By Buzz Byrne
PUSHING DAISIES does Halloween and while it feels like a Scooby-Doo script written by a tripping beat poet, I am continuing to recommend this show. Ned (Lee Pace), the pie maker with the gift to reawaken the dead, hates Halloween. Olive Snook (Kristin Chenoweth), the waitress at The Pie-Hole, says the holiday makes him, “Moodier than a pumpkin with PMS.” When Ned was a boy, shipped off to boarding school after his mother died, he eventually went searching for Dad on Halloween. He found him, with a new wife and two new sons and Ned as a distant memory. This is what Ned thinks of on Halloween. He would also, as the narrator (Jim Dale) tells us, “Come back to haunt the house where good times were had…and the house that at one time had Dad.”
Olive is the client this week as her past comes back to haunt her. Lucas Shoemaker, a farrier and former horse jockey is trampled by a ghostly horse and rider. The specter is the spirit of John Joseph Jacobs, a jockey himself who was trampled in the course of a race- The Jock-Off 2000. C’mon…that’s funny. Olive, it turns out, was a jockey and one of the riders that accidentally trampled John Joseph Jacobs. When Emerson Cod (Chi McBride) goes with Olive to investigate John Joseph Jacobs’ tomb, they find the skeleton of a horse with no legs instead of human remains.
Ned, during his haunting of his old house, sees Charlotte “Chuck” Charles’ (Anna Friel) old house and calls on her aunts. Lillian and Vivian (Swoosie Kurtz and Ellen Greene) are always fun, especially now that they receive pies weekly, laced with serotonin inhibitors, from their deceased, but not really, niece. Ned asks about his father and is informed that he was a “Jackass.” But no one mentions that anymore. They talk about what a nice boy, er, man Ned has turned into. This may be enough to stop his need to haunt.
Olive, Chuck and Emerson visit Mama Jacobs (Barbara Barrie) and discover that she had her son cremated and buried his horse, “All the Gold”, in his tomb instead. But something is lurking in Mama’s basement.
When another jockey involved in the trampling is trampled himself, Olive reveals there is more to the story. John Joseph Jacobs “girth” was cut. This is the strap that holds the saddle to the horse. All of the jockey’s involved swore never to reveal this even though they didn’t know who did it. Olive proclaimed innocence and we believe her.
Ned and Emerson race off to find the last remaining jockey and Chuck stays with Olive. Olive is of course visited by John Joseph Jacobs only he isn’t on a beastly horse from hell. He is gawky and unusually tall. He was killed all those years ago but revived on the way to the hospital. His legs crushed, the doctors opted for a daring interspecies leg transplant. They gave him “All the Gold’s” legs. And Mama Jacobs has kept him in the basement for seven years.
Mama is the riding trampler, avenging the murder of her son’s career. I never thought I would see Barney Miller’s wife on a fire snorting steed but that is the beauty of PUSHING DAISIES I guess. Olive and Chuck are drawn together and learn to trust each other in the goofy final act, a move I heartily endorse. I want these smart, witty, sexy women as allies in this show, not rivals.
And in the final moments, as Halloween night draws its curtains closed, Ned takes Chuck back to her aunts. Not to reveal her being very much alive, but dressed as a ghost, haunting and delighting these women at 2 am. It was sweet, charming and irreverent. A great Halloween episode.