Pushing Daisies 2x02 Review: Triple Berry to Go

“Circus Circus”
Written by Peter Ocko
Directed by Lawrence Trilling
 
The Story
Ned is still adjusting to Chuck living in Olive’s apartment. He misses her a lot. Emerson, on the other hand, finds himself enjoying tremendous success. A distraught (but emotionally constipated) mother hires him to look for her missing daughter. Olive is still at the abbey, finding relief from her stash of secrets by sharing them with Pigby. Chuck (and Ned, but he won’t admit it) miss her. Chuck tricks leads out of the missing girl’s best friend by acting like a teenager who feels exactly the same way. Nikki ran off to join the circus with her mime boyfriend. The team finds his van, which contains his corpse and no Nikki. They question him and find out more about Nikki, like where the circus is. Apparently the purportedly sweet missing girl was less sweet at the circus. Chuck is alone at the Pie Hole when Aunt Vivian shows up, so she has to hide behind the counter. She manages to have kind of a conversation with her and sell her some pie without revealing herself. Nikki was training to become a clown, and she narrowly escaped being one of the many clowns who got driven into a lake by the murderer. Lily tries to convince Olive that Charles Charles wasn’t Charlotte’s father to cover her own butt, but she really didn’t think it through. Ned, Chuck, and Emerson trick an important person of interest into coming to the pie hole so they can question him. All that accomplishes is that they no longer have any leads, because this guy isn’t the killer and doesn’t know where Nikki is. Emerson stops by Ned’s so they can discuss the case. Emerson is sure Nikki isn’t the killer, and something Ned says gives Emerson an idea. At the abbey, Olive gives Lily advice about moving on with her life without stopping caring about her daughter. Ned, Chuck, and Emerson continue pursuing the case and catch up with Nikki hiding in a giant pink gorilla suit. She’s terrified because she knows who killed the clowns and her boyfriend, but she’s worried their deaths will be pinned on her. When they find her, the acrobat Ned and Emerson talked to when they first arrived at the circus tries to kill her. They stop him, and mother and daughter are finally reunited, and the acrobat goes to prison. Lily and Vivian begin to make a regular habit of stopping by the Pie Hole. Emerson scolds the cold mom into being happy to see her daughter again. Ned finally makes his peace with Chuck moving across the hall. He and Chuck pretend to meet for the first time. It’s freaking adorable.
 
“Circus, Circus” probably isn’t an episode to watch outside of a marathon, but that’s only because it doesn’t particularly stand out, not because it’s not good. It certainly advances everyone’s character arcs by significant amounts. (I suppose that’s only to be expected when the main theme of the episode is that it can be difficult to deal with change, especially when that change is in the people we care about or even in ourselves.) Maybe the reason it’s not one of my favorite episodes is that I’ve always found circuses to be weird and off-putting, and I’ve never really understood the appeal.  
 
Things I Liked

• Mrs. Heaps’ emotional constipation
• Middle mid-morning prayer
• Chuck’s interrogation skills with Randi
• Emerson pointing his gun at the mime so he’ll start actually talking. Bahahaha.
• “It’s a ‘traveling’ circus, not a ‘wait around for you two to work all your junk out’ circus.”
• Late mid-afternoon prayer
• “Excuse me, Mother Superior, does something ever happen where you think everything’s kinda blah? Like, ‘blah brick walls, blah faux-Shaker furniture, blah good works’ and then, shazam! All the little boring stuff suddenly becomes full of meaning?” “Like an epiphany?” “Bingo!” “Not very often.”
• Early mid-middle night prayer
• “There are two things clowns make around here: balloon animals and enemies.”
• “They usually travel in a pack.” “Like wolves?” “More like cigarettes.”
• Aunt Vivian’s visit to the Pie Hole! *ugly crying*
• The clown car full of corpses
• Lily swearing and smuggling a flask inside her Bible, and Olive being super shocked about all of that
• “I guess my glass is half full on this one.” “Generally speaking, I would say you don’t even have a glass at all, just a wet ring on the coffee table where the glass used to be.”
• “I’d forgotten how much I hated this morning porridge when I was here.” “I could throw up in my mouth a little and not even know the difference.”
• The acrobat’s ridiculous accent
• Ned and Chuck’s fake first meeting, because it’s freaking adorable
• The glass roof over the courtyard of the apartment building

 
Things I Didn’t

•  Poor young Ned. Nothing goes well for him, does it?
• Mimes
• Clowns

 
The Characters
I may have spoken too soon about Ned accepting what Chuck wants and wanting it for her. It really takes him until the end of this one to get comfortable with it and realize that it doesn’t mean they’ll end up distant from each other. It’s probably more in character for him to take this long to work through such a big change. Bringing her all her things to fill the apartment with wasn’t the sign of him being cool with the change, it was the sign that he would try to be cool with the change, and it was quite the struggle. He backtracked a bit by trying to restrict Chuck’s involvement, which did not go over well. I suppose it’s his abandonment issues we’re dealing with now. This is fascinating. We have a relationship between someone with abandonment issues and someone who wants to be free and independent. I love how these characters clearly have legitimate internal issues to work through, not just the external issue (not being able to touch and her status as legally dead) to work around, and yet it doesn’t make their romance one bit less convincing or adorable.
 
Olive might be a Hufflepuff, but that doesn’t mean it’s easy and fulfilling to be a nun when she only resorted to that because the rest of her life was neither easy nor fulfilling. She is working on it, though. She has Pigby and she actually gives Lily some very good advice without spilling any secrets.
 
Emerson gets a little more focus in this one than he did in the season premiere. He wants to find his daughter, but she’ll have changed so much since he saw her seven years ago that he might no longer recognize her. More and more, the Plot A (in this show, that would be the case of the week) is pointing towards parents and children. Here we have a mother who isn’t great with emotion trying to find the daughter who’s very different from the person she thought she was. Emerson is a father who isn’t great with emotion whose daughter is by now very different from the little girl he remembers. What’s particularly interesting is that Emerson solved the case because his fatherhood makes him ever so slightly less cynical, at least when it comes to missing daughters.
 
Overall Rating
4/5