Top Five Cases: Pushing Daisies

Given the fact that its protagonist can touch dead people back to life and ask who killed them, Pushing Daisies still does a fine job coming up with intriguing, wild, visually inventive murders for the team to solve.  It’s an achievement Bryan Fuller comes by honestly – he honed his ability to come up with creative death scenarios on Dead Like Me, and he current puts it to impressive use on Hannibal.  The following five episodes contain my favorite cases solved by the Pie Hole crew.

 “The Smell of Success” (Season 1, Episode 7)

Okay, this case has it all.  Scratch ‘n’ sniff explosives?  Tension among both novelty book authors and olfactory experts?  The threat of Cannibalistic Humanoid Underground Dwellers?  Check, check, and check.  Oscar Vibenius is an awesome character (who brought some tension to a larger season arc in an unexpected way,) and Anita Gray is the sweetest charred corpse you’ve ever met.

 “Corpsicle” (Season 1, Episode 9)

I love the intrigue of this one, the dead bodies of insurance adjustors showing up frozen and occasionally hidden in snowmen.  There’s something of a vigilante justice angle, a great stake-out scene between Ned and Emerson, and the fantastic sight of Emerson using a knitting needle to chip the ice off a “freezer-burnt” corpse so Ned can make the necessary contact.

“Frescorts” (Season 2, Episode 4)

Frescorts!  Oh my gosh, I love this case.  The whole idea of friend escorts amuses me, and everything over at Frescorts HQ is fun and cheerily weird.  I also really like the double clients (especially the Kalashni-Cod scene,) along with Chuck and Olive’s undercover shenanigans and the gross-out factor of a friendly dead Frescort preserved in formaldehyde.

“Dim Sum Lose Some” (Season 2, Episode 5)

I love the noir-ishness of the shady, behind-closed-doors dealings at the dim sum restaurant, helped, of course, by the presence of Emerson’s potential squeeze Simone – I just love that cool-as-a-cucumber dog breeder.  Oh, and dim sum poker?  Creative and delicious.  If I knew someone running a dim sum poker game, I might actually have to take up poker.

“Window Dressed to Kill” (Season 2, Episode 11)

Department store window dressers turning up dead, accompanied by the lavishly-dressed windows that are decked out to look eerily, presciently similar to the death scenarios?  I’m so there.  Plus, this is a case that’s largely hands-off by Ned (literally,) so we get to see Emerson and Chuck doing old-fashioned, non-magic legwork to solve the murders.  Fun all around.

Favorite Characters: Ned (Pushing Daisies)

 

Pushing Daisies was the first Bryan Fuller show I ever loved, and Ned was the first Bryan Fuller character I ever adored.  The series is packed to the gills with delightful, vibrant characters, but it’s the lanky pie maker who won me over the quickest and the most completely.  He’s a wonderfully built-from-the-ground-up character, so understandably a product of his experiences that, despite the magic and whimsy of the show (and Ned himself,) he feels nothing but genuine.

 

If, before watching Pushing Daisies, you’d asked me to describe someone who could bring the dead to life with a touch of his finger, I have no idea what I would’ve come up with.  With Ned, though, I can’t help but think, “Of course!”  You might think someone who’d discovered such extraordinary powers at a young age would develop a potent god complex, that he’d feel above the laws of men and nature and carry with him a sense of invincibility.  But young Ned’s crash course on his powers included the sudden death and resurrection of his mother (first touch:  life,) the even more sudden and cruel second death of his mother (second touch:  dead again, forever,) and the inadvertent death of his best friend’s father (keep a dead thing alive for more than a minute, and something else has to die.)  The man is damaged, and he comes by it honestly.

 

As such, it makes perfect sense that he grows into someone closed-off, lonely, and incredibly cautious.  It’s logical that he adheres to things so rigidly, because knowing the rules of his powers is the only way to prevent devastation.  Until Emerson learns of Ned’s powers and proposes a waking-the-dead P.I. partnership, he only renews dead fruit to make eternally-fresh pies.  He walks through the world like he’s folding into himself, hunched up with his arms folded to avoid unintentional resurrections.  Furthermore, as someone who lost everyone who mattered to him as a child, he loves deeply but worriedly, and he clings even as he berates himself for being clingy.  He’s uncomfortable in his skin around other people, even living people, like he still feels his mother dying irreversibly when she kissed him good night.  When you think about it, it’s a wonder he’s as reasonably well-adjusted as he is.

 

Because, all things considered, he really is.  Yes, he’s shy and a little awkward, and he keeps secrets almost possessively, but he’s also bright and kind.  We tend to see him more at ease when he’s talking to the dead, getting any information that will help solve their murders.  Though he keeps a punctilious eye on his ever-present stopwatch, he becomes relaxed and conversational, treating them like people rather than freaks (I love the scene in the pilot where he chastises Emerson for using terms like “zombies” and “living dead.”)  And it’s true that, at first glance, his nervousness might seem to be his defining characteristic, but he’s capable of real bravery and heroism when the situation calls for it.  The more traditional bravery, of course – confronting dangerous people, thinking on his feet in tight situations – but he also displays a less showy bravery reserved for shy, tightly-wound people.  Over the course of the show’s two seasons, we see how incredibly far he steps beyond his comfort zone, how he swallows his nerves to open himself up to new people and experiences.

 

As with so many terrific Bryan Fuller characters, I’m reminded of one of George’s lines from Dead Like Me, the one about “respecting somebody for being a mess because you’re a mess too.”  Like the others, Ned is a fantastic mess, entirely relatable despite his extraordinary circumstances, and it’s a treat to root for him to find his way.