By Sonia Aurora
As much as I love my DVR it likes to be quirky, and not in a good way. Actually, if it were a female, I might use the “B” word for my DVR, who may be offended I’ve never named it anything but “DVR”.
As it happened, this week it decided to not tape Pushing Daisies, but I happened to be home on time and was able to catch the majority of the episode (thankfully). As if it weren’t enough, the Emergency Broadcast System also decided to cut in midway, and so I got a hiccup about 30 minutes in too.
Cosmically, I think it was because this wasn’t the strongest of episodes for the show. Sure it, retained its quirkiness and even the worst of the bunch is still the best of so much else on the tube (cough, The Hills, cough cough). And I want to believe it was off because I was off and didn’t get the proper beginning re-cap and whimsical theme song to set me up in my Wednesday world.
Mystery of the Week: Teenager Nikki Heaps runs away to join the circus with a mime who somehow winds up dead due to poisoned makeup. Mrs. Heaps (a too-deadpan Rachael Harris) hires Emerson to find her daughter.
By the time I came into the scene, Rocky was revived to tell of his broken heart, ending his life (part deux) trapped in the mime’s glass box. Turns out Nikki ran out on him and off to be with the Circus of Fun.
In the meanwhile, Ned is still adjusting to Chuck’s moving out into Olive’s old apartment, and I’m still adjusting to Olive not being in her cute waitress outfit at the Pie Hole. Yup, she’s still posing as a nun, hoping for that epiphany.
While Ned and Emerson leave Chuck behind to run the Pie Hole, they’re accosted by an upside-down snooty French acrobat, but also find out from the Circus Manager’s snorting secretary that Nikki had become apprentice to the head clown Jackie Johnny. This easily became my favorite scene of the night for two reasons: Lee Pace is TALL (6’3” according to IMDB.com), something that seems to be not so blatant even with his scenes with Anna Friel and Kristen Chenewoth (I guess it’s the guy/girl he-should-be-taller ratio in my head). But in this scene Ned is so obviously too tall for the circus trailer that he spends the dialogue exchange with his head cocked to the side the whole time, and I found it endearing. Ned is cute, not a word you usually use for tall guys, but in that head tilt, you understand the cuteness factor. After he’s gotten the intel from the secretary, Ned goes on to tell Emerson about Jackie Johnny, who was “a real lousy lowdown” [insert burst of flames from a flame thrower to censor the words that Ned repeats]. Words Emerson never expected Ned would say, but, hey, he’s only repeating chapter and verse.
Meanwhile, Chuck gets cornered at the Pie Hole by Aunt Vivian who is, once more, all alone, eyes brimming with tears. Lillian gone again (to visit Olive at the nunnery), and my heart did break a little as I’m sure Chuck’s did.
Cut back to the chase- the dead “pool” (literally and figuratively) is filling up, as we now have a dead mime and two dead…three dead, um WAY more dead clowns. (Fifteen, to be exact). Emerson tries to explain to Mrs. Heaps they are doing the best they can to track Nikki down, even if their trail ends with a dead clown. “What’s your plan?” she asks “To bring him back to life and ask her where she is?” She’s joking, of course, but the joke is on her and you can’t help but chuckle.
So the clown car got run off a road and the main suspect is now Bryce Von Deenis, a circus attendee cum participant who threatened to kill the lot of clowns who humiliated him in their act. And now comes my second favorite scene of the night: The clown made up a limerick of our suspect, and Chuck begins it:
“There was a young man named Von Deenis…”
To which Ned continues:
“Who they said had a very big—
Cut to black.
(Genius).
More secrets crop up as Lillian confesses to Olive that she lead Chuck’s father to believe he was her father…and he wasn’t! (Oh man, another secret? We’d better start having some confessions to the proper people, and soon!)
Turns out Nikki followed the clown car, and she’s still missing, and we know that Emerson is mainly touched by this case because of the missing daughter situation resonating his own. In a reversal, Ned’s the pessimistic one in thinking Nikki might be the killer, and this time, Emerson’s glass is the half-full one.
To which Ned retorts with my favorite line of the night:
“Generally speaking I would say you don’t even have a glass, you just have a wet ring where the glass used to be.”
Ouch. But Emerson’s not going to give way to cuddly, even if we do see the chinks in his steadfast armor.
Olive’s epiphany is that Lillian shouldn’t completely let go of Chuck. And she still is in love with Ned, which makes her believe she needs to stay in the nunnery until she can resolve her own issues (bummer).
Back at the circus, turns out the manager Mr. Arno was trying to prevent the clowns from union-izing and put Nikki in as a spy on the inside. Just then, a human cannonball bursts through the window meant for our detective trio! Peeling back the onion of reveal, Nikki’s hiding as a bright pink monkey stuffed animal, and the acrobat was the killer, not wanting to allow the clowns to be in a union since working environments shouldn’t be fair. Ned (with a surprising pitching arm) knocks him out from the high-wire landing with a baseball, and all is right with the world.
Emerson flirts with his softer side again when he implores Mrs. Heaps to “Love what’s there” in the teenage daughter she can’t understand. “Love it,” he commands, and love it (and her) she does.
Although not the strongest of the Pushing Daisies show, I did enjoy it. It’s hard not to, when the actors are so fluid in their jobs. Just the rapid-fire exchanges and the swooning of Ned and Chuck are enough to make me sigh at the end of every episode, in longing, in love.
The episode wraps with Ned and Chuck trying to re-introduce themselves to each other, with a meet-cute in the hall of their separate apartments. Ned asks if they can re-meet every day, and Chuck replies “Absolutely, definitely.”
Next week the gang investigates a murder at the nunnery, which brings Olive back in the fold. And with Ned and Chuck posing as Father Mulcahy and Sister Christian, you wonder if I will be tuning in again next week?
Absolutely. Definitely.
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Aspiring screenwriter and seamstress, Sonia's dream is to write life-tweaking films while product-placing her own line of handbags. In 1999, she wrote, co-directed and co-starred in the short film Dr. Lovestrange, or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bug, a satirical homage to Stanley Kubrick set amidst the panic of Y2K. She is working on her next short about the Mayan Calender that she hopes to finish before the end of the world. Ever the late bloomer, she finally started a blog chronicling her misadventures as one half of a long distance relationship (http://llddr.wordpress.com). She still struggles with which picture to kiss before bedtime: her boyfriend's or Bruce Campbell's. And, in the interest of time, she'd like to start thanking the Academy now. 
Not brilliant, agreed, but I did think it was quite a step up from last week’s episode. For whatever reason, everything just felt about two degrees off in the last episode…except for Lee Pace, who was fantastic playing Ned as if his world was coming apart with Chuck’s decision to move out.
This week I laughed more, cried more, and generally was just more impressed with the fun and inventiveness of the episode. Okay, there was no crying.
Fingers crossed that it just keeps getting better…and the ratings go up…
I think that the thing that’s missing this season is the interaction between all the characters. Olive Snook is off at the convent, Chuck’s moved next door to Ned, Emerson is more emotionally involved with his own missing child than he is involved with the Pie Hole crew – there’s just too much fragmentation and the story is being pulled in too many directions at once.
If they wanted to split the team up, at least give us a half-dozen or so episodes with them all together before doing so – remind us why we love these characters and their world.
Here’s to getting the gang back together.