Pushing Daisies: Acceptance

The facts were these…

Distressed over Charles Charles’s departure, Chuck and Ned fear for the worst, that someone will find out about how Ned brought Charles and Chuck back from the dead.  Emerson is also worried about Charles’s flight because he helped Chuck hide Dwight Dixon’s body when Dwight took the place of Charles in the afterworld.  Seeing Ned, Chuck, and Emerson continue to exclude her from their plans only enrages Olive, who wants to be taken seriously for once.

Meanwhile, Vivian throws a wrench in everything by wanting to hire Emerson to find Dwight, her “gentleman caller.”  Only Emerson won’t take the case, lectures Vivian about how bad Dwight was, and implores her to leave; and leave she does to go hire a new detective agency.  Norwegian Investigative Services, aided by their mobile computer crime lab MOTHER, arrives at The Pie Hole to investigate the disappearance of Dwight.  Determined to throw the Norwegians off the trail, Emerson beseeches Olive to convince Vivian to call off the investigation for fear of what they will uncover.

Olive’s meeting with Vivian only reminds Olive of how she, like Vivian, are stifled by others, and Olive encourages Vivian to keep working with the Norwegians for her answers about Dwight.  The Norwegians find Lily’s note to Dwight and Lily confesses to Vivian that Dwight dug up Chuck and stole the pocket watch (or so Lily thinks).  Vivian concedes that Lily is correct but she is heartbroken nonetheless.  Fed up with it all, Olive teams up with the Norwegians to help find Dwight; she even gets her own Norwegian jockey uniform after a DNA test proves she’s of Norwegian decent–apparently all Norwegian DNA forms the pattern of their flag.  (Seriously, check it out.)

In his own sleuthing on the sleuths, Emerson learns of Olive’s betrayal and that the Norwegians have an order to dig up Charles and Chuck’s graves.  The gang rushes to the graveyard, digs, and finds two empty coffins even though at least one should contain Dwight’s body.  Chuck, who believes her father is still around thanks to a brass button she found, thinks her father must have taken Dwight’s body, but does he know to destroy any DNA evidence with bleach?  Too late as the Norwegians have the coffins and are examining them in MOTHER.

Emerson distracts the Norwegians by pretending to confess to everything while Ned tries to carjack MOTHER.  Olive catches Ned and admits she’s working on “deep cover” to bring down the investigation from the inside.  She has the keys and off they go with MOTHER.  To make it up to Olive, Ned agrees to answer all of her questions, but only with a simple “yes” or “no”; through her questions, she learns that Charles is really alive but she assumes that he, like Chuck, simply faked his own death.  For unexplained reasons, Ned swerves MOTHER off the road toward a steep cliff.  They jump out just before MOTHER plummets to her death and Ned and Olive hang from a branch.  As Olive admits her regret that Ned never looked at her like he looked at Chuck, Ned shares that he wouldn’t say “never.”  As Olive enjoys what she thinks are the last moments of her life, a masked stranger reaches over and pulls them to safety.  (Question: If they fell Olive first so that Ned landed on Olive after she died but before he died, would Olive come back to life–assuming she didn’t immediately retouch Ned?)

As Chuck treats Ned’s wounds and Olive shares that she knows Charles faked his own death,  Olive’s ramblings lead her to figure out that Dwight is really dead.  But the Norwegians are still on the case and, while yelling at the gang for killing their MOTHER, they get a report that Dwight just used his credit card.  They all rush over and find a dead Dwight laying on the bed.  Every item in the room told the Norwegians a carefully crafted story: Dwight died of natural causes on his own, he burned the bodies of Charles and Chuck, and he was a grave robber.  Vivian accepts Dwight’s true nature and untimely death, and for a moment, tragedy is averted.

Of course this is just what everyone was supposed to think.  In reality, the man who’s been helping Ned is his estranged father, George Hamilton, who’s sitting in The Pie Hole at the very moment Ned tells Chuck that he’s no longer going to wake the dead.  In this statement to Chuck, Ned seemingly accepts that, even with his magical gift, he can never perfectly undo the profound loss that accompanies death.  Very true, indeed.

Season 2, Episode 10: The Norwegians (originally aired December 17, 2008)

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