Thursday, November 29, 2007

Pushing Daisies - Bitter Sweets

This show is on such another level compared to regular TV. It's combination of fantasy, it's look, it's feel and even it's taste is magical.
Things got exciting at the Pie Hole when the brand new Balsam's Bittersweets Taffy and Sweet Emporium opens up across the street. It appears that the very lovely Dilly Balsam (guest star Molly Shannon) is very competitive and fearless due to some very Hitchcockian circumstances... the homage to the film The Birds was hilarious.
The gang go over to meet the new neighbours, and after some sweet smelling pie attracts the customers out of the Emporium to the Pie Hole (as in ’shut your’ but one sweet whiff and people usually wanna ‘open their’) Dilly goes ballistic. War ensures, Dilly makes the Pie Hole the Pie Ho and gets the Health Inspector after them..... Ned can't really explain why he has a room full of rotten fruit so they get shut down. We learn that Ned doesn't like confrontation and there is another insight into Ned as we see him as a child, playing in a pile of dead leaves with a friend and freaking him out when the leaves come back to life. Ned has had a very complicated life, and I love these peeks into his psyche.
Olive and Chuck decide to get even, so after some great Mission Impossible moves, they release rats in the Emporium and once Ned finds out he goes back to clean up, discovering Dilly's dead brother in the Taffy Vat. Death by taffy.... oh my god. Ned re-animates him, but can't get any information from him due to having a mouth full of taffy.... the cops show up and Ned is accused of murder.
Emerson and Chuck do some sleuthing, and have a great CSI moment using candy to get hand prints... it appears our murder is missing a finger that they found in the victim's stomach. The gang thinks its Dilly, but they are later proved wrong and it's the Health Inspector who has disappeared and we see at the end that Dilly has disposed of his body..... hmmmm
A lot of the episode revolved around Ned and Chuck's relationship, Ned still feeling guilty over his accidental killing of her father and him finally blurting out the truth at the end of the episode... which I have no idea when we will see the next one. Olive got in some great time and I was happy to see the return of the Homeopathic Salesman who truly loves Olive, Digby was hilarious with the Health Inspector and Emerson was showing his skills as a PI. Unfortunately no sign of the Aunts in this episode, which of course made it bitter sweet.