The Pushing Daises TV Review 1.3: "The "Fun" in Funeral"
Posted by Brendan Newton on 10.18.2007
As always, Swordplay can save a dull story.
Pushing Daisies continues its' run this week by putting “The Fun in Funeral.” Before getting to the episode, I should mention that Pushing Daisies' ratings reportedly dropped from 8.3 to 6.6 and from first to second in its' timeslot between the pilot and the second episode. This is probably to be expected as no new show is going to be able to grab the interests of all viewers who check out the first episode, and its' early critical acclaim has continued with positive reviews online and in print, so huzzah.
Anyways, this week's installment was much more arc-based than last week's stand-alone story, showing us some of the repercussions of Ned's resurrecting Chuck and focusing on the crooked funeral director who died in Chuck's place. It all somehow leads to Ned getting into a swordfight with a young Southern-Chinese man (as in Southern U.S.). Meanwhile, Olive gets a love interest and finds out just who Chuck is. Here are some of the highlights and my thoughts:
-As always, the dialogue was great and managed to run the gamut between hilarious, profound, and hilariously profound. Standing out in my mind were Ned and Emerson's differing philosophies on how to rip a Band-Aid off (Ned “pulls up the corner a little at a time, runs it under warm water, and pulls it up a little more. It's a process”), Chuck's spunkily morbid enthusiasm for the next job (“maybe it's one of those four-stage poisons, where they have to touch four things in order before they're poisoned!”), and Ned and Wilfred's exchanges during their duel (Ned, in response to Wilfred's fencing prowess: “I wanted to be a Jedi”; Ned's summing up of one of the shows themes when he tells Wilfred that the best we can do is make choices, and ask for forgiveness if anyone gets hurt). Watching this show back-to-back with Bionic Woman really highlights the difference between good and bad dialogue; while Bionic Woman's dialogue is usually flat, pedestrian and clunky, giving off the feeling that the writer doesn't really care all that much about most lines as long as they sound like they vaguely fit the situation, every line of Pushing Daisies seems like the writer regarded it as important and tried hard to make it have that quirky, real-life quality. The way most real people talk is not flat and predictable, but rather unpredictable and absurd, and Pushing Daisies' dialogue is more realistic than that of many more reality-based shows because the writers recognize that. The dialogue almost has that unreal quality of Shakespearean drama, with the characters speaking in a ritualized, stylized manner; this was in places much more noticeable this week than it has been previously, especially in the Olive-Alfredo scenes. Perhaps the show's critical acclaim has led the writers to try to appeal to the critics more with more clever dialogue, or perhaps they just realize how well the quirkiness works (as I said, it does manage to reflect reality). Either way, the dialogue this week was excellent albeit a little more overtly “clever” than previous weeks.
-As I mentioned last week, the Coroner (Sy Richardson) who's duped on a seemingly weekly basis into letting Ned and Chuck look at the corpse of this week's victim, is a favourite sleeper character of mine. Great stuff from him this week, randomly discussing how he keeps his hands moisturized (!) with Emerson, before Ned and Chuck show up. I'm glad to see he's scheduled to show up in the next two episodes as well. He's the kind of character who could gradually get phased in as a lead. Assuming he ever figures out that Ned & Chuck aren't actually toxicologists or dog experts or whatever else, that is.
-Great new character this week appears in Olive's subplot, and like everything in this show, his premise is so off-the-wall and random that it feels much more like real life than most TV. Alfredo (Raul Esparza), a salesman of homeopathic (a word which Olive amusingly mistakes as having something to do with gay people) antidepressants who also regularly uses his products to ease his anxiety over the thought that the Earth might suddenly lose all oxgyen and be sucked into the vacuum of space. Sounds silly, I know, but once in college this writer was informed by a science-geek friend that this scenario might actually happen someday and I spent a few days really worried about it before it occurred to me that there was pretty much nothing that I could do to prevent this from possibly happening. Poor ol' Alfredo never came to that realization, however, and his fear, visualized in a brief but impressive fantasy sequence, means that he fits right in on this show. Esparza plays that sense of irrational but overwhelming dread very well, and he also does a good job of getting over how smitten (in a neurotic sort of way) Alfredo is with Olive, thus further complicating the Olive-Ned-Chuck dynamic, which has gone from a Love Triangle to a Love...Rectangle, I guess. Unrequited love is obviously a major theme of this series, with Alfredo now loving Olive who loves Ned who loves Chuck, with none of them actually able to have the object of their desire, and-this is the important, and potentially heartbreaking part-none of them being willing to take the easy way out and settle for being with the one that loves them instead of the one they love. And it looks like things get even more complicated in next week's episodes, where Chuck potentially falls (literally!) for another guy.
-I'm a little surprised with how soon the writers pulled the trigger on Olive finding out who Chuck is as it seemed like the kind of thing that could have been played along for a few more episodes, but it was well handled. Nice little call-back to the pilot, as Chuck does as she threatened and bakes antidepressants into her aunt's baked goods. The return of the Darling Mermaid Darlings was welcome, and as always this show manages to take the most absurdly comical characters, make you laugh at them, and then show a sobre, poignant side to them, in this case the renewal of Lily and Ellen's depression when Chuck's postcard reminded them of her death. It will be very interesting to see where Olive's knowledge of Chuck goes, and how far Olive goes to get Chuck out of the picture and Ned all to herself. Will Olive eventually find out about Ned's gift? Will Olive tell Emerson what she knows, and will she and Emerson still try to join forces to get rid of Chuck? Or will Chuck manage to bond with both Olive and Emerson? It's the sort of storyline that can and will hopefully be played out over a string of episodes; personally, I'd eventually like to see Olive learn Ned's secret, but not for a while, perhaps not until the end of the season (assuming the show lasts). Either way, Kristin Chenoweth does a great job of making sure that Olive's love for Ned, obsessive though it may be, somehow manages to say sweet and innocent rather than coming across as stalkerish and menacing as it would in real life.
-Speaking of innocence or lack thereof, am I the only one whose mind went to a dirty place of junior high school-level sexual innuendo during the scene with Olive talking about Ned with Chuck's aunts? C'mon, they mentioned that Ned once gave Chuck a Beaver T-shirt, and now he makes pies. Then, just in case we didn't get it, they repeated the words “Beaver” and “Pies” several times. Then it occurred to me that the pies at least had been around since “Pie-lette” without me picking up on the obvious double entendre. Ah, well. Probably just the writers having fun, and perhaps drawing attention to how physical Ned's attraction to Chuck is, and therefore how frustrating the whole no touching thing is. Where I'm really hoping and praying it'll lead to, though, if they keep using the pie innuendo, is a cameo by Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson. You know, have him come into The Pie Hole and talk about what kinds of Pie he likes. Kind of like that song he released back when he was big in WWE. He can be Emerson's weird cousin or something. Greatest cameo in the history of TV right there.
-Loved Emerson throughout the episode, from the aforementioned scene with the Coroner, to his racing terrified out of the funeral home when he realized that he might be the one to die in the funeral director's place if he was brought back for more than a minute, to his “Winnie-the-Pooh moment” getting stuck in the window. It seems like in all of the best Sci-Fi/Fantasy shows, there's the one “straight man” character who's relatively mundane and uncomfortable with all of the weird stuff going on around him, and Emerson is a great example. Chi McBride is fantastic.
-Although the episode had many, many, great little moments, I must admit the main plot left me a little underwhelmed. I just didn't care about the crooked Funeral Director brothers enough to get sucked into their story, and the whole story with them stealing from the dead just came across as dull and half-hearted. It just didn't have the cleverness that I've come to expect from this series. It felt almost like the episode was seen as being “necessary” to the arc, in that it addressed the consequences of Ned's having resurrected Chuck and therefore killed the Funeral Director, but I can't help but think that it would have been so much darker and more satisfying if the Director hadn't been such a corrupt, unpleasant character; if a normal person had died in Chuck's place, it would have led to a much more weighty, and I think better episode with she and Ned wondering if her resurrection was the right thing to do, whether or not Ned was being purely selfish when he resurrected her, and whether or not she deserved life more than the one that died did. As it is, that last question is fairly easy, because the Director's so unpleasant-and Chuck such a pleasant, likable contrast to him-that we don't question whether or not it was right, but that doesn't make for any kind of interesting, dramatically satisfying story, and the episode really petered out once the dramatic focus shifted to the Director's equally unlikeable brother.
-The episode did pick up again nicely in the final act, as we got the strange story of Wilfrid Woodruff, the man responsible for the death of the Director's brother, and then that great swordfight between him and Ned. The whole “Wilfrid Woodruff is actually Chinese because his ancestor was a coolie that picked up a Civil War uniform” thing was pretty far-fetched and goofy and almost felt like the writers trying too hard to be wacky and subvert expectations, but it was funny in a “how-would-anyone-think-this-stuff-up” way, and Eddie Shin was great as Wilfred, so as long as they don't try too hard like that every week it's all good. Besides, it's the kind of thing that's so bizarre that it might have actually happened. Any time you can work swordplay into a TV show is alright with me, too, and it made for a great, unique climax to the story instead of the standard dull chase scene or fight that I was expecting. Easily the second-best dialogue of all time during a swordfight, too, just behind Princess Bride, of course. Ned's speech about choices and forgiveness touch on another them of the show; that of his choice to bring back Chuck, his conviction that it was the right one all along, and his regret if that conviction hurts anyone, along with the larger existential idea that in an uncertain universe we must have faith in our choices, forgive, and be forgiven. “That's the best anyone can do” emphasizes Ned. His acceptance of that is what separates him from bad guy Wilfred. Putting aside any deep existential themes that the scene brought up, the swordplay in this scene was really well done and well choreographed from a technical standpoint; the directors know what looks cool on camera and are sure to capture it. Great swashbuckling finish to the fight, too, with Ned bringing the curtain down and Stuck Emerson getting his kicks in. Swordplay saves a dull story as always. Ned's existential epiphany during this scene also segues nicely into the romantic coda, where he reaffirms, with a confidence that he has lacked, that bringing Chuck back from the dead and keeping her that way was the right thing to do.
This was not Pushing Daisies' best episode. In some ways, it felt like a formality, written not really out of any creativity on the part of the writers but rather because they needed to show the repercussions of Ned's resurrecting Chuck. Despite many clever touches and the great subplot with Olive, much of the episode felt forced and flat, with supporting characters that I didn't care about (unlike last week's episode, where interesting one-off characters were one of its' major strengths). It strongly picked up in the final act once the swords came out, however, and next week's episode-in which Ned's frustration at not being able to touch Chuck is exacerbated by her attraction to another man-looks great.
The 411: Great dialogue as always, some intriguing twists in the plot surrounding Olive, but the episode fell a bit flat at times due to a lack of likable supporting characters and a tight plot. Once the swords came out, though, everything was good.
