Pushing Daisies Robbing Hood - The Case
Original Air Date: 26 Nov 2008
Crystal - TwoCents Staff Writer
crystal@thetwocents.com
Our case begins with a visit from a former lawyer, spouting out legal rhetoric and terms in common conversation. He tells Emerson that his friend/client/lover Gustav Hofer was robbed and murdered. He suspects Gustav’s gold-digging wife, as Gustav was the richest man in town, his millions coming from a string of inventions that started with the mechanized yarn baller. Sounds like a case after Emerson’s heart.
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Our case begins with a visit from a former lawyer, spouting out legal rhetoric and terms in common conversation. He tells Emerson that his friend/client/lover Gustav Hofer was robbed and murdered. He suspects Gustav’s gold-digging wife, as Gustav was the richest man in town, his millions coming from a string of inventions that started with the mechanized yarn baller. Sounds like a case after Emerson’s heart.
ReplyDeleteNed, Chuck, and Emerson pay a visit to the morgue, where they find Gustav hanging from a crystal chandelier (the killer left the murder weapon), and Ned brings him back to life. He’s an older gentleman and speaks like it, throwing around words like “Moxie” and calling Chuck, “Sassafras.” He tells them they need to go to his trophy room, and retrieve his new will, which stipulated that his money-hungry wife got nothing. He was very adamant about that. When asked who killed him, he answers “the bellman did it.”
So our heroes head to Gustav’s mansion to meet his wife and hired help. His wife Elise (Jan Brady from those weird modern-day Brady movies in the 90s) is a young blond ditz. She’s all hair-flinging, and diamonds, and “champagne juice drinks,” which normal people would call mimosas. But she has an alibi, a charity event of some sort. The bellman, who angrily asserts that he is a porter, brings in some mimosas, and has an alibi of his own, a key party. In a very cute scene, we find out that Ned doesn’t know what that is, reinforcing his adorableness.
But he spent most of their stay at Gustav’s in the trophy room, finding an empty safe. No will, but a cryptic Latin phrase “orbis pro vox”, the trademark of a proverbial Robin Hood, a thief stealing from the rich and giving the take to charity. This leads them to a charity organization full of Robin Hoods, or rather, telemarketers, whose token phrase is the English equivalent of the Latin phrase left at the crime scenes of the rich.
The three meet the group’s leader, Rob Wright, an energetic man who upholds that none of his men could possibly be a killer. They also meet a suspect-ish (Ned’s word) telemarketer named Tam Phong, who hides his phone list and runs off before the three can question him. But he didn’t hide his list very well, as Emerson gets it, and a little investigating reveals that everyone on Phong’s phone list had been robbed. But they don’t suspect him of the actual robberies, believing he was just passing on the names of really rich people in town.
So they set up a sting using Aunt Lily and Aunt Vivian’s house. They send Olive to the charity agency’s headquarters, undercover as a rich heiress with a bad fake Hungarian accent, but it works, and Tam Phong seems convinced of her wealth. I’m not. They accent really wouldn’t fool anyone, and the only way I know that it was supposed to be Hungarian is because that’s what closed captioning told me.
So that night, Ned and Emerson make camp in the Aunt’s living room to wait for the robber so they can bust him, while Chuck hides upstairs taking care of a personal matter. I don’t know why they thought the robber would enter downstairs through the front door, because he shows up upstairs where Chuck is. He maintains that his intentions are entirely noble, of course. He’s Robin Hood, taking from those who don’t need it and sharing with those who do.
“The facts were these,” the catchphrase of the Narrator, is commandeered by Rob Wright, who tells Chuck his story of robbing Gustav. According to Rob, he and Gustav had made a deal. Gustav wanted to make sure his wife was really loyal to him, which would determine if he wanted to leave her his fortune, or use his new will, which wrote her out. Rob would steal everything in his safe, and if Elise stayed with Gustav, then she was loyal enough to get his estate. After he knew what to do about his estate, Rob would return half of what he stole, and keep the rest for charity. He tells Chuck that while he in the process of the robbery, Gustav’s wife burst in, yielding a giant musket and scaring him off.
So again the finger is pointed at the greedy wife. So our three plan out a stake-out at Gustav’s mansion and catch a glimpse of Elise and the bellman engaging in sexual activities. They burst in to interrupt, and once again interrogate the two. Elise’s alibi didn’t hold, she never went to that charity event.
But Elise has them beat. She is way to blinged up and fake nailed out to handle that musket. There’s no way she could pull the trigger with all her rings and her fake nails. She couldn’t have done it, and of course, the bellman was with her. In addition, she reveals that she never saw the robber at all. Jennifer Cox is hilarious, as always, but even more as Elise, in her ritzy outfits, valley girl attitude, and general stupidity. It was very entertaining.
So Ned, Chuck, and Emerson head back to the charity organization’s headquarters, being sure that it was Rob Wright, our very own Robin Hood. Turns out that Gustav secretly saw his wife and the bellman in the act, and witnessed his friend the former lawyer standing up for him and defending him to them. Determining that his wife really was a gold-digger, Gustav tried to call the fake robbery off, not needing Robin Hood to rob him anymore.
But Rob Wright would have none of it. He grabbed the musket, and Gustav pushed him down on the ground, causing Rob to pull the trigger, the bullet hitting the rope holding the chandelier up and that was the end of Gustav.
Rob turns over the will, believing that this means that he can go free, but Emerson will have none of his Robin Hood business. He’s a killer, and he goes down for it.
All in all, not a very exciting story. The characters are entertaining, which makes up a bit for the lackluster murder mystery. The actors were spot-on and hilarious.
What did you think? Was this the kind of episode that’s going to make you miss Pushing Daisies as much as me? Did it spur you to want to join in the efforts to save the show? Or did it make it you, “Meh,” and lead you to believe that Pushing Daisies is better off pushing up daisies?