Pushing Daisies

If that's the last Pushing Daisies we get to see until next Fall, then it was a good one to go out on.  There are no more new Pushing Daisies episodes in the can, so until the writers' strike gets resolved, tonight's “Corpsicle” will be where Ned and the gang leaves us for the time being.  I'm OK with that.  Bryan Fuller said that he tweaked the script for this last episode right before the strike to make it feel more like a season finale.  He wasn't kidding.  Tonight's was a season finale and “special Holiday episode” wrapped into one, including an out of left field cliffhanger and a holiday miracle performed by a Binobo monkey named Bobo. 

We left last episode off after Ned blurted out the truth to Chuck – he was responsible for her father's death.  Tonight's episode picks up with a Streetcar ode – Ned yelling on the snowy streets “Chuck!  Chuck!” and then throwing snowballs at an angry neighbor.  Chuck spends much of the episode hiding in anger from Ned.  She stays with Olive, convinces Olive to keep her whereabouts secret.  Oscar Vilinius returns, still hypothesizing over Chuck and Digby's respective scents and Chuck almost spills the beans to Oscar.  In the end, she doesn't, but it was a great excuse for Paul Reubens to return.  In the end, Chuck starts to forgive Ned.  But, she's still sad. 

The case of the week involved a string of murders of insurance adjusters for a the Uber-Life Life Insurance company.  One is found frozen in the middle of the street.  Emerson talks to a sick and hysterically bitter teenager who was denied a heart transplant by the deceased adjuster, who happens to live on the street the adjuster was found.  On the way out, Emerson discovers a frozen body in a snowman – it's another dead Uber-Life adjuster.  The trail leads to a third dead adjuster, and Ned and Emerson almost die by carbon monoxide poisoning (the killer put a potato in the tail pipe and Emerson admits to Ned that he has a daughter), before they unravel the mystery.  A woman from the Wish-a-Wish foundation is unable to make the teenager happy with any of the wishes she grants – the one thing (besides a heart) he does want is for the adjusters who denied him to die.  So, she kills the adjusters.  Emerson and Ned save a fourth adjuster from being murdered by the woman with a little help Bobo the Binobo, who puts her van in neutral and runs the Wish-a-Wish woman over. 

Meanwhile, Olive delivers an over-dosed with homeo-pathic anti-depressants pie to the aunts.  Lily eats the whole thing and begins hallucinating.  In the episode's very last scene, while she is extremely high, Lily admits that she is Chuck's mom!

There were so many things to love in this episode.  This was the most urgent hour of Pushing Daisies we've seen.  The two storylines were really four (1-Emerson, Ned and the case. 2- Chuck dealing with the news. 3- Lily, Vivian, Olive and the over-dosed pie. 4- Chuck and Oscar) and it moved between touching, sad, funny, interesting and depressing.  There was a lot of self-referential symbology in the episode (the “heartless” boy needed a new heart, the parallels between the powers of the insurance adjusters compared to Ned's powers) and it all just worked perfectly, at least to me.  The end of the case, involving Bobo, may have rubbed some people the wrong way if they saw it as a cheap way to wrap up that story, but I saw it as a clever nod at the tired cliche of the “Christmas miracle”. 

But, at the heart of tonight's episode, there was a lot of sadness.  I'm the type of cynical bastard that usually scoffs when TV shows try to be touching.  Usually, the acting is over-done and the dialogue is just a little too dramatic.  Pushing Daisies, though, nailed it all tonight.  This is a testament to the writing, but (and I never say this) probably more so to the caliber of the four main actors.  All of them are incredible. In the little scene in the car, where Chi McBride as Emerson admits to Ned that he has a daughter, a ridiculous amount of emotion poured out in just a few lines of dialogue.  The beginning, which ran down the specifics of how that fateful day when Chuck's father and Ned's mother kicked the bucket went down, was very moving, especially when it segued into Ned yelling on the sidewalks.  Chuck and Ned's scenes could have been cheesy or over-dramatic, but they were subtle and realistic, two people doing their best to overcome a massive road block.  As for the twist at the end, I like it, because we have no idea the story behind it.  It opens up a whole new box of mysteries for the writers to explore.

“Magical” is a good way to describe the episode.  Pushing Daisies has really hit its groove over the last two episodes, and the shame of the writers' strike is that there's no guarantee the cast and crew will regain this sort of magic when the show returns.  It's as escapist and profound a show as there is on any network these days, and it's a damn shame we won't be seeing another new episode for months. 
 

-Oscar Dahl, BuddyTV Senior Writer
(Image Courtesy of ABC)