"Pushing Daisies": I Smell Something Fishy

Published: November 25, 2007 at 07:00 PM GMT
Last Updated: November 25, 2007 at 07:00 PM GMT

By Lisa LaValle

The excitement started this week on Pushing Daisies when I saw four of my favorite words on the bottom of the screen: Guest Starring Paul Reubens! We all know Reubens as Pee-wee Herman and for his unfortunate movie theater incident, but he’s making a comeback with guest roles on shows like 30 Rock, Dirt, and now Pushing Daisies. And, according to his IMDB.com page, there’s a Pee-wee’s Playhouse movie in production!

Setting aside my childhood for a moment, let’s talk about Ned’s. In the first few episodes of this show, I didn’t feel like the opening scenes with Young Ned made any sense with the rest of the episode, but now they’re starting to act as more of a prelude, introducing the theme of the episode. This week, it’s smells. More specifically, it’s how smells can remind you of certain memories. Young Ned taught himself how to bake pies to remind himself of his mother, and Olive and Chuck use chlorine to get Aunts Lily and Vivian back in the pool.

The poor innocent murder victim this week was Anita Gray, a student of olfactory science who fell under the spell of her charismatic instructor, Napoleon LeNez. He was working on a self-help book about connecting smells with memories called The Smell of Success, and when Anita took a peek at an advance copy, she met her untimely demise via an explosion set off by scratch and sniff. As Emerson observed, “Death by scratch and sniff - what ever happened to people killing each other with guns?”

It appears to be an attempt on Napoleon’s life, but of course it’s more than that. The release date of Napoleon’s book had been pushed up, but the killer wasn’t Chas Spielman, author of Pop-Up Pin-Ups (and Emerson’s new hero), the book it bumped. When Ned finds a mysterious dirty sock threat in the sink at the Pie Hole, Napoleon points them toward the sewers, where they find Oscar Vibenius (Paul Reubens), Napoleon’s former lab partner. Oscar believed in natural smells, while Napoleon wanted to create perfectly controlled smells (hence the Willy-Wonka-esque decontamination chamber at the entrance of his apartment). Needless to say, when you have two opposing olfactory viewpoints, there might be some bad blood.

Oscar wasn’t trying to kill Napoleon, however; he was trying to stop Napoleon from not killing himself. Napoleon staged these “attempts” on his life and framed Oscar to drive up his book sales. After all, “nothing sells books like a little murder and mayhem.” Oscar will be back though: While Napoleon detected the scents of honey and death on Chuck (which she was able to blame on her perfume), Oscar smelled something else, and stole Chuck’s mother’s sweater in order to do some further research. Our narrator warns us, “Chuck and her secret were in danger.”

I like the underlying plotline involving someone potentially discovering Chuck’s secret, and thus Ned’s. To the audience, it’s starting to seem pretty normal that Ned and Chuck can’t touch and that Chuck is technically dead, but it’s great that the show reminds us that there are elements of the real world that the characters have to deal with.

One thing I’m having a little trouble with - or two things, rather - are the aunts. Don’t get me wrong, I love the quirkiness of the characters and the performances by Swoosie Kurtz and Ellen Greene, but I’m just not invested in the storyline of them trying to get happy again. I’m glad they finally got back in the pool at the end of the episode (though I feared for Kristin Chenoweth’s right boob when she was hopping around in the mermaid costume), but I almost wonder if they need to be more involved in the primary plots - maybe they need to find out about Chuck and join the Scooby Gang, although Emerson probably wouldn’t like that too much.

To end things on a positive note, I’m loving this weird little world of Pushing Daisies more and more each week. In the real world, most murder cases involve drug dealers and drivebys, but Pushing Daisies has introduced us to the underground worlds of olfactory scientists, jockeys, dog breeders, cropduster pilots, and alternative fuel auto developers. Next time (in two weeks), Pushing Daisies will delve into the dark abyss of candy stores with guest star Molly Shannon. Even Willy Wonka had his dark side…

To communicate with or to be contacted by the executives and/or companies mentioned in this column, link to JackMyers Connection Hotline.