The Pushing Daisies Review: 1.5
Posted by Brendan Newton on 11.02.2007
It's no Treehouse of Horror, but Pushing Daisies delivers another good episode this week...
Ah, Halloween. One of the greatest days of the year, no matter what stage of life you're at. When I was a kid, it meant wandering the neighbourhood with family and friends dressed up as a Pirate, Ninja Turtle, or Darth Vader, then coming home and gorging myself full of candy for the next month. When I was a teenager, it meant roaming the streets with buddies playing with firecrackers and coming up with other random petty mischief that made us feel badass. When I was a college student, it meant hitting a bunch of parties and beer gardens on Campus and spending days in a booze-and-candy-fueled daze. Now that I'm a working Joe in my twenties, it apparently means sitting at home watching Pushing Daisies and then writing a review of it. Huh. If this show wasn't so consistently great, I'd be depressed.
Halloween's also always been a great tradition for TV, from It's the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown, to The Simpsons' seemingly never-ending Treehouse of Horror series to a dozen other off-the-wall Halloween episodes and specials. TV writers seem to love to use it as an excuse to disregard the usual laws of their show's realistic universe, kill off characters with impunity, and bring all manner of supernatural, quirky elements. So that's why I was intrigued to hear that Pushing Daisies was going to be doing a Halloween episode. It's difficult to imagine how a show that's already so quirky and offbeat could get even weirder. Luckily, it worked, and it was yet another good episode with some great character development (Ned especially, whose character took on an interesting, darker dimension) and an interesting ongoing story, although the episode tried to fit a bit too much in when there was probably enough material for two, and was thus one of the weaker Pushing Daisies episodes thus far.
-Normally, I find it kind of goofy when writers set up something that appears to be the work of a ghost or some other supernatural presence and then reveal it to be the work of a normal human being using lots of wires and strings and Hollywood-quality special effects. It just has this silly Scooby-Doo quality to it that I can't take seriously but isn't really funny. In this episode, though, the mundane explanation was just creative enough to work, plus having the “ghost” turn out to be a hoax seems a lot more original when you're dealing with a series that already has supernatural elements to it. As Chuck explicitly points out to Ned, the idea of ghosts isn't all that absurd when you have a guy walking around who can raise the dead, so it seems like more of a twist to have it turn out to all be a hoax. It's also a neat way of reinforcing that the series does take place in a realistic world, without too many supernatural elements. This in turn reinforces how isolated Ned is as the lone supernatural being in the show's universe (and also emphasizes that it's magical realism as opposed to horror or fantasy, as I went on about in the “Pie-lette” review); he has the mysterious gift with no one around to explain to him how or why it works in an otherwise mundane universe (although it would be kind of funny if one week he noticed the omnipresent Narrator and suddenly started talking with him and asking him where the gift was from, to which the Narrator would respond that he didn't know). He is fundamentally different from all other human beings, and this has led to a life of almost complete isolation and alienation.
-Indeed, Ned's essential isolation was a central plot point in this episode, as we finally get to know more about his relationship with his father after the first few episodes focused on his mother. Turns out that Halloween brings painful memories for Ned, as it was on that day that he discovered that his father had moved on after his mother's death and married another woman. Who came complete with two step-children. Young Ned's return to his old house only to discover it abandoned, and his annual attempt to reconnect with the past as it moves further and further away was absolutely heartbreaking, especially when you remember that everything changed because of Ned inadvertently killing his mother and thus there's a strong element of guilt involved here (let's not even go into the weird Freudian connotations of his mother-related pie obsession). The following scene with Chuck's aunts was equally touching; I love how they're gradually developing different personalities for Lily and Vivian, with one being generally more positive than the other (“I'll get the candy bowl. I'll get the gun”). Loved the return of the strawberry from “Pie-lette”, too, as Ned kills it when he touches it for the second time and realizes where the pies must have come from. I love it when shows explore all of the weird little ramifications of their supernatural gimmicks in order to further the plot, it's the sort of great touch Buffy and Angel (erm, the shows, not the characters) used to be so good at. In the end, they helped Ned work through his “Halloween complex” by showing him that his rosey image of his father before his mother's death wasn't all that accurate...but that it's okay to view the past as we wish it had been, not as it actually was. There was one really nice moment though when Ned's face lit up while Vivian was telling him incredibly mundane things about his father (“He was a handsome man. He mowed the lawn on Saturdays”). Interesting comment on how some of the most memorable things about a person can be the most mundane, as well as reminding us how cut off from that normal life Ned is. It's not made clear whether or not Ned's father still survives, but he and his new family would be a great source of future stories, hopefully they'll show up again. For now, though, Ned manages to work through his Halloween issues when he realizes that since Chuck came back, he's been gradually opening up to her and thus to the world in general. He actually has something going on in his present life that means something, so he no longer has to cling to the past for meaning. I'd say that's what really makes this show; it's all about Ned's getting beyond his childhood tragedy and guilt and arrested development and coming back to life. It's actually very similar to one of my favourite movies of recent years, Garden State, also about a young man whose life has been “frozen” since a tragedy involving his mother but who returns to life through the love of an equally odd young woman. Speaking of returning to life, we end with Chuck Trick-or-Treating at her Aunt's place, re-living both her days with her aunts (great moment of almost-recognition, with all of these near-misses, I wonder if they'll ever pull the trigger on having them find out once and for all that Chuck still lives; given their decidedly weird personalities, I wouldn't be surprised if they weren't surprised), and her childhood Halloweens with Ned, who now loves Halloween as much as the rest of us. Good stuff.
-Ned and Chuck's love is bad news for Olive, however, and it was her tense relationship with Chuck that took centre stage this week, along with her past. Okay, so at this point Pushing Daisies' wacky job gimmicks are getting a bit, well, gimmicky (could we just have a character who's an accountant or a teacher for once, please?), but given Olive's comical shortness, the jockey thing at least made some sense. Plus Emerson's reaction to it was great. Anything Emerson did in this episode was gold, actually, from bristling at Olive for “acting like that word (farrier) was something that everybody knows” to nailing Mama Jacobs with his shovel at episode's end and declaring “I love you, shovel.” I've heard a lot of actors declare their love on-screen to other human beings with much less passion. Although his statement to Chuck about how coming back from the dead and faking your own death were as different as “purple and mauve”, while hilarious, made me wonder if on top of Emerson's knitting they're hinting that he's a gay private detective of all things. Not that there's anything wrong with that, in fact it would be a neat twist for the character. Anyways, great bonding between Olive and Chuck this week; I was surprised by how quickly they had Olive confront Chuck and reveal that she knows Chuck's identity, but kudos to the writers for not drawing things out too much. The final step is to have Olive discover Ned's gift, but my guess would be that that won't come for a while, and probably shouldn't. Another possible development would be Chuck figuring out that Olive loves Ned, which they almost pulled the trigger on this week when Olive, in mortal danger, channels Mr. Smithers and tells Chuck to tell Ned that she loves...his pies. Lots of sweet stuff with Olive this week, from her “Jiminy Crispers!” exclamation when she heard about Shoemaker's murder and fell off her bed, to flashbacks of her as a jockey, to her cute flirtiness with the equally skewed John Joseph Jacobs (or as he will henceforth be referred to, Triple J). Clever writing too to build up audience sympathies with Olive this week, especially by making she and Chuck a team as opposed to adversaries, and then completely let Olive (and perhaps by then the audience, who are on her side) down by having Ned blow off her amorous advances and rush to make sure that Chuck was okay. Just when we're getting used to the idea that Olive might not be that bad for Ned, and that she and Chuck can get along, we're reminded that Olive's love is unreturned by Ned no matter what, and it hurts, and it leaves things up in the air as to where things will go with Olive, Chuck and Ned next.
-I wasn't quite sure what to make of this week's case as it did at times have a warmed-over Scooby-Doo flavour to it that I found tiresome, and it really didn't have much connection to Halloween besides the “ghost” element. I liked Ned's Halloween flashback story, and the idea of Olive's past as a jockey putting her in danger had the makings of a good story, but there were two separate episodes there, and the attempt to merge the two was on the clunky side. From time to time, Pushing Daisies really should put the cases on one side and do special character-focused episodes. That's what the Halloween episode could have been, a low-key affair all about Ned visiting his past home in search of memories of his father. Get back to Olive's story next week, and focus on it then. As it was, the episode was a bit overextended. Ma Jacobs was really creepy before she even showed up in costume, though, and the “Ghost Jockey” costume did look kind of scary during the chase with Olive and Chuck (great, intense, scene), so huzzah. Triple J was hilarious once he showed up (“Swizzle sticks, we're out of crackers!”), and I loved the resolution with Olive giving him the giant trophy. Sweet stuff. Ralph P. Martin was a notably great guest star as Pinky McCoy, I loved him cutting off the drunken Gordon and then promptly chugging Gordon's whiskey for himself.
-After I mentioned the barrage of “Beaver/Pie” double entendres a couple of weeks ago, we get yet more wordplay that soothes my inner 12-year old with the fabled “Jock-Off 2000” horse race. Hey, makes me laugh. Plus that actually describes most of 2000 for me. Sigh.
-Ya know, I can stare at images of all kinds of violently killed human bodies week after week on TV, but there's something about dead animals that really creeps me out. Here we had the skeletal remains of Triple J's horse, All the Gold, buried in his supposed grave. Creepy. But it led to a reference to “Horse With No Name”, a song with which I've been obsessed with for years, so it's all good. Equally creepy now that I think about it, though, was the whole thing with Triple J having had All the Gold's legs transplanted into his body. It paid off the “Horse With No Legs” gag cleverly, but still...I dunno, the thought of the legs of a dead horse being shoved into a human body is just macabre. One of the very few times Pushing Daisies has tried to be whimsical and failed as far as I'm concerned, as it missed “whimsical” and landed badly on “creepy.”
All in all, another good episode, the Killer Jockey storyline was a little on the lame side but it meant lots of Olive so that's a good thing. I would have liked to see more time given to the poignant storyline with Ned in search of his childhood Halloween happiness as it made the whole Jockey story seem trivial in comparison, but what there was of that story was great despite the creepy horse legs stuff. This show should sometimes take it a bit slower and do episodes devoted wholly to either the characters or the case instead of trying to divide time between the two all the time, but it's still managing to put in great episodes week after week and telling a great story.
The 411: One of the weaker Pushing Daisies episodes to date due to just too much going on and there being two good story ideas competing with each other for space, there was still a lot of good stuff here, especially with Ned's Halloween plot. Dark, poignant, stuff. The transplanted horse legs were creepy though.
