Pushing DaisiesCircus, Circus
The Case
Original Air Date: Oct 8, 2008
Crystal - TwoCents Reviewer
crystal@thetwocentscorp.com
I feel like Pushing Daisies is deliberately trying to mess with me. The second episode of the second season brings one of my worst childhood fears to the forefront of the show: clowns. Bees were bad enough, but Pushing Daisies has crossed into whole new territory now. I spent more of the show hiding expectedly from the clowns, who only played a small part in the show overall.
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Pushing Daisies
ReplyDeleteCircus, Circus
The Case
Original Air Date: Oct 8, 2008
Crystal - TwoCents Reviewer
crystal@thetwocentscorp.com
I feel like Pushing Daisies is deliberately trying to mess with me. The second episode of the second season brings one of my worst childhood fears to the forefront of the show: clowns. Bees were bad enough, but Pushing Daisies has crossed into whole new territory now. I spent more of the show hiding expectedly from the clowns, who only played a small part in the show overall.
Our mystery centers on a missing teen girl, and a case that immediately draws Emerson towards it (for more on this, see the character breakdown of this episode.) Emerson gets a visit from Georgeann Heaps, played by an almost unrecognizable Rachael Harris. Her daughter, “Sweet Nikki” Heaps is missing, and Emerson is all over this case.
Emerson starts with Nikki’s best friend, but she tells him nothing. Chuck gets a chance to talk to the girl, manipulating her into a confession quite brilliantly. The best friend is most striking in her attire. I’m not even sure what era she walked out of, some fusion of 80s and 90s I think, but she’s stereotypically all attitude and teenage angst. She sees through Chuck’s attempt at forging a bond, but spills later anyway that Nikki ran away with her boyfriend and is living in his van, trying to make her living in the entertainment business.
A trip to the van yields a dead mime, and no sign of the girl. The mime is very cute, I must say, miming that he got his heart broken by the teenager and telling Ned, Chuck and Emerson that Nikki left him for some clowns in the “Circus of Fun.” He has reason to believe that someone poisoned his face paint, which explains why his face is red and covered in an awkward rash. He finishes off with the whole “trapped inside a glass box” trick.
So Ned and Emerson head to the “Circus of Fun,” which is not so much fun for me, that lingering expectation of clowns just behind the next booth. Naturally, there’s a bearded woman, a weightlifter, and a little person with a large bright cannon. They even meet an upside-down Frenchman, an acrobat, who sends them to Bailey, who runs the show. Bailey’s all red coat and black hat, of course, played by Lee Arenberg from Pirates of the Caribbean. I really wanted him to break out with a, “ ‘Ello Poppet,” but he merely tells her heroes that he isn’t familiar with the missing girl, but it’s possible that she was working as an apprentice for the clowns, since she wanted to be one, an odd profession. A nervous tick by the secretary prompts Ned to pay her a solo visit, where he learns that Nikki wasn’t as sweet as her nickname suggests, and she was the apprentice to the lead clown.
Ned and Emerson embark on a drive back to the Pie Hole, and stop along the way when Ned spots a clown mask in some bushes on the side of the road. They trek down into the woods to a pond, and wouldn’t you know that there’s a rainbow clown’s mask floating on top of it. I cringed, personally, knowing that there would be clowns afoot, or a-water, I suppose you could call it.
The coroner is called in, and the clown car is dragged out of the water. It ends up holding more clowns than is possible, and way more clowns that I needed to see, though it was amusing watching them carried one-by-one in front of an astonished Ned and Emerson.
So now Ned and Chuck are in the morgue, and there are dead dripping clowns all over the place. And I wanted to run away and hide, and never look back, but I watched anyway as Ned wandered around in search of the lead clown, a garishly painted man in bright clothes with a large wig who tells the Piemaker that the clowns were run off the road. He also reveals that he was not the last person to see Nikki. It was actually a man named von Deenis, a patron of the Circus whom the clowns ridiculed and who Nikki had to hose off after the clown humiliated him in a sick trick involved chocolate pie, a horse named Peppers, and a rather awful limerick.
Emerson, Ned and Chuck track the man down, and he tells them that he didn’t chase the clowns off the road, as he stayed with his kids at the Circus while his clothes dried. As it turns out, Nikki chased after the clowns. So now it appears that Nikki killed the clowns. Personally, I can’t find fault with anyone wanting to take them out.
Emerson, usually the first to point fingers, is hesitant to blame Nikki, and inspiration strikes him. The three head back to the circus, as he has reason to believe that she wouldn’t wander far, not with nowhere else to go after all. The three end up finding a poster advertising that the circus is in need of some entertainment (as the clowns are dead), but this poster was given to Chuck before the clowns were killed by the mime in the beginning. So they head back to management.
The plot starts to look a bit clearer and things are explained a bit more. The clowns were planning on starting a union and Nikki was spying on them and reporting to the Bailey. The last the Bailey knew, Nikki was following the clowns to a secret meeting on their union.
And then WHAM, the human cannonball flies through the window, a rather twisted method of attack, if I do say so myself. Our heroes run out into the circus, and eventually make it into the prize tent, which is stuffed with plush animals of all shapes, colors, and sizes. It was a nice reminder that no one ever wins those cute prizes at the carnival. Lucky for Ned, Chuck, and Emerson, they get a prize today, that prize being none other than Nikki Heaps, in full costume as a pink gorilla in a tutu. I found my new Halloween costume!
The three, accompanied by Nikki, walk out into circus, and Emerson guess correctly that Nikki didn’t kill the clowns, but she knows who did. And then out of nowhere, Nikki is suddenly hoisted up by a wire, and held at gunpoint on a platform above the circus by none other than the French acrobat.
Now we get the real story. The acrobat killed the clowns because he was threatened by the clown union, claiming it would run the circus out of business and ruin everything. He starts rattling out a list of demands, until he is stopped by a fastball right to the head by Ned, a truly apt way to catch a criminal at the circus. It feels like poetic justice for all of us who never win at those games where you throw the ball at the milk jugs.
This case felt really convoluted to me, and hard to follow at points. I won’t lie, I did get confused a couple of times. There was so much guesswork and conjecture, it was hard to tell what actually happened, and what was theory until the very end when the Narrator explained everything.
What did you think? Too many clowns? A little confusing? Absolutely fabulous? Drop us a line and let us know.