Pushing DaisiesCircus, Circus
The Relationships
Original Air Date: Oct 8, 2008
PMB - TwoCents Reviewer
pmb@thetwocentscorp.com
You Can’t Stop the Change
You know the saying that you have to take one step back to take two steps forward? I never quite understood that — until this episode of Pushing Daisies, “Circus Circus.”
This episode was like a colorful picture book version of the best-selling book “Who Moved My Cheese?” because it was all about change. And yes, every single character took one step back to take two steps forward.
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Pushing Daisies
ReplyDeleteCircus, Circus
The Relationships
Original Air Date: Oct 8, 2008
PMB - TwoCents Reviewer
pmb@thetwocentscorp.com
You Can’t Stop the Change
You know the saying that you have to take one step back to take two steps forward? I never quite understood that — until this episode of Pushing Daisies, “Circus Circus.”
This episode was like a colorful picture book version of the best-selling book “Who Moved My Cheese?” because it was all about change. And yes, every single character took one step back to take two steps forward.
In the beginning flashback, young Ned brings a nest of chicks back to life for a preschool class, only to have the other birds the children were nursing back to health die instead. From this experience, he learned that “new beginnings only led to painful ends.”
Fast forward to Ned getting used to sleeping in his room alone after Chuck has moved out wondering if “moving a little bit apart had moved them [emotionally] a little bit apart.” This is a mopey Ned and quite frankly, Chuck has every right to be miffed with him. (Although one scene of him alone in the apartment at night, hoping that the knock on the door is Chuck—it’s Emerson— made me feel quite sad for him.)
Emerson sure doesn’t help Ned much. He points out that Chuck’s move could be the start of bigger changes, “Today, an apartment across the hall; tomorrow, Paris and a croissant-maker named Phillipe.” Yet Emerson is struggling with his own inner doubts. So let’s start with him.
Emerson takes on the case of a runaway daughter who wants to change by getting out from under her mother’s shadow. Obviously, this non-murder case mirrors that of his own daughter, then Ned asks if Emerson would even recognize his daughter after seven years apart? The question unnerves the knitting detective so much that he provides some uncharacteristic counseling to the mother of the runaway girl, leading to their reconciliation. Big hug for them and a small smile for Emerson.
Olive, still at the nunnery, is overwhelmingly bored by a life where there’s nothing else to do but pray. Then Lily appears (hysterical in the teal habit and a matching eye patch), claiming that everything she told Olive was a lie, which, being a smart cookie, Olive didn’t buy for a second. But this leads to Olive’s epiphany that the secret she’s most scared of blurting out isn’t Lily’s or Chuck’s, but rather that she is still in love with the Piemaker! So she decides to stay at the nunnery until she can get her infatuation under control because “Olive realized that a new leaf may take time to turn over.”
Lily learns that she just has to live with her shady past and try to be a good sister to Vivian. In fact, she may be the one who changes the least, except, as the narrator says, “they went back to eating pie and keeping secrets, but not to being shut-ins.”
Vivian is the most adventurous aunt right now, driven by her loneliness to frequent the Pie Hole (causing Chuck to take several rolling dives over the counter). She is the character who needs to change the most and shows it by taking baby steps toward that goal. I’m finding her the saddest character in the cast right now.
Chuck is struggling in several ways. She’s coming to realize that her aunts are changing because of her death in a way that they couldn’t when she was alive. At the same time, she is fighting for her independence. As she says to Ned after the aunts prove they are no longer shut-ins, “they’re allowed to move on and start over, but you don’t want me moving across the hall.” Later she adds, “My first time around, I was terrified of change. I’m not going to make that mistake again.” The old Chuck would have run back home to avoid conflict.
Ned takes the longest to embrace change, as he likes his world neatly ordered, with no room for surprises. Yet when Ned and Chuck finally fight about this, it only strengthens their relationship. (Didn’t you love it when he spoke about making “contraptions” so they can get around the no-touch thing? Wouldn’t you love to know what they are?) Because when Ned does give Chuck the psychological space she needs, it only brings them emotionally closer together, playing a game that they are new acquaintances.
The narrator so aptly ties up this theme of change by saying “watching someone make a fresh start can be fairly traumatic. But making a fresh start together can be a thrill.” See? It’s all about taking one step back to make two steps forwards. It really does work, at least on Pushing Daisies.
BTW, did you notice that the culprit in the case was an acrobat who didn’t want change? And look where he ended up — in jail. What does that teach you?
"This is a mopey Ned and quite frankly, Chuck has every right to be miffed with him."
ReplyDeleteNaw, see, I disagree--though I think Chuck was right to move out, Ned had every right to be mopey.
Think back to last season. Before Ned and Chuck were reunited, each was astonishingly--nay, unhealthily--selfless. But a selfless person is not a whole person.
Post-resurrection, Ned and Chuck found that they were in similar places in their lives: in their late twenties, but only just beginning to live for themselves. Each of them is only just learning to acknowledge and articulate their own desires--it's just that Ned's are for intimacy while Chuck's are for independence.
Ned knows that he cannot keep Chuck close by force, but this is the practically the first time in his life that he's acknowledged--much less verbalized--his own needs, and he's finding that he's expected to sacrifice even that fragile spark of self. He's made himself more vulnerable than he's ever been with his admission--to himself as much as Chuck--that, if he has worth as a human being, he cannot always be purely selfless, and now he has go and be selfless again. No wonder he's upset.
But it isn't Chuck's fault, either. She needs independence as badly as Ned needs closeness, for exactly the same reasons, and her compromise solution is probably the best possible solution.
The real problem, as I see it, is that Ned and Chuck each have the double burden of learning to be themselves while simultaneously learning to be part of a pair. It won't be easy, but it will be necessary.