Pushing DaisiesComfort Food - The Case
Original Air Date: 03 Dec 2008
Crystal – TwoCents Reviewer
crystal@thetwocentscorp.com
It seems mighty strange that the private investigator is taking care of personal business with the dead girl, and the piemaker is solving murders alone with the waitress. And yet here we are with this week’s Pushing Daisies, in which Ned and Olive are the sole solvers of the murder, which seems to be almost a tack-on to the larger storyline that involves Emerson and Chuck minding Chuck’s personal business.
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It seems mighty strange that the private investigator is taking care of personal business with the dead girl, and the piemaker is solving murders alone with the waitress. And yet here we are with this week’s Pushing Daisies, in which Ned and Olive are the sole solvers of the murder, which seems to be almost a tack-on to the larger storyline that involves Emerson and Chuck minding Chuck’s personal business.
ReplyDeleteSo they need to get Ned away from things, and what better way to do that than to send Ned and Olive to a comfort food bake-off that is sure to make all of suddenly hungry for good foods in life: waffles, muffins, pie, fried chicken, and so on.
The murder begins with the sudden death of “Colonel Likkin,” a southern man with a secret recipe that makes his fried chicken a cut above the rest. He was found face down in a fry vat of his own secret recipe, supposedly after having fallen in the vat after a heart attack.
His grieving widow finds him, and bemoans the loss of his secret recipe, which only he knew, and which he only kept in his brain. Ned, supposedly in some sort of attempt to comfort her, goes into the Colonel’s booth, and brings him back to life to ask his secret recipe.
But it turns out that someone pushed the Colonel from behind, shoving him into the fry vat, and taking the only hand-written copy of his recipe out of his pocket. The Colonel is no doubt a play on KFC’s Colonel Sanders, with the southern accent, the white hair, the suit, and he even claims the person who pushed him was “stealthy like a snake, or a yankee,” which just made my own southern family laugh.
So now Ned, at this cook-off without his investigator or his love, has a murder on his hands. But luckily, he has Olive, who is more than willing to assist him in an investigation. But it’s right after this that they go into their booth to find that their oven has been sabotaged and their pies are ruined. Someone is taking out the competition. “Find the saboteur, find the killer.”
Find the saboteur, find the killer, open the oven, find maple syrup. Conveniently, there is only one person who uses pure maple syrup, and that would be a German wafflemaker, the “Waffle Nazi.” So they head over the Waffle Nazi’s booth, and sneak in, a huge violation of the rules. But they take the risk, and head into dodge.
And discover a giant bowl of delicious batter, but not just any batter, the Colonel’s batter. Cue the ominous music, as the waffle man and the muffin lady (who is a huge rival of Ned and Olive’s) burst in, accusing Ned and Olive of sabotage, as the waffle irons’ cords have been cut.
The Waffle Nazi accuses them of sabotage, they accuse him of murder. But he has a reason for keeping a bowl of the Colonel’s batter in his workstation. He and the Colonel were going into business together. Before anything else can transpire, it turns out the Waffle Nazi is not German, and Ned and Olive are disqualified for being in someone else’s booth and supposedly sabotaging the Waffle Nazi. I was too busy laughing at the wafflemaker’s “pageantry.” I guess the lederhosen were just for fun then.
So Ned and Olive are out of the competition, but not out of the investigation. They sneak into the Colonel’s booth, and find cheap plastic jewelry on the floor just before someone clubs them with frying pans and throws them in a truck.
But Ned is not to be outdone, and he forces their way out of the trunk with some awkward thrusting. I’m with Olive, let’s not be dirty. They pop out of the trunk, and there is the Muffin Lady holding the frying pans.
She has been nothing but terrible for the whole episode, and it kind of seemed like it was her the whole time. But she claims she didn’t do, and thought Ned and Olive were the killers. She was only in the Colonel’s booth to sabotage him, not to kill him. Well, that’s one problem solved, as we now know who’s been sabotaging everyone.
In bursts Leo Burns, the event coordinator, on his scooter. And suddenly a few things look clear. There are tire marks in the batter on the floor, and grease burns on Leo’s hands. These things won’t hold up in court, he claims, but the fact that he possesses the secret recipe is proof enough.
And then we discover his motivation: he was once a slender and lonely man who tried to drown his sorrows in the Colonel’s chicken. He gained a large amount of weight, and his health suffered, so he vowed revenge on the Colonel. It’s a long way from all those lawsuits against McDonald’s.
So the murder is solved. It wasn’t the guilty-looking Muffin Lady at all, though Beth Grant was truly marvelous in this role and played it perfectly. I would love to see her make another appearance, perhaps in a similar capacity to Molly Shannon’s Dilly Balsam in season one, just without the craziness.
So what did you think? Was Beth Grant awesome? Did you miss Emerson’s involvement in the case? How did you like this week’s case or are you just left hungry?