Sunday 11 September 2016

Lazy Sunday: Pigeon



Does anyone remember Pushing Daisies? I’m sure most of you do. It’s the show about Ned, the pie maker who has the unusual and restrictive gift of bringing back the dead. But he can only bring people back from the dead for 1 minute, any longer and someone else goes instead. Once he touches a dead thing for the second time, they’re dead again forever. He can bring back anything that’s dead, plants, animals and even food. Things become complicated when he bring back his first love, Charlotte ‘Chuck’ Charles. 




Along for the ride and the business is Emerson Cod, a private investigator who works with Ned, making his casework easier, sometimes. Apart from Chuck, he’s the only other person who knows about Ned’s gift, although Olive Snook, Ned’s faithful friend and waitress at his café, The Pie Hole, should have been told. The gang of four make a great team, sometimes by accident, other times on purpose. 




Now that you’re up to speed, I can talk about this week’s Lazy Sunday Murder Mystery. Each week on Pushing Daisies, the gang solve a murder mystery, beginning with Emerson be hired and Ned touching the corpse for information. Chuck is along too to help as ‘the alive again avenger’, a name Emerson hates and Ned becomes worried about seeing as Chuck is meant to be dead.


When a pigeon crashes into the Pie Hole’s window, Ned accidentally touches the bird, keeping it alive for longer than a minute, a load of water bugs meet their end restoring balance. Olive takes it upon herself to get the pigeon well again so it can send its message, as it is a message carrier pigeon. Not long after this event, a plane crashes into a building, killing the pilot and ruining ‘Conrad’s’ apartment. While Chuck consoles ‘Conrad’ with coffee, Ned and Emerson discover another body, the real Conrad who died when the plane crashed. It turns out that the fake Conrad, real name Lefty Lem, is an escapee from prison. Why the pigeon? Well, the pigeon is a key part of the mystery and it all makes sense.



Filled with delicious pies, retired windmill communities, missing limbs and an always amazing and delightful colour palette, this is one of my favourite episodes from Season one of Pushing Daisies which fits along side Agatha Christie adaptations in the ‘cosey crime’ division.