The Facts Are These: ABC’s delightful fantasy Pushing Daisies is back in action after having its freshman season cut short by the writer’s strike. I quickly fell in love with the show last season and am very much looking forward to watching what creator Bryan Fuller and company can do over a full season.
The Case: Dusty Fitz hires Emerson to look into his wife’s death, believing that she was having an affair and about to leave either him or the other man. It turns out that Kentucky Fitz, the Number 1 Bee Girl at Betty’s Bees, was in the process of sabotaging the company’s bee colony and wound up stung to death. Chuck goes undercover as a bee girl and discovers that Woolsey Nicholls, Betty’s biggest competitor, had recently completed a takeover of the company. Woolsey had planned on making Kentucky the new face of the company, angering Betty Bee and thus giving her a motive. After Chuck had her own encounter with a colony of bees in Betty’s office, the trio realize that Woolsey discovered that Kentucky was sabotaging his bees and he confesses his crime in the face of DNA evidence.
The Pie Maker and his Lonely Tourist: When we last visited Coeur d’Coeurs, Ned (the Emmy-nominated and just plain adorable Lee Pace) and Chuck (Anna Friel) were dealing with his confession that he had caused her father’s death by bringing his mother back to life 20 years earlier. The two had developed their own domestic habits aimed at preventing them from accidentally touching (and thus causing Chuck’s permanent death) and Ned felt happy with his home life for the first time since his mother’s death. Chuck, however, began to realize all the things she had missed out on while taking care of her aunts (job interviews, living on her own, etc.), prompting her to move into Olive’s vacant apartment next door. A conversation with Chuck’s Aunt Vivian (Ellen Greene) caused Ned to realize how in faking her death, Chuck had been forced to leave behind the place she had called home for so long. He was able to put aside his own fears and help make her new home all the more special by filling it with her former belongings, including the pillow that once belonged to her father.
Olive: Forced to keep the fact that Chuck was alive hidden from the aunts and that Lily was actually Chuck’s mother from Chuck, Olive (portrayed by Kristin Chenoweth, who also received an Emmy nomination for her role) finally reached her breaking point in this episode. Realizing that she never had a chance for romance with Ned, she tendered her resignation from The Pie Hole and wound up in the same nunnery where Lily had gone while pregnant with Chuck. Lily decided to stay and keep an eye on Olive, dropping yet another bombshell: She hid the fact that Chuck was her daughter because she had had an affair with Vivian’s fiancé
Emerson: After confessing that he had a daughter in last season’s finale, Emerson (Chi McBride) continued to work on his pop-up book — a “fictional” story of a young girl searching for her father.
Quotes of the Week:
Ned: “I could have been swarmed in my underwear.”
Emerson: “Hey! You don’t just get to put them pictures into my head! That’s an assault on my imagination!”
Ned: “I told you this was dangerous. Just because you’re alive again doesn’t mean you can’t be dead again. There’s a reason I don’t let Digby play in traffic.”
Vivian: “Lily was very tenacious. She tried to get me to come home in 6 consecutive stops.”
I could go on about this wonderful show for hours (I can’t believe I haven’t even touched upon the appearance of Ned’s father) but I don’t want this blog to become longer than my Russian Lit assignment for tonight. I’ll be back next week but in the meantime, I leave you with this question to ponder: “Who will run the Pie Hole with Olive gone and Ned spending all his time solving murder mysteries?”