Pushing Daisies Fodder

Pushing Daisies: Dummy

This week's episode opens with a flashback to Ned's childhood when he first wound up at boarding school. We even get to see his dad. Well, sort of. He's at a bad angle, but he's there. Telling Ned he'll be back, and lying about it. Gee, I can't imagine why Ned is all distant with people.

Despite knowing the rules about his gift, Little Ned offers to help with his class's frog dissection project. He passes out frogs that naturally come to life (before they've been cut open, which is good for both the frogs and the special effects budget). The class freaks out and heads for the hills. Little Ned only catches and re-kills one frog. He manages to also head for the hills, or at least several feet up a tree, before the one minute is up. Since he didn't re-kill most of the frogs, something else has to die in their places. I was sort of hoping it would be the classmates because I'm evil like that and watched too much Twilight Zone and Outer Limits as a kid, but it's just the tree full of pigeons. The teacher asks Little Ned if he had anything to do with this, and Little Ned lies and says "no," vowing to keep his gift a secret.

I get the feeling lying and secrets are going to be a Thing in this episode.

Whatever money was saved in the special effects budget by not digitally dissecting the live frogs is blown with a nice dissolve from Little Ned to Adult Ned.

Ned and Chuck are sort of living in sort-of domestic bliss, sleeping in twin beds like Lucy and Desi. Chuck misses her looney aunts. Perhaps if they weren't in separate beds she wouldn't miss them so much. Or she'd be dead. And certainly wouldn't miss them so much. Regardless, she lies about missing the looney aunts (Who, it turns out, are also cheese fanatics).

Ned still refuses to tell Chuck that he killed her dad by accident.

Olive, Ned's waitress/next-door neighbor hangs deftly out her window to spy on their sort-of domestic bliss with a mirror on a stick. Well, that's not creepy at all. She's really thrilled they don't touch. Which also isn't creepy at all.

We learn that Emerson also has a creepy habit: When stressed, he knits. And Ned and Chuck are stressing him out. They've stressed him to the point that he's knitted a sweater vest and two gun cozies. After all, one doesn't want one's handguns to be uncozy. Emerson calls Ned to what has to be the prettiest morgue ever to talk to a guy who was killed at a deer crossing, hopefully not by an angry deer. Emerson is stressed at the moment by the fact that Ned has brought Chuck to the prettiest morgue ever.

At the morgue, they talk to the dead guy; it turns out he wasn't killed by an angry deer, but by a crash-test dummy. No, not a Canadian band member. An actual test dummy. Unfortunately, Chuck runs out most of their minute by asking Dead Guy if he has any last words and trying to discuss Buddhism with him, so they don't get to ask for details on the dummy. He does, however, ask that they tell Jeanine From Promotions that he loved her. Awwwwww....Emerson heart is not melted by this. He's just annoyed at Chuck.

Back at the Pie Hole, Olive has hair MUCH shorter than last week's and is wondering awkwardly who the "funny girl" is hanging around Ned (Interestingly, Kristin Chenoweth appeared in a benefit performance of Funny Girl in 2002. I assume this isn't a coincidence, but you never know). She also wants to know if Ned and Chuck touch. Emerson says that he wishes they would touch, and then helpfully tells Olive that Ned digs Chuck way more than he digs her. Well, that was just mean. Olive feels really, really, really lonely.

Ned and Chuck head to Dead Guy's old place of work to give Jeanine From Promotions the message. Dead Guy and Jeanine both worked at Dandy Lion Worldwide Industries. The company is about to release a car that runs on fuel made from dandelions. The company president, Mark Chase, is leading a group of Asian folks who are going to sell the cars in Asia somewhere. We learn that Chuck speaks Japanese (and a slough of other languages) when she asks Mark about Dead Guy and Jeanine in Japanese. Ned is dumbfounded.

Jeanine From Promotions is dressed in a lime-green go-go dancer outfit with a horrible dandelion helmet and even more horrible eye make-up. She lies and says she doesn't know Dead Guy. But she takes their consolation pie anyway and eats it, weeping, while hiding behind a car. And unlike Britney Spears, she doesn't cry her horrible fake eyelashes off. She does, apparently, barf up the wonderful pie 15 minutes later, but we thankfully don't see that.

Ned and Chuck take a tour of the crash test facility to look for clues. The facility is run by science guys. Neither one is Bill Nye. I feel cheated.

They find a room full of crash-test dummies. One of them is missing its clothes and its face (Buster, no!), but for some reason it's left with two very surprised-looking eyes, which is odd, since the rest of the crash-test dummies don't have well-defined faces.

Back at the Pie Hole, Ned and Chuck tell Emerson what she found. They keep trying to emphasize that Chuck was the discoverer.

It turns out that the company has a lot riding on the new car and there are also a lot of angry competitors because of said new car. Our Three Heroes decide to go back to Dandy Lion, leaving Olive all alone to sing "Hopelessly Devoted." Okay, I'll admit, I still haven't listened to my cast recording of Wicked, but I had no idea she could belt like that. Wow. She dances (sort of) with both Digby the Not-Flat Dog and Manuel the floor cleaner. It's very nicely choreographed and shot.

Our Three Heroes get into Dandy Lion, which seems poorly guarded. Apparently there's only one security guard who is easily distracted by Chuck's rack. It's a nice rack, but you'd think if there were only the one guy, they'd have trained him not to be so distracted by racks.

Emerson has gotten a pass card to break into the testing facility by going through an elaborate yet sneaky process. Chuck, however, just hugged the easily distracted security guard and swiped his pass. Apparently Emerson didn't think to shake his junk for the security guard. He actually planned ahead.

Chuck wants to know why Ned doesn't want to know everything about her; she wants to know everything about him. But before he can come up with a good lie, Emerson announces that he's found skeletons in the closet. Or rather, corpses in the spare room. Ned starts touching dead guys. None of them are connected to the car, but it turns out they agreed to be used to test car safety. Instead, apparently, of the dummies.

Our Three Heroes run into Jeanine From Promotions and ply her with more pie. She reveals that she was in love with Dead Guy. They even Did It in one of the Dandy Lion cars in a way evocative of Titanic. A scene in the movie. Not the ship itself.

As Dead Guy's hours ran later and later, Jeanine got jealous and started spying on him. She agrees to lead the Heroes to what she found while spying, but only after Emerson gives her the end of his pie. There is a wonderful nonverbal exchange between the two of them before he caves in.

The Three Heroes follow Jeanine in their car. Jeanine drives ahead of them in a Dandy Lion. As they go, Chuck complains about Jeanine's secret bulimia, Chuck having to be Ned's secret, how much Ned loves secrets, and her secret that she misses her creepy aunts. And that Aunt Lily had a historical erotica collection. I'm with Emerson on this one: I didn't need to know that. Chuck also complains that she can't sit in the front seat; Ned's afraid that he might accidentally touch her and she'd be dead forever. We can't have him stopping short, after all.

Jeanine's car explodes before they get where they're going, although our Three Heroes look rather nonplussed about it.

Jeanine winds up in a full-body cast, which Chuck makes over for her. Well, it's not completely full-body. Her toes, painted the same color as her go-go girl getup, are sticking out.

On Jeanine's direction, they go find a mass grave full of crash-test dummies. Hopefully none of them were musical prodigy dummies driven mad by their jealous rival composer dummies in creepy black dummy masks. It turns out they were dumped there because they're full of computer goodies that store data that can't be erased, and someone wanted to hide all the crash test data. But who? Well, as it turns out, it's the guy standing above the hole dressed like a crash test dummy. Who tases all of them.

Meanwhile, Olive is obsessing about Ned and Chuck. She pictures them being obnoxious in a bubble bath. Well, that would keep me awake too, but not that way. She takes Digby for a walk to stop the obsessing.

Our Three Heroes wake up in body bags inside a Dandy Lion car in the crash test facility. Outside the car, the evil crash test dummy turns out to be Mark Chase, President of Dandy Lion Worldwide Industries. He is hooking their car up to be crashed. He's also giving the Supervillain Why I Did It Speech. It turns out Dead Guy knew the cars would explode if they got over 70 MPH and the seat warmers and headlights were on (they put seat warmers in this thing?) and tried to get production of the car stopped. When he couldn't be bribed to shut up, Mark Chase had to get rid of the dummies and their data and Dead Guy. After all, a little moral turpitude is apparently cheaper than halting car production.

Chase crashed Dead Guy into the wall in a body bag inside a Dandy Lion car, the way he's going to do with Our Heroes, and then dumped him by the deer crossing sign, using his anal retentive attention to detail to make the scene look truly convincing as a hit-and-run accident.

Oh, and the body bags? It keeps things neat and tidy. Which is important when murdering. And keeping cars shiny.

Mark Chase is giving a truly brilliant Supervillain Why I Did It Speech. Sadly, unlike in James Bond movies and Scooby-Doo episodes, Our Heroes are in a very quiet car and in very quiet body bags and can't hear any of this.

About to die, Ned suddenly wants to tell Chuck everything. Even the thing about killing her dad? The two of them share a sweet, if bizarre, open-mouthed kiss through the body bags. No tongue, I assume.

Emerson has been carrying around a knitting needle, which comes in handy to escape the body bags. He breaks Ned and Chuck out of their kiss, and Ned drives off into the sunset. Well, out of the building, anyway. Mark chases after them in a huge Hummer (Hey, the antithesis of the car he's trying to sell! I get it!). He tries to get them to get the car up to 70 MPH so they'll explode. Of course, he does this in part by bumping the back of their car with his, which shows how the Dandy Lion's rear bumper is totally made of cheap plastic-er, I mean, a space-age polymer, no doubt made from dandelions.

Mark Chase is pulled over by the cops and can't get away because his gas guzzler is, well, out of gas.

Meanwhile, Our Heroes careen out of control back into town, very nearly reaching 70 MPH and exploding. Luckily, they have to stop before they reach speed so they don't hit Olive and Digby the Not-Flat Dog. Luckily for Olive and Digby, they stop JUST in time. Olive is also pleased that Ned and Chuck don't seem to have been doing anything romantic (Hey, maybe being tied up in body bags driving out of control in an eco-friendly car is just their kink).

Mark Chase is arrested, and the Dandy Lion car company dissolves. Jeanine Formerly From Promotions is happy that Dead Guy didn't die in vain and starts back on the road-ha!-to dietary recovery. Emerson realizes that Chuck isn't going anywhere, so he'll just have to keep knitting. Luckily, he's making lots of money, so he can make cozies for his bundles of cash. Olive refuses to give up on Ned.

And Ned finally lets Chuck ride shotgun. He's made her a plexiglass partition for the front seat of his car so she can ride in the front seat with him. It looks suspiciously bulletproof. All the fun of riding in a cab without actually being in a cab. There's also a rubber glove built into it for Steering Emergencies. It's pretty low in the partition. I'm sure it's just for holding hands (and steering emergencies), but...it looks like it could be for holding Other Things if this show weren't on at 8 p.m. However, it is on at 8, and the show closes with them holding hands and staring deep into each others' eyes. Through the plexiglass.

---

Posted by on October 12, 2007 2:01 AM
Permalink | Email to a Friend | Add to del.icio.us | Digg This






More Recent Stories:
• Pushing Daisies Ep. 2 Finally Viewable in UK.
• Pushing Daisies Ranked Best New Show by AOL Users
• Pushing Daisies Coming Out On DVD (and other random news)
• Pushing Daisies: Corpsicle
• "Pushing Daisies" Nominated for Golden Satellite Award
• Pushing Daisies: Bitter Sweets
• Pushing Daisies: The Smell of Success
• Pushing Daisies: Bitches
• Pushing Daisies: Girth
• Pushing Daisies: Pigeon