Pushing Daisies: The Complete Second Season

BY Scott A. GrayPublished Aug 5, 2009

For the pie-maker, touching a dead thing once brings it back to life, touching it again brings death, permanently. It's the central mythology of the story applied directly to the series, in this, Pushing Daisies' second and final season. Brian Fuller's outlandishly charming and impishly macabre fairytale love story gets its chance to delve deeper into character arcs without succumbing to bloated plotting or a rushed ending to the hastily cancelled show. Season two commences with former jockey/current pie-slinging waitress Olive Snook, the third wheel in Ned and Chuck's love tricycle, running off to a nunnery to nurse her bruised heart. Ned, the man of delicious pies and live-giving touch, has complications with his reanimated love Chuck's aunts, Vivian and Lily. Namely: secrets and secrecy. This is a detective show after all and investigative techniques are applied to much more than the increasingly ridiculous and gnarly deaths that Detective Emerson Cod and his Pie-Hole cohorts take on as each episode's plot anchor. Each character knows just a little more than they're willing to admit up front at first, creating a playfully mysterious tension throughout the series, brought to a head as the vital plot ingredients of the over-arching interpersonal story find resolution, sadly without the aid of a hallucinatory CG crab this time. But Ned does discover exactly why taxidermy would've been a poor career choice, of which a resulting rampant rhino in all its CG glory is the focus in one of the all-too-brief special features. "Master Pie Maker" is a look at creator/writer Brian Fuller's deep involvement in his beloved brainchild's development as a linguistic gymnastics champion and perhaps the most visually vivid and meticulously designed show to grace a TV screen. Two other features spend equal time poring over the script-to-screen process and the incredible work of composer Jim Dooley, whose majestic arrangements and wealth of musical cinematic reference points are key to the show's whimsical tone. Pushing Daisies was a perfect confection of stellar actors inhabiting a magically realized world. It's a shame the network decided this season deserved the Pie-maker's final touch.
(Warner)

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