lawrence wasn't really murdered, there's someone who had murder on the mind. Quite mysterious.
Alfonso offers Chuck some anti-depressants. Chuck takes a sample of Alfonso's product, sprinkles the anti-depressants into a pie, and sends the pie to her aunts. Olive, on her day off, gets stuck with the task of delivering the pie to Chuck's aunts.
Louis Schatz turns up dead in the Pie Hole's pie freezer. This very much confuses Ned and Chuck.
Olive arrives at Vivian and Lily's to deliver the pie. They decide to have pie for breakfast and invite Olive inside. We learn that the aunts' called Ned "beaver boy" when he was younger. Through simple conversation, Olive learns the truth about their dead niece Charlotte, and that she's not really dead, but the girl she knows as Chuck.
Emerson tells Ned that he's being set up. Sure enough, the cops show up at The Pie Hole. Ned wakes Louis from the dead and asks Louis to follow him. He's going to heaven. Emerson meets them in the alley. Before the minute is up, Louis says that he died choking on a piece of cow tongue he was eating. He choked because an angry victim of one of the robberies was approaching him menacingly, asking about a Civil War heirloom.
Chuck, believes that the angry heirloom man was Wilfred Woodruff, who in a letter warned that anyone who desecrates his family name will receive death. Wilfred had seen his family's prized Civil War heirloom in an online auction. They decide to head back to the funeral home and put Louis back exactly where he died.
They arrive and the funeral home is totally locked up. They try and enter through a window into the basement. Emerson can't fit. Chuck calls him Winnie the Pooh. In the basement, there are a multitude of cadavers. Chuck accidentally wakes up a couple and quickly sends them back to death. On one of the gurneys, however, is Wilfred Woodruff. He's an Asian man who wears a trucker hat, wielding a sword and speaking with a Southern accent.
Wilfred's story: his great-great-grandpa was a Chinese immigrant working the railroads in the south during Civil War time. Instead of fleeing north with the rest of countrymen, he decided to head south (probably due to heat stroke). He had to steal the army uniform of a fallen soldier for the South. He then fought for the South, and took the name (Woodruff) of the soldier's clothes he was wearing. Now, Wilfred is very upset that his grandpa wasn't buried with the sword he's now wielding. Ned finds a sword of his own and a prolonged sword fight goes down.
Wilfred was at the funeral parlor to confront Lawrence on the day Chuck was revived. He saw Lawrence die, and then saw Ned flee the funeral home. Wilfred put two and two together, and thought it Ned who had killed the man who he had made a death threat against, hence the attempted framing.
Ned vanquishes Wilfred eventually, thanks to a kick from a still-stuck Emerson, and in the process finds all of the stolen booty. Chuck and Ned inventory all of the stolen artifacts and send them back to their rightful owners.
-Oscar Dahl, BuddyTV Senior Writer
(Image Courtesy of ABC)