Thursday , March 28 2024
It's a post-Halloween look at the Grim Reaper.

Pushing Daisies Makes Me Happy, Reaper Less So

I missed a day, sue me… I was gorging on Snickers and Butterfingers (and KitKat and Reese's Peanut Butter Cups). But let's talk about Tuesday night's Reaper for a minute even if it's old(er) news.

Did I not tell you that the Andi/Sam thing was going to perpetually move from hatred to like and back and forth and never really progress anywhere? This week's episode was a microcosm of exactly that. The pendulum swung from hatred to friendship, maybe even a hint of more. Next week they'll be back to where they were two weeks ago and the week after it'll shift again, and then again, and then again, then it'll go to hiatus until January before it starts swinging more. It will never progress in a satisfactory fashion (maybe that's a season three development), but it will keep swinging.

I was happy that the Andi/Sam storyline took a backseat to Halloween hijinks. I completely approve of Halloween hijinks. At least, I do as long as Halloween hijinks occur solely within my television and not within my reality. I've had too much Halloween hijinks in my reality for me to in any way, shape, manner, or form approve of more.

Hell closing for Halloween, much to the Devil's distress, is a clever idea. I particularly liked the notion that the Devil hates Halloween because it's the one day of the year that no one on Earth is scared of him. I never thought of it that way. That's just the sort of interesting take that Reaper needs to have on a regular basis instead of focusing on the will they or won't they story.

I also missed discussing Cane.

Here's what I want to know about that show – was Vega always such a bad dude or did his bad dudeness come about after the show began? In the first episode he had someone killed, this week he had people beaten up. Has he always done these sorts of things or is this an entirely new level he's sunk to? I get that he's protecting his family, but I don't approve of the how.

On the upside, I wholeheartedly approve of the Godfather-esque way that Vega went to get help. That scene was clearly straight out of the opening of the first Godfather. They even went so far as to have Vega quite clearly make the choice to not have his brothers' abusers killed, but rather to truly seek justice. This wasn't the choice in The Godfather and it upset Don Corleone; here the choice not to murder made this godfather happy (as it would have made Don Corleone happy).

I know that I've spoken of happy earlier, but I'm going to do so again for a second. Each week I enjoy Pushing Daisies more and more. The whimsy, about which I worried, has not become too over-bearing. Now, I worry instead that they won't be able to keep it up. I love that revelations are had every week, that the story changes. Last week Olive found out about Chuck being not so much dead. This week Ned found out Chuck was having pies sent to her aunts' and Olive was doing the sending. The story progresses, not at a breakneck pace — you can miss an episode and still be okay, but it progresses.

I progress too. I finished discussing Tuesday and Wednesday, and now it's almost primetime on Thursday. Tune in on Friday to read about Thursday.

About Josh Lasser

Josh has deftly segued from a life of being pre-med to film school to television production to writing about the media in general. And by 'deftly' he means with agonizing second thoughts and the formation of an ulcer.

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