Pushing Daisies 2x01 Review: Apple with Prunes

​“Bzzzzzzzzz!”
​Written by Bryan Fuller
Directed by Adam Kane
 
The Story
Emerson is hired to solve the murder of an employee of Betty’s Bees, a honey-based hygiene product company. Chuck goes undercover as a bee girl to find out what’s going on, because she loves bees. Likely suspects are Woolsey Nichols and Betty Bee. The former bought out the latter and replaced her with the murder victim as the face of the company. Chuck is still having Olive take pies to Lily and Vivian, which Olive now knows she’s secretly dosing with herbal mood enhancers. Which is why she hasn’t actually been delivering them. They arrive to confront Olive about why she stopped delivering pies, and the secrets Olive has bottled up come bursting out in the form of a shrill scream and a dramatic declaration of resignation. She leaves to go figure out how to deal with all these secrets not surrounded by the people she’s keeping them from and for. At an abbey! At Lily’s suggestion. Chuck moves into Olive’s apartment while she’s gone, to Ned’s chagrin. Chuck, still undercover, learns that the bees of Betty’s Bees were killed via an inside job by a mite infestation planted by Kentucky. Vivian comes to the Pie Hole for company because Lily has mysteriously vanished and Chuck is gone and Olive has run off. Ned, paranoid about possibly losing Chuck to all her new independence, goes undercover at Betty’s Bees too. Olive has to take a vow of poverty in order to stay at the abbey, which means that poor people took all her stuff. The murderer tries to kill Chuck with the same swarm of bees he used on Kentucky, but Chuck knows her bees too well to fall for it. Lily checks up on Olive at the abbey and reveals that not only is she Chuck’s mom, but that Chuck’s dad was Vivian’s fiancée. (Apparently Charles Charles was their step-brother, and they took the same last name. Or something.) The gang discovers that Betty and the murder victim conspired to hide the company’s bees so that Woolsey Nickels couldn’t have them, and they pretended the bees were dead by planting mite-infested bees in the company hives. Woolsey was the killer! They prove it using a very dubious DNA test. Ned learns of a way to help both Vivian and Chuck at once, as well as proving that he’s okay with Chuck leading the life she wants: he can bring Chuck’s things from her old room to fill up Olive’s apartment! Betty and the murder victim’s husband form a new company together, and all is well. Emerson finishes up a pop-up book designed to lead his daughter back to him. Olive befriends the truffle pig at the abbey. Ned’s father shows up secretly at the Pie Hole.
 
Season two starts off strong with this one. Ned and Chuck’s dilemma of maintaining emotional intimacy while avoiding any chance for physical contact develops further with her moving into Olive’s apartment, Olive’s issues with secrets, particularly Lily’s, develop so much that they drive her out of town and into a nunnery (which is hilarious), and there’s a clear promise that we’ll be dealing with the plot thread of Emerson’s daughter. The show has lost none of its whimsy or anything else that made it special, and I think a bee-related mystery in the season premiere was the perfect way to demonstrate that.
 
Things I Liked

• Lily and Vivian’s very fashionable beekeeping outfits.
• Little Chuck’s beekeeping. I have a phobia of bees and wasps, but beekeeping still seems like such a charming endeavor to me.
• Ned and Chuck’s “ballet of avoidance”
• Ned helping Chuck get her same bees back. Awwww.
• “Don’t offend the bees.”
• Chuck’s dresses, as always
• LIL’ GUMSHOE (I want a copy of that book SO BAD)
• “I know somebody...” [stare goes flat] “...who knows somebody.”
• Biscuits and shrimps, and the coroner getting his “rent”
• Kentucky’s sinister story about how she got swarmed by bees
• “That’s nice. We don’t know what she was doing, but we do know it took a lot of effort.”
• Olive progressively going nuts because of everyone’s secrets
• “You’re thinking about how you can train your bees to walk around in people shapes, aren’t you?” “Yeah.”
• The Betty’s Bees set. EVERYTHING IS HEXAGONS. It’s wonderful.
•  “If I could breathe, I would vomit.”
• “Olive Snook! Every week a delicious, life-giving pie, and then nothing for months! I thought you were dead! And so soon after Charlotte! I was beginning to take everyone’s dying personally!” “We would’ve called, but by the time I knew we were coming, Vivian was already on the bus.” “Lily was very tenacious. She tried to get me to come home on six consecutive stops!” “She insisted on coming all this way just to ask why you stopped delivering pies.” “I’m...really flaky.” “That’s what I told her!”
• Olive’s The Sound of
• Music moment, and how it gets interrupted by disapproving nuns
• “It was a place that valued Olive’s silence as much as Lily did.”
• The bee fuzz eyelashes the bee girls wear. They look so cool! ​

• Chuck and Betty bonding over their love of bees (well, sort of. Chuck definitely feels for Betty, but Betty is too bummed about losing her bees and her company to reciprocate.)
• “Mother was a Methodist and Daddy was a pragmatist, so ‘God put those bees there for a reason.’” BAHAHAHAHAHA. That’s awesome.
• “If I was more comfortable with you people, I’d cry.” “Oh, you can cry, it’s okay!” “It is not okay for a grown-ass man to weep in public with a bunch of happy families enjoying pie. If you can’t hold it, you take your ass to the men’s room and cry in private, on the toilet, like a man!”
• “I’m just glad you’re here.” “Then it isn’t stalking;” [into the hidden microphone pin for Emerson] “It’s just good, old-fashioned chivalry!”
• Olive in the confessional
• Lily in the confessional
• “I’m having awkward silences with God!”
• “And by cabbage patch, I mean your lady parts.”
• “YOU DID NOT JUST TELL ME ANOTHER SECRET!”
• “Betrayed and broken-hearted, but not sloppy...”

 
Things I Didn’t

• Um. Hello, French Stewart. Then again, I’m not sure it’s a bad thing that he’s on the show, because his particular brand of overacting kind of fits the style. And he looks rather dapper in the three-piece suit.
• Chuck’s idea of high-class Parisian living
• Um, pretty sure any DNA from Woolsey Nickels’ spit would’ve been washed off when the little bee container was in Chuck’s mouth, and wouldn’t a DNA test just get the team in a world of trouble for seemingly faking Chuck’s death?
• The very tangled nature of the Charles family.

 
The Characters
Ned has a harder time with the idea that he and Chuck can’t be physically close than Chuck seems to. She obviously doesn’t like not being able to kiss him unless it’s through plastic wrap, but she’s the pragmatic one of the pair. He thinks they can get by with the “dance of avoidance” method, but she knows it’s a pretty big risk. He likes having her so close, but he hasn’t realized that she’s kind of just a guest in his life. She spends her time in his apartment, his pie shop, and accompanying him on his cases. None of that is hers. This is the episode where she finally reclaims some of her own autonomy. She gets her own space and her own role, and when Ned realizes how much that matters to her, he stops being opposed to it and helps her make it even more hers by bringing her all her own things. That’s an important element of real love, I think. You can be upset about something your significant other wants because it might take them farther away from you, but as soon as you realize how much it matters and why it matters to them, you start wanting it for them and helping them get it. Go Ned! However, it would still be good if he was better at telling Chuck why the idea of her moving out is so upsetting to him. She’s definitely the one whose concerns are usually more reasonable, and he has a lot of neuroses it’s important to work through, but it can feel a little imbalanced sometimes. Then again, that might be a common pattern with Gryffindor/Ravenclaw relationships. The Gryffindor tugs the Ravenclaw along through challenging adventures they probably wouldn’t have tried otherwise, and the Ravenclaw keeps the Gryffindor more grounded than they would have been otherwise.
 
Olive continues to fit pretty well in Hufflepuff. Everyone trusts her with their secrets, and she’s too loyal to betray that (which is probably why they trust her), and instead of taking it out on all of them, she kind of implodes and runs away. She does give them a piece of her mind in the process, which is fun. The part when she screams and quits is probably my favorite part in the whole episode, probably a top ten moment from the show.
 
Vivian has come a long way from the extremely timid, paranoid woman she was at the beginning of the series. Now she’s venturing out of the house with so much determination that she’ll do it both alone and in defiance of Lily. She’s learning to pursue her happiness instead of just exist. Go Vivian! Lily is having a rather more difficult time, but that’s because she’s a curmudgeon. And because Chuck is her daughter and she never even managed to tell her that before she died.
 
Emerson gets the least development of the major characters in this one, but thanks to “Lil’ Gumshoe,” we know we’ll be getting to him soon. But just because he’s not growing and changing just now doesn’t mean he’s not still delightful to watch in all his cynical, sardonic glory.
 
Overall Rating
5/5