“Into the garbage chute, flyboy.” - Princess Leia

By Sonia Aurora

I came back from a lovely Thanksgiving holiday to back to back episodes of Pushing Daisies on my DVR. I considered writing my articles reviewing both eps in one, but felt that since ABC canceled the show, I didn’’t want to shortchange the Pink Raygun audience of every morsel of the Pie Hole and its players have to offer. And while a huge part of me wants to complain (yet again) about the great disservice ABC is doing against this show, I decided instead to revel in the beauty of what the show is and offers without sullying it with anger. I want to enjoy every last bite while I can (and I hope you do too).

We again meet Young Ned and his one boarding school buddy Eugene Mulchandani whose other friends include his python and his rabbit, which meet an unfortunate end but Ned and his power is able to rectify, earning him the lesson that “…as long as the benefits outweighed the costs, an act of charity outweighed the consequences.”

And so our episode smacks of the acts of charity and consequences, with Gustav Holst, billionaire, being our weekly mystery to solve, having encountered death by chandelier. His trusty attorney Daniel Hill, devoted and in love with him, wants Emerson to figure out who killed him, because chandeliers don’t just fall out of the sky. Plus there’s the whole bullet in the ceiling….

The underlying mysteries of the show also continue, with Mysterious Bad Guy Dwight still courting Aunt Vivian and Lilly hating every second of it, and Ned stress baking in fear that Dwight will see a picture of Chuck and realize our girl is still alive. Dwight’s heart is softening for Vivian, but his pursuit of the pocket watches far outweigh that gain, and when Vivian shares Chuck’s obit that she carries with her, complete with lovely smiling photo, Dwight knows where he needs to go to retrieve his possession…

But back to the billionaire:

Ned, Emerson and Chuck revive him and the cantankerous old coot scoffs both Ned and Chuck as he reveals he made out a new will that is hiding behind his largest trophy in his trophy room that needs to be turned clockwise to access. He does like Chuck’s moxie, and he asks that his gold-digging widow not get his riches and tells them the bellman did it.

Wow, have they ever gotten the murderer that quickly before?

Well, there’s still a lot more to come. Elise, the self-proclaimed “Worst widow ever” channels not only Paris Hilton and the like and Cher from Clueless, but also my fave fictional bimbo, Lina Lamont from Singin’ in the Rain. Jennifer Elise Cox (best known as Jan from the Brady Bunch films) does a spectacular job, albeit not being in the episode as much as I would have liked, which can be a good thing, as it leaves you wanting more as opposed to wishing for less.

While Emerson and Chuck chat with Elise and James Andrew the bellman, I mean, porter, Ned sneaks into the trophy room, which is full of dead stuffed game, like lions, tigers and bears…and it wasn’t til my sister’s OH MY moment that I realized that Ned should NOT have been the one to go in there…AS HE CAN’T TOUCH ANY OF THE DEAD ANIMALS!

As Chuck and Elise sip champagne juice drinks, we hear a slight bear groan but also learn that the safe behind this bear-bastic trophy is empty, and scrawled in the back are the words “Orbis Pro Vox”. Now, as Emerson puts it, their slam dunk case is now a badunkadunk case, meaning it’s gotten bigger as the Latin phrase is linked to a series of robberies plaguing the rich.

Alas, the mystery is also bigger due to the bellman, er, porter, has an alibi, having been at a key party, and it is cute that Ned is naïve enough to not know that it’s a kind of raffle “of the porno variety.”

Our Dwight mystery gets deeper in that Ned knows they could potentially unearth Chuck’s dad for the answers but he loves her too much to make her suffer like that, so he won’t. This scene is sweetly compounded by the underlying musical track that is not only instrumental accompanied by human whistling, which I thought at first was my sis behind me until I rewound it and stuck my head to the speaker.

The gang investigates The Bell Men, a company of telemarketers that solicits for charities. Their motto? Ring for Rights, which translates to Latin as our robber’s Orbis Pro Vox calling card. Rob Wright insists neither he nor his company is responsible for the onslaught of robberies, but they feel telemarketer Tam Phong is very “suspect-ish” and decide to set a trap by using the aunt’s house as bait, with Olive posing as Tessa Carville, complete with Pigsby on a leash, channeling Eva Gabor as wife to Clarence Carville of Carville steal. Fake eyelashes and pink do become our dear Olive.

Meanwhile, to by-pass the Charles Charles resurrection, Chuck breaks into the old cheese locker at the house to search for a wooden box of her things that kept her father’s old letters. She hopes they can find answers about Dwight in these, but there are none, and she is startled by Rob Wright, Robber Extraordinaire, who reveals that he plotted with Gustav to rob the house to test his true friends and the love of his wife. Apparently, the wife stumbled upon him and  flailed the musket gun around before he escaped, thus implicating her as the killer. It’s compounded by the surveillance Emerson and Co have as they watch the widow and porter in a clawing embrace: “Hello motive nice to see you again.”

In the meanwhile, Olive is at the pie hole stress eating as she had been confronted by Dwight who left a message in the form of the Chuck obit that Vivian had – yes, he is telling them he knows, and that is Not Good. Dwight also gets driven away by Lilly, sitting on the porch waiting for him with a shotgun, telling him to never come back. He gets to her though, and Lilly goes to visit her daughter’s grave only to realize that the grave has been unsettled, and she supposes that he dug up Chuck to get the watch. She goes to his hotel room and sees an array of rifles and machine guns, and 2 pocket watches. She takes them back just as he walks in and he thinks Chuck is the thief – and he leaves to retrieve them.

The gang confronts the widow who couldn’t have fired the musket with her crazy long manicure and massive finger ring bling, and they confront Rob Wright, liar, who did accidentally shoot down the chandelier in a struggle with the gun. Turns out while part of the story was true, Gustav in the end didn’t want to go through with the robbery having found out about the affair beforehand. Rob returns the new will, which bequeaths all to Daniel Hill, lawyer and loyal friend to Gustav, and while Rob attempts a daring and flashy escape via pulley rope, Emerson thwarts it by shooting the rope and sending our thief and murderer crashing down.

But celebration is short as the gang comes back to the Pie Hole to learn what Dwight now knows, and Ned and Chuck decide the only way to end this is to know what Chuck’s father knows about Dwight and use that as leverage. They sit staring at the coffin while Chuck tells Ned he is the “real swash buckling do-gooder, and I love you.” But will she after having seen Ned revive her dad…and kill him again?

As always, I loved this episode. I love that that the mysteries unfold sweetly, interestingly, intricately, and surprisingly. The murderer isn’t as transparent as it is on most procedural shows. The language is also better, the colors brighter, but also with a hint of underlying darkness. It can’t be helped – we are dealing with murder and human failings here. But its done so differently, that as much as I can be addicted to the CSI’s and Cold Case’s of TV, this one leaves me not only with a sense of justice but a levity of hope.

Ok, here is my wish fulfillment: If ABC can’t see this show through to its natural end, can they at least give it, if not til the end of this season, a wrap up 2 hour movie episode? Can’t Emerson reunite with his long lost daughter? Can’t Chuck somehow stay alive and be touched by Ned, or at least be revealed to her aunts without compromising Ned’s gift and potential incarceration into a funny farm? Please, studio heads that loom like Big Brother over this show – can’t you do this show some justice?

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About Sonia Aurora: Aspiring screenwriter and seamstress, Sonia’s dream is to write life-changing 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 (Featured on ifilm.com & Coming Soon to YouTube!). While Sonia waits patiently for the Studios to call, she continues her selfless, humanitarian efforts (think Mother Teresa) through her scripts, short stories and sewing (a true triple-threat!), knowing all the while that someday her efforts will indeed save (or at least mildly tweak) the world. 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.