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First of all, I need to ask y'all something. Am I high? I mean, do I seem high to you? Wait. Are you high? Maybe you should be, because when I try to explain this show to you, you're going to feel high. Secondly, there are a lot of dogs on this show, which I appreciate; and third, Kristin Chenowith is crazy-short, but has huge boobs. But I'm getting ahead of myself. This show is about Ned, a pie maker (yes) who has the power to return the dead to life with a touch. No explanation is given for why he has this power, nor are the other rules explained, such as: 1) he can re-kill someone by touching them again; and 2) if he doesn't re-kill them within one minute, someone nearby has to die in his or her place. Natch? So he turns to the only sideline career available to him, after being sort of half-blackmailed by Emerson, a private detective who found out his secret. When he's not baking pies at his...pie restaurant...he and Emerson run around touching recently-murdered people, asking them (within sixty seconds) who killed them, killing them again, and then collecting rewards for solving the crimes. Is any of this making sense? Right. But I'm not even finished! So, by day, Ned hangs out with his dog -- who he has to pet with a skeleton hand on a stick in order not to re-kill him after bringing him back to life nineteen years ago -- and studiously avoids the boobalicious temptations of his pie shop waitress, the aforementioned Chenowith. Everything's going along swimmingly until...the latest murder reward becomes available and, crazily enough, the victim is his childhood beloved, Charlotte Charles, a.k.a. "Chuck," who lived door to him growing up and was killed on a cruise ship in an alleged smuggling deal gone bad. Speaking of Chuck, it seems Ned accidentally killed her dad who was in the general proximity when Ned unknowingly brought his own mother back to life. You know, as happens. Let's see...Ned and Emerson go to enliven Chuck, planning to do their usual routine, but Ned cannot follow through. He brings her back to life and, instantly, his love for her reawakens as well. He can't re-kill her. She doesn't know who killed her in the first place, anyway. So, she makes it past the sixty-second deadline (ha!) and, in her place, a crooked funeral director dies on the john. Good riddance. Meanwhile, the team, now numbering three with the addition of Chuck, realize that her family -- two crazy, synchronized-swimming (really), cheese-loving, homebound aunts -- are in danger. The team reasons that the smuggler who killed Chuck is likely to go after the aunts (one of whom is the incomparable Swoosie Kurtz), looking for the allegedly smuggled booty. God, is anyone even still reading? Okay, so they get to the aunts' house, find out they're right, one of the aunts ends up killing the smuggler/murderer and the aunts, not realizing that Chuck has come back to life, and having collected the reward, have a new lease on life. Y'all, there aren't sentences long enough in the English language that will help me explain this any more clearly. What's weird is, it's all very charming and everyone is cute. Yes, I feel crazy, but so far, I like it. Want more? The full recap starts right below!
All right, here we go. Brand-new show! When I learned I'd be recapping Pushing Daisies, I read as much as I could about it. Okay, a guy who can bring people back from the dead. Jesus-style sci-fi: I got it. As the weeks progressed, however, every new article leading up to the premiere seemed to reveal an increasing number of weird facts about the show and its characters. The main guy is a pie maker. His job is making pies. It's just on the side that he does this back-to-life, back-to-reality thing. And, by the way, he has to kill the people again within sixty seconds, or someone nearby dies. And so, his thing is to run around un-killing murder victims in order to find out who killed them and collect the reward when the murderer is brought to justice. Um...okay. And did I mention the pies? And that the show would be shot in glorious, saturated, CGI-enhanced Technicolor like you're having an acid trip inside a Betty Crocker box? Impossible as it may seem, all of that is, in fact, the case.
The one thing none of these news stories mentioned was the presence of a narrator. Now, I know audiences are sharply divided about narrators -- a lot of people hate them, and I understand all the reasons why. The thing is, those people obviously never watched Magnum P.I., the show that hooked me on narrators for life. Frankly, Magnum hooked me on a lot of things, okay? Tom Selleck. Short shorts. Dudes with mustaches. Men in uniform. Snappy theme music. Fruity cocktails. Wait. I'm sorry. I was talking about narrators. Yeah, I enjoy them, in general, even if, as we find in this program, they talk like a VISA commercial.
The great Jim Dale opens the show, telling us that Ned, the young boy we see running through an ultra-yellow field of wildflowers under a mega-blue sky is nine years, twenty-seven weeks, six days, and three minutes old. His dog, Digby, whom Ned is joyously chasing, is three years, two weeks, six something something, I'm not going to even tell you, because the DOG gets HIT BY A TRUCK at this very MOMENT and goes FLYING THROUGH THE AIR and I wasn't expecting it and it nearly killed me. Damn. Okay, so somehow Digby, though definitely dead, was not broken and mashed into a zillion bloody pieces, and when Ned rushes to his (dead) side in grief and reaches down to touch his face, a tiny lightning bolt shoots from his finger, and the dog springs back to life. "This was the moment," Jim Dale tells us, "when Ned realized he wasn't like the other children." No shit. "Young Ned could touch dead things," the narrator goes on, "and bring them back to life." Except, dun dun duuuuuunnnn, as Ned goes galloping after his newly-enlivened dog, we see a seemingly healthy squirrel drop from a tree branch, dead in the dog's place.
But now's not the time to stop and explain that stuff, apparently, because we see Ned -- wearing a different shirt, so we presume on a different day -- sneaking around the kitchen while his mother makes delicious-looking pies. She has just swatted a fly, and when Ned finds it lying dead on the counter, he decides to test out these newly discovered powers, zapping the fly back to life. The thing we're to understand, however, is that Ned doesn't really know what's up with his powers or how to use them or where they came from: he's learning all these things as he goes along. "The terms of use weren't immediately clear," Dale tells us...
...and Ned doesn't care anyway, because his mind is on other things -- namely, the pretty little neighbor girl, Charlotte Charles, a.k.a. "Chuck." Ned and Chuck together build Play-Doh worlds which they then destroy, Godzilla-style, a common practice of pre-adolescents in love.
Back in the kitchen after a particularly violent playdate, Ned's mother sweeps the dust of destroyed civilizations off of him -- with a broom -- while Ned looks wistfully out the window at Chuck, who is still playing in the yard under the supervision of her father. Suddenly, Ned's mother falls over dead. Ned looks at her in shock. But, a-ha! He can fix this! He crouches down and touches his dead mother's face. "Must have slipped," she says, instantly alive. "Clumsy!" She jumps up and pulls a pie from the oven as Ned backs away, shocked anew. Now the narrator explains that this gift Ned has? It not only gives, it takes away. Because he brought his mother back to life, and because she had been back alive for more than sixty seconds, someone in proximity now has to die. Unfortunately, the only person in proximity who qualifies is Chuck's poor dad, who drops dead on the lawn door. Jeez! The details! Oh, but we're not done.
In the grand scheme of things, Jim Dale tells us, Ned had traded his mother's life for Chuck's dad's. He obviously feels terrible about it, looking morose as his mother tucks him into bed that night. I hope you didn't think this whole mother-death thing was going to have a happy ending after all, because it ain't. "There was one more thing about touching dead things that young Ned didn't know," the narrator says, "and he learned it in the most unfortunate way." Yeah, he sure did -- when his mom leans down to kiss him goodnight, she dies AGAIN. "First touch: life," says Dale. "Second touch: dead again, forever." It's at this point that I imagine Jim Dale turning to the producer in the sound booth, throwing the script in the air, and saying "HUH?" Because, I mean, really. That's a lot of rules for a nine-year-old to learn the first four minutes of this show. And a lot of dying. And, are we really supposed to believe that Ned hadn't touched his beloved dog once since the dog sprang from the tarmac? But these are merely details.
We see poor Ned and poor Chuck at the adjacent funerals of their parents. As Jim Dale tells us that Ned would be hustled off to boarding school, and Chuck would be subsequently raised by her two personality-disordered and cheese-loving aunts, we see the children sneak away from the funerals and share a grieving, sunset kiss.
Don't be trying to bask in the sweetness or anything, though, because Jim Dale shoves us forward: after his mother's death, Ned avoids social attachments, fearing the whole "I might kill/unkill the people I love" issue, and as anyone might, sure, becomes obsessed with pies. Here, Jim Dale must have sighed, thought of England, and pressed on, bringing us up to speed in the present.
Young Ned, Dale tells us, has become a pie-maker. He owns a shop called The Pie Hole -- which, okay, is hilarious -- and makes pies with fruit which, in his hands, magically becomes ripe with everlasting flavor, as long as he only touches it once. Jim Dale, please then explain to me how Ned will chop it up and place it in a pie for baking? No? You're not going to explain it? Fine.
In the restaurant, cutie-patootie and oversexed waitress Olive Snook, played by Kristin Chenoweth, is pushing the rhubarb on a cynical black man. He ain't having it. Apparently, this guy, Emerson Cod (the awesome Chi McBride), is a private detective and the sole keeper of Ned's secret. He discovered it a while back, chasing a criminal across the roof of The Pie Hole, as we see: Criminal falls, bounces off the dumpster into which Ned was dropping some trash, dies, but bounces into Ned, comes back to life, and is again killed instantly when Ned reaches out to grab him as he runs away. Emerson, seeing this, proposes a partnership: he and Ned will bring murder victims back to life, get the 411 on who committed the crimes, and then re-kill the dead people and collect the crime-solving rewards. Voilà. Ned reluctantly agrees, because The Pie Hole needs money, and he and Emerson enter into the arrangement, contentious though it may be.
For instance, Ned doesn't like Emerson referring to their subjects as "zombies." That's not how it is, he says. They're not "un-dead," because a person can only be alive or dead, and if they were dead and now they're not anymore, they are officially alive. Just when I thought I was free of the Gilmorian quirk-talk...damn. "Can't we say 'alive again'?" asks Ned. "Doesn't that sound nicer?" Emerson says that what it sounds like is Ned is narcoleptic. Ned is confused. "I suffer from sudden and uncontrollable attacks of deep sleep?" he asks. Emerson shakes his head: "What's the other one?" Ned: "Necrophiliac" Emerson shrugs: "Words that sound alike get mixed up in my head." Coming in on the tail end of this private conversation, Olive cheerily pipes up to say that she has the same problem: "I used to think 'masturbation' meant chewing your food." She flashes them a big smile before announcing uncomfortably that she doesn't think that anymore. Ned cringes and asks her to lock the door behind her when she leaves, meaning now.
Emerson brings Ned up to speed on the latest reward opportunity. There's a dog involved, he says, causing the STILL ALIVE (nineteen years later) Digby to become interested in the tale. Apparently, Cantaloupe, an innocent Chow hound, has been wrongly accused of killing her owner. "Cantaloupe was framed," says Emerson. "Someone put a part of the victim in her mouth." Eek. Ned doubts Cantaloupe's innocence, pointing out that Chows are the breed most likely to eat their own owners' faces off. "Hey, hey," says Emerson, offended. "That's racial profiling." He says that if the dog is, indeed, innocent, then the incident is murder, and if it is a murder, and they solve it, then there will be a reward.
Jim Dale gives us the deets: a rich dude was found mauled to death in his office. Cantaloupe was the sole witness and only suspect in the crime. The family, however, is convinced of Cantaloupe's innocence and has offered a reward to anyone could find the real killer. So, Emerson and Ned show up at the morgue. "You the dog expert?" asks the suspicious attendant. "Already had a dog expert." Ned says he's uh, the other dog expert. "Mm hmmm," drones the awesome, but still skeptical morgue attendant, and Ned goes in to check out the dead guy.
"How's he look?" asks Emerson. "Fine," Ned remarks, "but my threshold's pretty high, so you have to take what I say with a grain of salt." Emerson steps up to view the body, which apparently has only half a face. "That ain't a grain of salt," he says. "That's one of them blocks they give cows to lick." He goes to wait outside while Ned does his thing. Gripping his watch to remind himself that he has only a minute to get this info out of the dead guy, Ned gives him a poke. Instantly, the man sits up. "Do I have something right here?" he asks, noticing Ned's aversion to the left side of his face, or...the gaping hole that used to be the left side. "No," says Ned, swallowing. "There's...nothing right there." Swiftly, Ned learns that it was not, in fact, Cantaloupe who committed the attack, but the secretary's Rottweiler. "She's been mad since the company Christmas party," the dead guy starts, but Ned doesn't stick around for the story. He touches the man again, and he goes back to being dead. Hooray, Cantaloupe is freed!
Meanwhile, Digby hangs out with Olive, who, Jim Dale explains, is glad to dog-sit Ned's dog, seeing as how her desperate attempts to connect with Ned have been met with nothing but failure. Digby, as a result, serves as sort of substitute for affection. He is not, however, enough of a substitute to fully satisfy the cravings of Olive, as we see when Ned arrives to pick up Digby, and she basically jumps him. Well, I guess she would jump him if she had a trampoline or something, but Kristin Chenoweth is so tiny, her head comes up to Lee Pace's belt. She literally stands on the coffee table to look moonily into Ned's eyes and attempts to seduce him with her, may I say, rather large melons, while he stutters and forces himself to avoid her come-on. Suddenly, he is distracted by the Cheno-rack when a report comes on the news about an unnamed woman who was murdered on a cruise ship. A reward is being offered for information leading to the capture of her killer, but Ned is enthralled for unknown reasons beyond that.
Later that night, Ned pets Digby with a hand on a stick while watching another newscast: the woman was killed on a ship traveling between Tahiti and the U.S. Emerson arrives to tell Ned that there is a $50,000 reward involved, and that Ned had better decide quickly whether he wants in on it, because the girl is about to be buried. "They just pulled her out of the water," says Ned, incredulous. "Jewish," Emerson explains. "Christians leave 'em laying around, but Jews gotta get them buried." Ned is strangely interested -- especially when he finds out that the funeral will be held in his home town, Coeur d' Coeurs ("heart of hearts"). It's Chuck.
Ned and Emerson take the bus to Coeur d' Coeurs, passing the very same super-yellow field of flowers where Ned first learned of his undeadening abilities. "You know this girl?" Emerson asks. Ned says that he knew of her. Emerson flatly asks if Ned knew of her in the Biblical sense. Ned avoids his eyes, saying that he knew of her when he was ten, and he remembers nothing about being ten. "The pie maker," Jim Dale assures us, "remembers everything." The facts are these: Charlotte Charles, twenty-eight, was found floating in the ocean, moments after her strangled body was discarded there. "Discarded by whom," Jim Dale says with British ominous..ity...ness, "seemed to be a question only Charlotte Charles could answer." So, for Ned and Emerson, it's off to the funeral home, where a fat, cigar-smoking, bastard of a funeral director is robbing the dead of their final possessions. Always eager to supplement his income, he is not averse to being bribed to allow Ned and Emerson a private viewing of Chuck. Ah, that sounds dirtier than it is. Ned wants to go this one alone, he says, in order to get some closure with Chuck. "What you got so open that needs closin'?" Emerson asks, suspicious. Ned says he just needs to say he's sorry for some kid stuff, no big deal, and Emerson goes out, reminding him he has only sixty seconds to get the job done.
Steeling himself, Ned opens Chuck's white coffin to see her lying there in repose, wearing a sweet gold dress. "Only Prince Charming could know how the pie maker felt upon looking at her," says Jim Dale. Ned struggles with his decision on where to touch her. The lips, he thinks, would be too forward. Well, I suppose so, though I could think of much more forward places, if you know what I'm saying. He goes for the cheek, instead, and Chuck instantly flails upward, knocking Ned in the head with the coffin lid. She's out in a shot, ready to knock him out with a chair, when Ned tells her who he is. She's delighted to see him, though, frankly, she had just been having the weirdest dream about being strangled to death with a plastic sack. "You were strangled to death with a plastic sack," Ned tells her, kind of uncomfortably, and goes on to apologize for, you know, the awkwardness of this whole thing of her being dead and all that. Full of regret, he tells her that she has less than a minute to live, and that he needs to know who killed her in order for justice to be served. He fails to mention the fifty grand. She says she'd like to tell, but she has no idea. She had gone to the ice machine on the boat and was strangled and thrown overboard, never seeing her killer. Emerson knocks on the door to warn Ned of the time. "Is my time up?" the impossibly cute Chuck asks. Ned sadly says that it is. "Well," she says, "thanks for calling me 'Chuck.' No one's called me 'Chuck' since...since you." Ned stutters that, when he lived door to her, he had a cru..., uh, was in lo....: "Um, you were my first kiss." Chuck says that, yeah, he was her first kiss, too. "You want to be my last kiss?" she asks. "First and last? Or, is that weird?" Ned smiles a tiny, sad smile. "That's not weird," he says. "It's symmetrical." As the two of them lean in for that final kiss, the one that will kill Chuck, by the way, Jim Dale warns us that Chuck's minute is just about up. But, see, Ned can't do it. The closer his lips get, the more he realizes that he just can't send her back to being dead. So, the sixty seconds elapse and, on a nearby toilet, the funeral director wheezes his last.
Outside the room, Emerson knows nothing of this. Ned tells Chuck that he can make it to where she doesn't have to die again, but that she can never tell anyone, and must hide. He tells her to get back into the coffin, lie still, and that he'll be right back. In the hallway, he tries to get rid of the suspicious Emerson, who notices Ned's nervous sweating and eye-twitching. "When people aren't being honest, their eyes twitch," he says, "like yours is now." Ned, flustered, says that it's an eye thing he has, exacerbated by a stomach thing. "It's like acid-reflux, except in my eye!" he says, easing his way back toward Chuck's viewing room and telling Emerson to go on without him. Emerson's against the plan, but goes anyway, and everything seems to be going all right until Ned bursts back into Chuck's room to find that her coffin has been removed. Running into the street (somehow Emerson is no longer anywhere to be found), he sees the hearse taking Chuck away.
Lying in her coffin, being driven to her graveside, Chuck reflects on her life. ["As you do." -- Wing Chun] She thinks about her crazy aunts, Lily and Vivian, who had social phobias that caused them to become homebound. I can't understand how, when I type it out, it sounds so depressing, and yet it is actually quite charming -- I mean, one of her aunts is Swoosie Kurtz in an eye patch, and the other is Ellen Greene, from Little Shop Of Horrors, neither of whom can be beaten, even with sticks. Chuck found it difficult to have much of a life, taking care of her aunts as she did, but she served the community by harvesting and selling honey for the homeless. As one does. Her life was sweet, but not full enough, and one day she decided to find a way to go out and see the world. She walked into Boutique Travel Travel Boutique where, Jim Dale tells us, she got more than she bargained for.
Distracting the gravediggers by setting their truck on fire, Ned rescues Chuck from a fate worse than death -- whereas that fate would be dying, coming back to life, and then dying again by being buried alive. They quirk on over to The Pie Hole, where we see in the clear light of the neon sign that the two of them together are sweeter than pie and cuter than...various and sundry cute things. Chuck -- who has taken time to freshen her makeup and fix her hair post-coffin -- has just learned of the painful caveat to this New Life scenario -- she can never touch Ned, on whom she is now mad-crushing due to his bringing her back from the dead and all, and to his general preciousness to boot. "I can't even hug you?" she asks, her freckles standing out in stark relief. "What if you need a hug? A hug can turn your day around!" Ned says that he's not a fan of the hug, really. Chuck asserts that he's obviously not been hugged properly in his life, as a hug can serve as an emotional Heimlich. "Someone puts their arms around you and they give you a squeeze," she says, "and all your fear and anxiety comes shooting out of your mouth in a big, wet wad, and you can breathe again." Ned cannot comply, as romantic as talk of big, wet wads always is. He explains this, but her charm remains on full blast: "So a kiss is out of the question?" Ned is dumbfounded by both her persistence and her loveliness, and for a moment cannot speak. They have a weird conversation, where she asks him how long he's been "thinking about this," and he says he hadn't been really lying in wait for it, which...he could he have? No one, even those with the power to awaken the dead, sits around fantasizing this exact state of affairs. Well, I hope not, anyway. Anyway, Ned mutters a weird monologue that comes down to him having thought of Chuck often. He tells her again that she can't go back to Coeur d'Coeurs and cannot see her aunts. She says that they won't make it without her, being all socially phobic, but he insists. People can't deal with someone suddenly being alive again. "Well," Chuck says, resigned. "I suppose dying's as good an excuse as any to start living." Ned gives her the wistful eyebrows and takes her upstairs to meet Digby.
"Wasn't your old dog named Digby?" Chuck asks, and Ned admits that this is the same Digby. Now, will it someday be explained how Digby lived to his ripe old age? Does Ned actually bestow immortality on the people and animals he brings back? Will Chuck now live forever? Does she have to eat and sleep anymore? Are she and Digby impervious to injury? Somebody tell me something! But, no, nobody's going to tell me anything, because Jim Dale has probably given up and started drinking and to interrupt now would mean we'd miss the fact that Ned has only reinvigorated two beings and left them to continue living -- Digby and Chuck. He avoids her pretty smile by saying he needs to rest after all that coffin chasing, gives her his bed, and sacks out on the couch. She watches him lie down, smiling all the time: "I'd kiss you if it wouldn't kill me."
In bed, Chuck watches the reports of her funeral on the evening news. They're calling her "The Lonely Tourist." She is, the narrator tells us, struck by the undignified nature of celebrity. You and Britney, girl. She sees that Boutique Travel Travel Boutique has offered a $50k reward for information on her murder, and puts two and two together. She goes to the couch and wakes up Ned: "Would I be alive right now if I'd known who killed me?" Groggily, Ned answers that of course she would: "Don't be silly. That's, uh...something in the news about the reward?" Chuck says she thinks he came to find out who her killer was for the money, not so that justice could be served, but Ned insists that he wouldn't have even know she had died if it weren't for the reward being offered. She is offended, however, that he didn't even tell her about it, and points out, angrily, that $50k makes a lot of pie. "Twenty-five thousand," Ned points out. "I have a business partner." Oh, Ned, if only you kept spare pie around to stick in your pie hole. So, Chuck is now clear on the concept, and wants to know if Ned's after her reward: "I won't be mad at you. I just want to know." She will be mad, she says, if Ned lies to her about it -- so mad that he'll have her "scratching the drapes" with anger. "I'm not lying," he insists. "Please don't attack the window treatments." Okay, she says, accepting his claims, and goes back to bed, where the show has the nerve to pull the classic star-crossed-lovers- simultaneously-reach-out- to-each-other- despite-physical/geographical-barriers thing. What I'm saying is, each of them put a hand on the wall that separates them, touching without touching. The morning, Chuck wakes up to find a note taped to the lamp: "Pease do not leave this apt."
Natch, Chuck leaves immediately, running into neighbor and waitress, Olive, in the hallway. Awkward. "I'm a friend of Ned's," says Chuck. Olive gives her the up and down before asking the all-important "Does he touch you?" Y'all, I don't even understand how Kristin Chenoweth finds high heels as tall as she is wearing now. Kudos to her for not pitching forward to her death.
At The Pie Hole, Emerson is grilling Ned. He suspects that Ned might have wanted the full reward for himself, and sidestepped their partnership. Where's the trust, my man? His fears are put paid when Chuck walks in with Olive. "Are you the business partner?" Chuck asks Emerson, who is surprised, to say the least, to see her alive. "Found her upstairs," says Olive. "Doesn't she look a lot like that dead girl?" Emerson locks evil eyes with Ned: "She looks exactly like that dead girl," he says and Olive tells Chuck to take it as a compliment: that dead girl was pretty. So, Olive is short, dumb, blonde, horny, and has big boobs? And they hired Kristin Chenoweth to play this one note? Please tell me there will be something more, here, because she is too talented to go to waste. I mean, give her a musical number, at least, or swing her from the ceiling, maybe.
When Ned sends Olive off to serve pies, Chuck lays her proposition before Emerson and Ned: she thinks they should find out who killed her and collect the reward, splitting it three ways. Ned is nonplussed -- he thought Chuck was offended by the whole notion of the reward. No, she says, she just didn't want him to want it. But now that she's thought about it, she's thinking they should go 30-30-40, with her taking the larger share. "It's only fair I get more," she points out. "I did die for it." Ned leans back in his seat. He's not a detective, he says; he makes pies. "You can't just touch somebody's life and be done with it," says Chuck. Ned begs to differ, insisting, "Yes, I can. That's how I roll." Cute, but tired. Emerson says that he could handle the three-way split, but Ned is worried, telling Chuck, "You're supposed to be dead This is pushing your luck." Chuck shakes her head: "Yeah, well, luck pushed me first."
Later, when he has Ned alone, Emerson questions the wisdom of this whole keeping-Chuck-alive idea. "Are you in love with her?" he asks. "Because it's that level of stupid." Ned admits that it's a confusing time and that seeing Chuck again is digging up a lot of childhood issues. "You know what?" Emerson snarks. "We all have childhood issues, okay?" In fact, Emerson says, he has a full subscription to all those issues. "Horror stories," he says, giving Ned the stink-eye. But Ned trumps him: "I kind of killed her dad when I was ten," he says. "She doesn't know." Emerson: "Well, maybe not horror stories."
Emerson wonders, since Chuck's still alive, who died in her place. Chagrined, Ned shows him a newspaper account of the death of the funeral director. "It's a random proximity kind of thing," he says in explanation, and Emerson loses it. "Bitch," he shouts, "I was in proximity!" While Emerson continues to berate Ned for foolishly complicating their lives by not re-killing Chuck, she comes in, insisting that she's not the small-town girl they think she is. Well, wait, yes she is, but she says she was hoisted by her own petard. Her whole exotic vacation was a devil's bargain -- the manager of Boutique Travel Travel Boutique offered her a high seas adventure at no cost; all she had to do was pick up a package. "Are you a drug mule?" Ned asks, shocked. Chuck is chagrined: "No I'm a...monkey mule." Heee. Apparently, DeeDee of the Travel Boutique asked her to pick up some antique monkey statues which, DeeDee said, had no value other than sentimental. "Those must have been some emotional monkeys," Emerson points out, and they all decide to head over to see DeeDee.
"Boutique Travel Travel Boutique manager DeeDee Duffield," Jim Dale tells us, "hoped the $50,000 reward would help catch a killer, before a killer caught her." But, as we see when the team arrives on the scene of BTTB, her plans did not work out that way. The plastic bag strangler who took out Chuck, has made it to DeeDee first.
Ned wonders how long DeeDee's been dead. "Touch the poor bitch and ask her," Emerson suggests. Ned reaches out to DeeDee, but hesitates when he sees Chuck's watchful eyes. "I'm sort of embarrassed to do it in front of you," he says. Better get used to it, dude. The only way you'll be "doin' it" is "in front" of her, if you get my meaning, which you should if I put those quotation marks in the right place. Chuck kindly covers her eyes, and Ned sets his watch for sixty seconds and gives DeeDee the touch of life. She's just as charming as you might expect someone to be who sends cute girls off to their deaths on boats. "Does everyone get to do this?" DeeDee asks Chuck, when Chuck gives her the sixty-second warning. "'Cause girl, we need to break it down!" I don't even know what that means, but I love DeeDee. No offense to your mothers or cousins, but where I come from, DeeDee is a redneck name of the highest magnitude, and this lady, though not a redneck, is pure DeeDee. Anyway, they don't even get a chance to ask DeeDee whether she knows who killed her, because when Chuck introduces Ned and gets all googly about him being her first kiss, DeeDee reaches across the desk to flirtatiously and trashily touch his cheek. Boom, DeeDead. Emerson rolls his eyes at Ned. "You couldn't have scooted back a little?" he asks, but Ned couldn't have known that someone was going to touch him, since apparently no one but Olive ever does.
So, Ned, Chuck, and Emerson are back at square one. Emerson wonders why the monkey bandit killed DeeDee when he had already killed Chuck for the monkeys. It occurs to Chuck, however, that the guy couldn't get into her room, since he had killed her right after she dropped her room key into the ice machine on the ship. He couldn't have broken her door down? Whatever: he didn't, and they realize all at once that Chuck's things, including the briefcase containing the monkeys, were probably sent to the home of her kooky aunts.
Off we go, back to Coeur d'Coeurs, where a man in gator shoes creeps along the aunts' lawn. As the trio pulls up to the front of the house, Chuck makes to jump out. Ned, however, stops her: she can't go near the house, for risk of the aunts' seeing that she's alive again: "You can have your pie, but you can't eat it. That's the way it works." Chuck gives him the sad eyes. "I wish I could give you an emotional Heimlich," says Ned, "so you could cough up that wad of fear and anxiety." Though Emerson is sighing heavily in the back seat, Ned asks him to lean up and give Chuck a hug. Reluctantly, he does, while Chuck stares all lovey at Ned. "That," says Ned, "was from me."
Now we must pause to learn about Aunts Lily and Vivian -- who, prior to becoming Chuck's guardians, made names for themselves many years ago as The Darling Mermaid Darlings, synchronized swimmers. Years later, Lily lost her eye in a tragic litterbox accident, and they were forced into retirement and hermit-style seclusion. Naturally.
The aunts kook out -- though they do provide a delicious-looking cheese spread -- telling Ned and Emerson all about how nice Chuck was as a girl, except, unfortunately, during puberty which coincided with Lily's change of life. "It is impolite to discuss a person's menopause in mixed company," says Lily, while kind of slaying me with her bedazzled eyepatch. "It nearly killed me," Vivian whispers, while Lily rants on, saying how horrible it was that Chuck spent her last days on a cruise, surrounded by fat, middle-aged women who wore sweatshirts with things sewn to them. "The food is perfectly atrocious," Lily goes on. "Unless she enjoyed vomiting and diarrhea, I can't imagine she had a good last meal." Emerson tries to engage in the conversation: "A good last meal can go a long way. Our penal system makes a point of it." Ned makes an attempt, saying it's nice that Chuck got to see a little of the world before she died. "Eh," Lily snarks, "the world isn't that great." Vivian offers the gentlemen some of their fine cheese -- particularly the blue ash, which has a grassy flavor. "It does have a grassy flavor," Emerson says, crunching a cracker while Lily rolls her one good eye. Vivian says it's especially delicious with Chuck's honey. "You haven't lived until you've tasted her honey," she says, unnecessarily dirtily. "The homeless love it." Haaaa. Ned looks behind him to see Chuck breaking the rules and peeking in through the window. To avoid detection, he asks to see Chuck's belongings -- specifically a stainless steel briefcase. Meanwhile, Chuck walks around the back of the house, casting a wistful glance at her bees. She climbs into her old bedroom, and sees the case. Opening it, she finds the monkeys, and Jim Dale explains that the sight of them makes her determined to do something more with her life. She doesn't want to be remembered just as "The Lonely Tourist." She grabs the monkeys, leaving the case on the bed, and runs back onto the porch just before Lily comes in to retrieve the case. And, as Lily walks back out of the room, sighing, she is attacked by the plastic bag killer!
Unaware of Lily's fate upstairs, Ned tries to comfort Aunt Vivian on the loss of Chuck. "In a rare moment of sensitivity," the narrator says, "he reached out and touched her." Vivian swallows hard. "Not realizing," Jim Dale goes on, "she didn't like being touched." These people and their intimacy issues are already starting to bother me. Ned realizes his faux pas, being an untouchable himself, and goes upstairs to check on Lily. Unfortunately, Aunt Lily has lost her battle with the bag strangler, and the bad guy now jumps Ned. From the porch, Chuck comes rushing out, whacking the killer on the head with the monkey case, surprising him a great deal indeed. "Didn't I kill you?" he asks Chuck in confusion, and before anyone can answer, Aunt Lily makes her triumphant return, heralded by a shotgun safety clicking off. "I can hold my breath for a really long time," the former Darling Mermaid Darling tells him, thinking the killer's talking to her, and blows him out the upstairs window with one shot. Ned and Chuck watch in silent surprise. "The jig," Jim Dale tells us, "appeared to be up." Lily, standing in the doorway, can see right into the room where Ned and Chuck stand to either side of the door. Ah, but due to her bejeweled eye patch, she can't see Chuck at all. This is amusing for multiple reasons, the most salient being that my own mother is blind in one eye (she does not, however, wear an eyepatch, though now I wish she did) and growing up, when she made me mad, all I had to do was walk around to her right side and make faces at her, because she couldn't see me. Please don't think for a moment I ever got away with it.
Chuck makes her getaway, climbing back down the trellis to give the murderer a good kick where he lies dead on the ground; Ned, seeing her, is delighted that the girl he rescued from death has returned the favor.
Back at The Pie Hole, Olive sees the news report about the goings-on at the aunts' house. Apparently, with the renewed interest in their careers after the media exposure, the Darling Mermaid Darlings are planning a benefit performance for Honey for the Homeless. Olive's mental wheels somehow begin to turn at the mention of "the Lonely Tourist."
Outside the restaurant, Chuck and Ned sit the appropriate non-killing distance away from each other on a bench. Ned, sitting on his hands, admits that, when he looks into his primal sweet spot, he realizes that he kept Chuck alive for selfish reasons. He smiles as he tells her that he just figured his life would be better if she was in it. Chuck is, of course, moved, and to prove it, she gives Ned one of the contraband plaster monkeys she died for. "Thank you for bringing me back to life," she tells him, and they kiss each other, via monkey. Does that make sense? They touch monkeys. Nothing I'm writing makes it sound any better. Anyway, after they uncomfortably pull away from each other, they passionately knock their monkeys together in a fit of lust, and break them, revealing the solid gold monkeys beneath. Ah. So, though they did not reap the reward of Chuck's murderer being caught (and killed) -- that, of course, went to the aunts, to whom it gave a renewed lease on life -- they did get some gold monkeys out of the deal. And Emerson, as a result of all of this, got a second partner on his reward-money scheme. Chuck is now part of the team, and their first job, back at the morgue, is to reawaken a dude who had been found dead in a lobster tank. Ned touches the guy, and before he can get into any specifics about his death, Chuck thinks it would be nice to ask if the dead man has any last words or requests. Lady, time is a-wastin'! I will be pissed if the sly old morgue attendant has to die because Ned runs out of time to kill the lobster guy just because Chuck's trying to be cute. Which is what's going to happen, actually, because Ned is so bamboozled by Chuck's adorableness, he reaches behind his back to hold his own hand, pretending to be holding hers. And, as Jim Dale tells us, at the same moment, Chuck reaches behind her back, and pretends to hold Ned's.
And now I hope you'll excuse me as I go do some shots of soy sauce to wash out this sweetness.