[PDS] Bad Habits

TV Programme: Pushing Daisies
Season: 2
Episode: 3
Date I watched this episode: 09/10/2009
Time since I last watched this programme: 1 month.

This episode was a bit of a turning point for multiple storylines in the show, but didn't feel like a turning point for the season. Olive left the nunnery (with an "emotional goodbye" - not that she's even been there that long), Ned and Olive had a very awkward, cringeworthy conversation about feelings, and Chuck finally found out that Lily is her mother. I think surely the next step is for Lily to find out that Chuck is still alive. Truth is, this doesn't seem big enough to be a season-long storyline; I can imagine in other shows, something like this would span a single episode, but they don't seem to have much else to talk about here.

For I think the first time, the flashback at the beginning of the episode focussed on Olive rather than any of the other characters. Her inability to accept negative statements was really what sparked off this entire chain of events. To some extent this is character-building, but in reality I feel that this is not in keeping with the rest of Olive's character. Olive, I'm afraid, is not a fighter - she's a bit of a weakling and runs away at the first sign of a battle. Her schoolgirl crush on Ned is not engaging, and she didn't manage to carry the episode. (I don't feel this is due to Kristin's acting, having seen her performance in The West Wing, but more due to the way the character is written). The only thing which kept me from falling asleep (and I mean genuinely - I was quite tired while watching the episode) was the slight suspense involved with all the secrets that Olive was spilling.

As for the core storyline of the episode, it was once again pretty weak. I do admire the way it's structured - getting lots of clues at the beginning and then having to slowly decipher them. But the ending was pretty ridiculous (the murderer was a literal pig). The entire set was in the nunnery, which I feel we've seen too much of already. Admittedly the ending with Mother Superior re-creating the lab was suitably ironic.

There were a couple of themes which ran through the episode. One was summed up as "you've got to rectify your past or you won't have a future". This can be seen in Ned's struggles with his own character, Chuck's discovery of her own history and Olive coming full-circle and being able to move on from the things which brought her to the nunnery. In this sense, the episode was well-designed and did follow a set theme. The other theme was that Ned "knows what it feels like to be abandoned" and this was also paralleled with Olive's situation. Again it shows the episode being well-designed, but this was quite subtle and was almost overridden by the in-your-face parts of the episode which were a bit rubbish.

No doubt the show won't stray too much from its formula but at the moment I'm struggling to see any hint of the spark which attracted me to the show last season. I'm starting to see why this programme was cancelled.