Pushing Daisies: Back in the Habit

All right, it took two episodes to wake Pushing Daisies from the dead, but it was worth the wait.  This week we wrapped up the dramas from last season, told a great story, and set the stage for what should be an exciting scene of whimsical storytelling.

The facts were these: Postulant Olive Snook is at the nunnery harvesting truffles with her pig, Pigby.  Olive has become friends with Sister Larue, who heads up the convent’s truffle operations.  While praying for a sign from God about whether to stay in the convent, Olive witnesses Sister Larue fall from the belfry-dead from an apparent suicide.  Seeking to exonerate Sister Larue from eternal damnation (as if God wouldn’t know the truth anyway), she sneaks back to town and hires Emerson to solve the case.

Chuck has also hired her one investigator, of a genealogical kind, to help her complete an incomplete family tree from when she was a child.  We also learn how the Darling Mermaid Darlings have the same last name as Chuck: they are her step-aunts from Chuck’s paternal grandfather marrying Lily and Vivian’s mother and becoming their step-father.  For those keeping score at home, that means that her father and her mother, Lily, were step-siblings.

So Emerson, Ned, and Chuck arrive at the convent dressed as two priests and a nun, Father Dowling, Father Mulcahy, and Sister Christian, specifically.  They present themselves to the Mother Superior and Father Ed as members of the Vatican Police, and they begin their investigation.  After Ned’s magic touch, Sister Larue says something about diamonds and that someone shoved her off of the bell tower.  She then pays tribute to Nuns on the Run by running, but not before Ned can send her back to the void.

After some snooping, including finding some secret rooms and passageways, we learn that Sister Larue was smuggling truffles to a nearby Swiss German chef.  In exchange he would give her forbidden items, like DVDs and eventually some Swiss German love.  Larue called off the affair shortly before she died.

Meanwhile, Ned confronts Olive about her stand-offish behavior toward him.  She says that she had feelings for him and he pushed her away; she does not want to return until she is over him.  She lets slip that she also doesn’t want to reveal Chuck’s secret.  Ned is intrigued and we play a guessing game wherein he figures out that Lily is Chuck’s mother, after two wrong guesses involving the Sacred Feminine and Chuck having a cousin of the same age.  Ned goes to tell Chuck but finds her horribly confused about her being the walking undead with neither a past nor a future.  She even considers asking Ned to touch her again to restore the “natural process.”

Olive realizes that the Mother Superior found out about the relationship and wrote the note to the chef calling off the affair.  When confronted by Olive, the Mother Superior confirms Olive’s suspicions but adds that she knows that Emerson, Chuck, and Ned are impostors.  Ned also gets caught when Father Ed figures out that Ned is not really a priest, after a moving confessional where Ned talks about praying for his father to return and to forgive him.  Father Ed advises Ned to rectify his past if he wants to have any future.

Chuck-being contemplative in the bell tower-finds a secret room where Sister Larue experimented on truffles.  Somehow Chuck almost falls from the bell tower and Olive, now being chased by Father Ed, runs up to save Chuck.  Save she does, but Olive falls from the tower, achieving inner peace as she flies through the air before landing in a cart of straw.

So what really happened here?  Larue was really Dr. Frank, a disgraced scientist who joined the convent and developed an artificial Italian white truffle-they’re really rare and very expensive.  Mother Superior learned of Larue’s carnal relationship with the chef and wrote the letter.  The Father confronted Larue and sought her contrition, but being a greedy non-nun, she attacked him.  Pigby, smelling the truffles, accidentally pushed her out of the bell tower.  Father Ed mistakenly thought Larue killed herself because of the way he confronted her.  In the end, the Mother Superior decided to continue the experimentation and tapped Olive to head up truffle relations.

But in more important relations for Olive, Ned apologizes to Olive for abandoning her.  In turn, she decided her work is done and she’s coming home, with her new friend (and comic relief) Pigby.  On the beehive roof Ned tells Chuck that Lily is her mother.  Chuck cries happy tears as she starts to fill in her family tree, and the audience goes “awwwww.”

Season 2, Episode 3: Bad Habits (originally aired October 15, 2008)

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Wednesdays at 8/7C on ABC

Photographs courtesy of ABC