Thursday, December 13, 2007

"Pushing Daisies" Recap & Review - "Corpsicle"

Pushing Daisies
"Corpsicle"


Original Airdate 12/12/07

Jeff L - TwoCents Staff Writer

Well gang, word on the street (by street I mean the one where they’re walking the WGA picket line) is that this is the last new episode of Pushing Daisies until next season. Bryan Fuller (Heroes, Dead Like Me) has said he planned this episode to act as a season finale in case the strike lingered. As far as season finales go this was a good one.

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  1. Pushing Daisies
    "Corpsicle"


    Original Airdate 12/12/07

    Jeff L - TwoCents Staff Writer

    Well gang, word on the street (by street I mean the one where they’re walking the WGA picket line) is that this is the last new episode of Pushing Daisies until next season. Bryan Fuller (Heroes, Dead Like Me) has said he planned this episode to act as a season finale in case the strike lingered. As far as season finales go this was a good one.

    Remember last episode when Ned (Lee Pace, Wonderfalls) told Chuck (Anna Friel, The Jury) that he was responsible for her father’s untimely death? Well, Chuck doesn’t take the news very well. She storms off into the snowstorm and leaves Ned to go all Streetcar Named Desire looking for her. He shows up at Mermaid Aunts’ (Ellen Green, Little Shop of Horrors and Swoosie Kurtz, Huff) house and lights their furnace since they are freezing and Chuck was the only one who knew how. He tries to explain to them about why they might see Chucks’s ghost around – especially since she’s not dead (anymore) but they don’t appreciate Ned’s bringing up such a sore subject and they kick him out.

    Ned goes to Olive’s (Kristin Chenoweth, The West Wing) place, but she hasn’t seen Chuck anywhere either. She’s lying of course, because Chuck is in her apartment so is Digby (Ned’s undead doggie) who is missing a big hank of fur from right above his tail. Olive wants to know why Chuck and Ned are fighting, why they never touch, why Chuck is alive but Chuck doesn’t want to talk about any of this with Olive. She just convinces Olive to bake another one of her special mood enhancing pies for the Mermaid Aunts. Chuck gives Olive her little vial of happiness and tells her it is vanilla to put in the pie. Olive prepares the pie and samples a little of the special vanilla from the vial. She can’t taste anything though so she dumps the whole bottle in the pie she’s preparing.

    Outside in the restaurant, the pie man is talking to the PI (private investigator) man. Ned tells Emerson (Chi McBride, The Nine) about his confession to Chuck about her father. Emerson isn’t happy and thinks Ned should have just kept the information to himself. He’s got a case for them and he needs Ned to concentrate on the case he’s just gotten. Uber Life Insurance adjuster Victor Narramore was found dead and frozen by a snowplow driver. Uber Life has hired Emerson to investigate the suspicious death.
    Ned pulls out the fickle finger of fate and Narramore, who can’t move his lips because he’s frozen, somehow manages to tell them he didn’t see who killed him but did see a baseball bat with the word kindness carved in it heading right for his face and that’s the last thing he remembers.

    Chuck is hiding out on the roof now, where she keeps her bees. She’s not alone on the roof though, she’s joined by Oscar Vibenius (Paul Reubens, Pee Wee’s Big Adventure). Remember him of the super sniffer from a few episodes back? He’s still curious why Chuck and Digby for that matter smell like death. Turns out, he’s the one responsible for the swatch of hair Digby has been missing lately. He wants a sample of Chuck’s hair too to continue his investigation. Chuck won’t give it to him.

    Ned is making some sort of pie and Olive comes in acting all suspicious, because she knows where Chuck has been hiding. Ned sees through her awkward behavior but Olive won’t tell where Chuck is hiding. Emerson shows up with a list of 15 people Narramore (the corpsicle) turned down for organ transplants. He’s narrowed the list down to just three people, since the other 12 have died since they were rejected by the insurance company.

    Olive is off to deliver her happy pie, and Chuck is watching the snow flakes fall out the window and being angry with Ned who shows up to talk to her. She needs to be alone. She’s angry about her father and she’s angry at Ned for killing him. Ned leaves and Chuck decides she needs someone to talk to, and since he lives in the sewers anyway and isn’t going to tell a bunch of people she decides on Oscar Vibenius.

    Emerson is checking out his leads and his leads have led him to the home of Abner Newsome. Newsome is a young boy with a bad heart who’s been turned down three times by Uber Life Insurance for a transplant. He’s very surly and wouldn’t you be too if you had a bad heart and were turned down for a transplant not once but three times? Outside, Emerson finds a snowman and since Abner is in a wheelchair and unable to go outside, he investigates only to find a second corpsicle inside the snowman.

    This time it’s Bill Richter, Uber Life Insurance adjuster number two who’s turned up dead and frozen. Ned puts the finger to him and he tells the same story about being hit with a baseball bat reading kindness. On this occassion there was a witness one Kevin Vandenikle a coworker of Bill’s at Uber Life.

    Emerson and Ned head to the Uber Life offices to find Kevin, but Kevin is missing and they find Steve Kaiser (Grand Shaud, Murphy Brown) in his office rejecting all the claims that Kevin would normally be rejecting himself were he not missing. All three missing insurance agents were the three agents responsible for Abner Newsome’s three transplant rejections.

    Back on the roof, Chuck gives Vibenius a small lock of her hair.

    Emerson and Ned head back to the Newsome house to investigate further. Inside they find not only Abner and his mother, but also Madeline McLean and her monkey Bobo. McLean is from the Wish a Wish Foundation and she’s been trying and trying to make Abner happy, but he’s a surly one that Abner. The only thing that’s going to make him happy is a new heart. Although he does seem to get some enjoyment in the fact that the two of the three agents who rejected his transplant have turned up dead and the third one is missing.

    Emerson and Ned decide to stake out the house to see if the third body shows up in a snowman on the boy’s lawn again. During the stakeout, Ned wants to talk about Chuck, but Emerson doesn’t want to. He understands the pain of losing someone close though and admits that he has a daughter he’s not seen in a very long time. Someone puts a potato in the tailpipe of Emerson’s car and Ned and Emerson pass out from the carbon monoxide. Ned wakes up before they are killed and they find the snowman containing the Vandenkle corpsicle on the lawn
    Olive delivers the happy pie to the Mermaid Aunts and Lily eats the entire thing.

    Vibenius brings back the lock of Chuck’s hair and asks her to just tell him why she smells like death. She won’t tell him though, because that’s her and Ned’s secret.

    Abner’s mom tells Emerson and Ned that Steve Kaiser just rejected another application for a heart transplant for her son and that the Wish a Wish lady had gone to the office to talk to him. Then it all starts to make sense. The Wish a Wish lady tries to make dying kids happy and that Abner kid really pushed her over the edge with his surliness. She tried and tried to make him happy and then realized that revenge against the people who rejected his heart transplant was the only thing that might make him happy. She’s on her way to kill Steve Kaiser so Ned and Emerson race to his rescue.

    Madeline McLean has Kaiser on the ground and she’s just about to kill him with kindness (her baseball bat) when Emerson pulls a gun and orders her to stop. She pulls a gun of her own and it’s a standoff, until Bobo the monkey drops the Wish a Wish van into gear and runs over Madeline. On the plus side, she was an organ donor and she was able to really make Abner happy finally by donating her heart for his transplant.

    Chuck is visiting her father’s grave and Ned finds her there. He knew she was there because he looked everywhere else for her first. She wants him to bring her father back just for one minute so she can say goodbye to him, but Ned can’t be there to watch her father die again. Chuck is really upset not only about her father, but because she never knew her mother.

    Lily Charles, the Mermaid Aunt, is hallucinating from the happy pie and she thinks she’s talking to a floating mermaid vision. She tells the apparition that she is Chuck’s mother but the apparition is actually Olive.

    This is a great show and this was a wonderful way to go out for the season, just letting us wonder about Emerson’s daughter and why Lily never told Chuck that she was her mother.

    You can catch up on previous recaps by clicking HERE.

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