“Pushing Daisies” — Corpscicle
Pee-Wee’s other playhouse.
So we have Oscar Vibenius played with an odd subtlety by the awesome Paul Reubens as well as that creepy neighbor kid from Mad Men both having hair fetishes. In the series each character gets his dream to come true when the female lead snips off a small lock as a souvenir. All we need is one more character on one more program and I suppose it becomes a trend. C’mon, Hollywood, don’t let us down now. More after the jump…
I think this was the last episode of Pushing Daisies until the strike ends, which is a damn shame. I don’t know how this show is able to keep up the perfect balance between set-decoration, quirkiness, genuine drama, comedy and cartoon nonsense week in and week out but they have and I commend them for their actions. Hopefully the forced time off doesn’t ruin all of this. For a fall that has largely been forgettable, Pushing Daisies is the one show that hasn’t really had a bad episode yet. I’m also impressed at how they’ve found ways to keep up the serialized nature of the show without driving the audience mad by withholding information. Other shows would have dragged out a lot of the mysteries for seasons, but here we are not even halfway through the first order and we’ve already had Chuck learn of Ted inadvertently killing her dad… and her making peace with it. Outside of the no touching! thing, which is at its core the basis for the entire series, this information is pretty crucial to understanding both Ned and Chuck as characters and thankfully it wasn’t drained of all meaning over some endless arc.
One other thing that struck me this week was how curiously gory the show is without ever being particularly bloody or unsettling. There are these moments when something plays out on screen and you find yourself taken by all of the pretty colors and pitch perfect set design and never realize until several minutes later that, yes, the frost-covered, frozen corpse is pink because under all of that ice is probably a bloody, mangled mess. There was also the scene tonight when the murderous Make-A-Wish woman was run down by a minivan driven by a monkey (no, seriously) where the camera is above the car and we see her legs sticking out the back only for the camera to truck right and reveal the top half of her body sticking out from under the front… ten feet away. For 8:00pm on a network owned by Disney this seems to be a particularly ballsy visual (as is another frozen corpse being dropped by the paramedics and seeing it shatter on the concrete). I’m not complaining. I find all of this to be one of the series great selling points: outside of the bubble-gum exterior, this is a series that regularly dabbles in some dark, dark shit.
Tags: ABC, Pushing Daisies, Season Finale
