Pushing Daisies: Bzzzzz!

By Sonia Aurora

The facts were these…

I missed this show immensely, and not even realizing how much so until the second season premiered. The delicious dialogue, the delectable colors, it’s just. . . it’s so hard to explain how much fun this show is, whimsical and sweet without being overly so. Really, there is nothing else out there like it, and I’d forgotten how lost I could get for that hour every week. Thank you, new network season, thank you!

As we often do in the beginning of each episode, we get a recap. This ep’s is a little longer, re-introducing us to Ned (the “Piemaker”) and his ability of reviving the dead (with consequences), and his beloved Chuck, forbidden from his touch. They continue their “ballet of avoidance”, dancing through the apartment and the restaurant avoiding each other of touch but not gaze….ah yes, the way they look at each other it makes a person want to be looked at and loved that intensely, that purely. That their relationship can’t be sullied with the complications that sex can bring is a revelation.

While we’ve been aware of Chuck’s love of bees (and Emerson Cod’s love of pop up books) they both get some showcasing this episode. The central mystery is about the death of Kentucky Fitz, Bee Girl to Betty’s Bees, a honey based cosmetics company, killed when swarms of bees sting her to death, possibly by a man made entirely of bees. Accidental, so it would seem; however, when Ned, Chuck and Emerson speak to her in the inevitable resurrection of one minute, we come to learn she was sabotaging the company with might (or, as we come to learn, mites) although both were needed to sabotage such a well-established company!

Chuck goes undercover as the latest Bee Girl, Katherine “Kitty” Pims, “dropping eaves” in the conversations of Woolsey Nickels and Betty herself – Woolsey, the man who partnered up with Betty and offered Kentucky the shot of being the new Betty’s Bees spokeswoman and product face.

Meanwhile, Olive is struggling with the weights of secrets: believing that Chuck faked her death, keeping it from her aunts, knowing Chuck doses her aunts’ pies with homopathetic mood enhancers, and most recently learning that Aunt Lillian is actually Chuck’s mother.  Well, it lends a girl to screaming (melodically, as only Kristen Chenoweth can do). And then, “resigning her tenders” as she quits the pie shop, Lillian helps to get her to a nunnery, the same place Lillian went to hide when she was with child, especially since the baby’s father (that would be Chuck’s dad) was also her sister Vivian’s fiancé!

Although Olive can hardly stand being the secret holder, it seems she’ll be pining away at the nunnery for at least one more episode (though this viewer hopes somehow that potential love interest Raul Esperanza [aka Alfredo Aldarisio] makes his way back this season to whisk out Olive back to the Pie Hole.)

Back to our mystery: as it turns out, Kentucky and Betty were in cahoots to destroy Betty’s Bees since Woolsey’s was a hostile takeover. Kentucky replaced Betty’s beloved bees with mite infested ones, and Woolsey, making himself a human hive, commanded the bees by keeping the queen bee in his mouth (and, thus, having all the bees protect her by covering his body. He tries to kill Chuck (aka Kitty) although he thinks it’s Betty; she’s smart enough to scream and also encase the queen bee in her mouth and make herself a colony until Emerson and Ned can save her.

They’re able to get Woolsey to confess (thank goodness for procedural dramas and DNA!) and Betty, along with Kentucky’s widowed husband, Dusty, reclaims her fame at her old Honey House.

As usual, visually, the episode has amazing colors and light of spirit intertwined with that underbelly of death. The melodious resurrection of Chuck’s bees that died and light up to life when showered over Ned’s body gives way to the graphic showcased destruction of the water bug infestation lurking in the Pie Hole drain pipes.

There are so many wonderful spots throughout the episode its hard to pick just one. Olive’s minor homage to The Sound of Music at one point was giggly fun, as was Ned’s concern for Chuck bordering on stalkerish; when he also goes undercover at Betty’s Bees his defense is that he wants to be close to Chuck when danger is afoot. The sweetness of his way does make us believe, in this instance, in their world, that it IS good, old-fashioned and pure heart chivalry.

And the language! How I missed the 40’s style zip zap banter everyone speaks on the show. From Emerson’s threat of “I’m gonna dose the both of y’all with a scoop of shut the fudge up” to Olive’s shotgun metaphor speech threatening to expel “Truth buckshot”, my ears and heart couldn’t help but drink in the sweet nectar that is the world of Pushing Daisies. Olive also had the honor of delivering my favorite line of the night (as she often does), when she confesses to Lillian about knowing that the nunnery is where she came to give birth to Chuck:

“Like when you holidayed here 30 years ago and found a baby in the cabbage patch. And by cabbage patch, I mean your lady parts.”

And as most season premieres do, there is a setup for issues/plots to come: Emerson’s authored popup book, Lil Gum Shoe (about a girl whose father is a detective but can’t find her, so she sets out to find him) is searching for only an audience of one – the daughter Season One mentioned that Emerson cannot find. And the episode ends with the shadowed visitation of Ned’s father visiting the Pie Hole, unbeknownst to our hero!

Next week…send in the clowns! There is no greater home for these characters than a murder mystery set in a circus…and no place I want to be Wednesday nights than home and soaking in their world.

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