"Pushing Daisies": The Smell Of Success
"Pushing Daisies"
Title: Smell Of Success
First Aired: 11/21/07
It may seem like the biggest problem for Ned and his sweetie is the fact that they can't touch, but like most couples, the truth is more complicated. Sure, there's no touching, but lovers separated by distance find a way to struggle through that. No, just like anyone, Ned and Chuck have to work on communication and compromise. It's cool to see their relationship getting more subtle as the season goes on, shedding the fairytale simplicity of the first few episodes. It's also cool to see the always bizarre Paul Reubens as a very stinky guest star.
After a little wander down memory lane to see how Ned's grief over his mother's death led to his pie baking skills, we're off to investigate the mystery of the week. A scent expert's assistant is killed in an explosion and Emerson, of course, smells money. Ned gives the toasty young lady a prod, and she tells the investigators that she was testing out an advance copy of her boss Napoleon Lenez's new scratch-n-sniff book when it exploded rather spectacularly.
A minor fault with the episode is that the mystery du jour seems a little too obvious. The puzzlers of "Pushing Daisies" are never exactly the mystery of the century, but as soon as the team meets the uptight and peculiar Lenez, it's obvious that he's behind the trouble. A visit to a rival novelty book creator - this one pop-up, instead of scratch-n-sniff - leads to the tidbit that Lenez's book release was rescheduled to a historically bad weekend for book releases, a sign that the publisher had lost faith in the book, and Lenez looks guiltier than ever.
Fortunately for us, much of the episode is given over to Chuck's efforts to cheer up her aunts and to get Ned used to change. She's packing Vivian and Lily full of mood-altering pies, with Olive as her accomplice, in an attempt to get them cheerful enough to try swimming again. The two have been out of the water since Lily lost her eye in that tragic cat litter accident, and Chuck thinks a synchronized dip in the pool is just the thing to get her beloved aunts out of their funk. Olive gamely helps with these efforts, her friendship with Chuck and her affection for Lily and Vivian spurring her along. With a little help from some aromatherapy in the form of chlorine tablets, Olive eventually wins over even the tough Lily, and the episode ends with the the two in a trippy water ballet.
As for Ned and Chuck, they clash over Chuck's desire to use her new bee-gathering roof garden to harvest honey and make cup-pies, tiny cupcake sized pies with honey infused crusts. Sounds delicious to me, but Ned, of course, is afraid of change. Chuck goes about her usual tenacious but charming way of loosening him up, and in the end he adds the tasty cup-pies to the Pie Hole menu. The triumph of love over neurosis is a central theme in this week's episode, something we can all relate to.
As for the mystery, Lenez points the finger of suspicion at his former partner Oscar (Ruebens), a sewer-dwelling weirdo who takes a more naturalistic approach to scents, eshewing Lenez's "people should only smell good-smelling things and avoid bad smells at all cost" philosophy. When a filthy sock with a threat against Lenez printed on it surfaces in the pipes of the Pie Hole, the team goes underground to investigate, encountering Oscar in what looks like an attempt to kill Lenez by filling his car with methane. Oscar makes a run for it, and Ned, Chuck and Emerson head topside again to get a shower.
While Ned and Emerson go to Lenez's office to be interviewed by a news crew, Olive and Chuck hang out at the Pie Hole, where Oscar suddenly appears to defend his innocence. In the process of talking to Chuck, Oscar notices her peculiar scent - Lenez said she smelled like honey and death - and is fascinated. Oscar explains how Lenez faked the attacks in order to drum up interest in his book, and he and the girls run for Lenez's office to warn Ned and Emerson.
While Emerson shills for the camera, Ned snoops around and discovers a filthy sock with an incomplete version of the threat written on it and realizes what Chuck and Olive already know. Ned grabs Emerson and the two attempt to flee, but Lenez catches wise and traps them in the de-scenting chamber that he uses to protect his office from outside smells. Chuck and Olive arrive with Oscar in tow, rescuing the guys by reversing the flow on the chamber and blowing Lenez's sniffer out with a tornado of stink. The good guys triumph and all is well... or is it? At the very end, we see Oscar with an old sweater of Chuck's that Lily gave to Olive, sniffing it and trying to recognize the peculiar smell. Will Chuck's secret be revealed, or will the scent elude the sniffer? As cliffhangers go, that's about the weirdest one I've ever seen.
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