In a hurry? Read the recaplet for a nutshell description! Finished? Click here to close.
We learn that our hero, Ned, was basically abandoned by his father to a weird boarding school where he accidentally awakened dead lab frogs, subsequently causing the deaths of various other nearby animal life forms. He grows up, as we know, to resurrect his childhood sweetheart, Chuck, and leave her alive, and while last week she was pretty grateful for that trick, this week her curiosity is getting the better of her. She wants some answers -- why is Ned the way he is? Meanwhile, a newly-pixiefied Olive goes to death- and heart-defying lengths to spy on the non-touching lovebirds, and Emerson knits sweater vests and handgun cozies to reduce his stress about Chuck encroaching on his territory. Nonetheless, the team returns to the morgue and the awesome coroner to interview this week's dead guy: an automotive safety specialist who says he was killed by a crash test dummy. That's weird, so they go to the dead guy's workplace, an even weirder car company where they've invented a car that runs on dandelions. Siiiiiiigh. I don't know. There are girls in big flower hats. Anyway, while Olive is back at the Pie Hole (getting the ULTIMATE MUSICAL NUMBER, which I was so excited about I jumped up and sang along with her), Chuck, Ned, and Emerson discover that something strange is afoot with the dandelion dummies. As a matter of fact, they aren't crash test dummies at all: they're dead bodies. The team learns from the dead guy's bulimic ex-girlfriend -- after she gets blown up in a flower car -- that the dead bodies were used in place of the dummies to keep investors from downloading dummy data and defeating the devilish dudes designing the d...ehicles. Just let me have that one. I know it doesn't make sense and that you're still like, "what? bulimic?," but stay with me. The trio, in fact, finds a pit where the old plastic dummies are hidden, and as a result of their snooping are kidnapped by the evil car manufacturer and are to be used as crash test dummies! Thinking that they are about to die, Ned and Chuck lean in for a final kiss! Did I mention that the evil car guy had put them in plastic body bags? Yes. So, Ned and Chuck are able to touch, encased, and not have Chuck die. Meanwhile, Emerson has breaks his bonds with a knitting needle he had hidden in his pocket, and they make an escape in the dandelion car, pursued by the evil car guy. They are saved, after almost running over Olive, and the bad guy is brought to justice. Some of it sounds kind of scary, right? The death and the bulimia and stuff? I know. And yet, it's scary stuff wrapped in cuteness and sprinkled with fairy dust. Somehow, it's really enjoyable. But if it gets any cuter, they'll have to call it Puppy Daisies or Pushing Kittens or Lambie Bunnies, or something like that, because as it is, it's just about given me the diabetes. Want more? The full recap starts right below!
Remember last week when we learned about Young Ned and about the sadness of his mother dying -- and re-dying -- and how as a result of her re-living for more than sixty seconds, his friend's dad died? All terribly sad. But is it more sad than his own father dumping him off at a CGI boarding school, never coming back, and leaving him to fend for himself as he deals with that whole secret power of bringing the dead back to life? Young Ned, Jim Dale assures us, did not go out of his way to make friends at CGI Academy. As a matter of fact, his tendency to go it alone made him the target of bullies. Filled with quiet vengeance, he serves them right when he brings dozens of science class frogs back to life at just the moment all the little mean boys are about to slice them open. Of course, his joy at all this comeuppance is short-lived when a bunch of birds fall dead from the skies in place of the now-living frogs. "His gift," Jim Dale sadly intones, "had once again brought him great distress in place of great joy." Jim Dale, we all possess a similar gift -- it is called "going home for Thanksgiving," and, to our surprise, it boomerangs us each in the face every year, even though a holiday has never passed in which we haven't paid for our mother's delicious meal by having to swallow nine hours of unsolicited advice about everything from our haircut to family planning. But where was I?
Oh, yes. So, in light of his unpopularity and the strange details of his strange life, Young Ned decides to lie about his powers, and that plan works just fine for nineteen years, something-something months, blah blah weeks and whatever days. That to-the-minute stuff was cute last week, but I'm done with it. Don't waste Jim Dale's time making him say all that stuff, okay? His sneerily-sweet voice is meant for more important subjects.
The thing we're supposed to get is that Ned's well-honed lying skills are being tested now, as he and Chuck gaze longingly at each other from their new twin beds in his apartment. "This is strange," Chuck says, giving him one of her best smiles. But Ned disagrees. "It's not strange," he says. "It's unusual, maybe. Eccentric, in a quaint way, like dessert spoons." Chuck is charmed by his charmingness, but says that she has so many questions about how he brought her back to life that her mind wanders. "You need to feed it warm milk and a turkey sandwich," he tells her, "and let it curl up in a sunny spot and take a nap." Okay, Ned. You're really, really almost ridiculously cute. And you have this cool power. And you're in love with Chuck and the reasons are clear. But that is so cute it's gross -- I know you can't have sex with this woman, but it doesn't mean you have to treat her like a tiny kitty you found in the street.
Chuck says she misses her aunts, a little, which Jim Dale tells us is a lie -- she misses them really a lot. Moments later, we see her and Ned in the kitchen, attempting to prepare a meal without touching each other, shouting warnings when crossing the room or entering doorways. Chuck is wearing quite a pretty dress, one I am sure I recently saw in People magazine...not that I read People magazine. During all this don't-kill-me meal prep, Chuck grills Ned on how many people he's brought back to life. He's cagey about it, saying it's not like he walks around reviving childhood sweethearts willy-nilly. He finally admits to her that she's the only human being he's ever made alive again, to stay. "He lied," Jim Dale adds. Because, remember, he made his mom alive again to stay, resulting in Chuck's dad's death -- not that you could have forgotten that, because Jim Dale is not going to stop reminding us, ever. Anyway, Chuck's suspicious of this claim, noticing Ned's telltale eye twitch. He turns quickly away as she opens the fridge. "This is such a small cheesebox," she says, referring to the refrigerator as a whole. Aunts Lily and Vivian had raised her to think of the fridge as a cheesebox, a practice with which I wholeheartedly agree. If I didn't have to wedge the occasional bottle of wine in there, mine would be called the same thing.
As the two of them sit down to dinner, not really keeping, to my mind, enough distance between them to ward off Chuck's permanent demise, Olive Snook hangs perilously out of the door-window spying on them by use of a mirror on a stick. As you do. "From her perch," Jim Dale smarms, "the jealous, yet agile, neighbor was able to confirm only one pleasing physical detail." Olive: "There's a surprising lack of physical contact." With this revelation, she loses her balance, swings into the wall of the building, and loses her ingenious spy mirror.
Across town, Ned's partner, Emerson, is also mulling over his displeasure at Chuck's encroachment on the scene. And apparently, during times of stress and anxiety, Emerson likes to knit. In fact, according to Jim Dale, he finds the stockinette stitch most relaxing. "But no stitch," Dale goes on, "was a substitute for a murder case." The phone rings, informing him of a new job. He immediately calls Ned, demanding his presence at the morgue in ten minutes. "As he finished purling the row," JD says, "he wished aloud: 'She better not come.'" But, natch, she does. When Ned arrives with Chuck in the back seat, Emerson waits for her to disembark before jumping in to Ned and locking the door. "Hey!" Chuck yells as Emerson rudely gives her the "hold on" finger, and turns to acidly ask Ned what Chuck's doing there. Apparently, you can't keep a dead girl down. In fact, Ned says, the un-dead girl was pretty insistent on riding along. "She said she didn't climb out of her coffin for me to keep her in a box," Ned says. Emerson: "Is she the boss of you?" Ned insists that he is the boss of himself, and that dead girl ain't going anywhere. Emerson makes his case. "You don't know nothin' about her," he says, "except that she had soft lips when she was ten." Ned smiles and says that should be enough. Now, is it just me, or is that possibly the most unintentionally creepy thing you've heard on television this week? Soft lips when she was ten? Let's not be talking about a pre-teen's lips, please.
Emerson says he doesn't like it, and he huffs out of the car, only to be replaced by Chuck, who jumps back in and slams the door on him, locking him out and giving him a much more awesome "hold on" finger. Poor Ned. Torn between two lovers. She asks if Emerson hates her, and if he's mad Ned brought her back to life. "He barely knows you're here," Ned lies. In truth, Jim Dale tells us, Emerson has been so het up, he's knitted himself a lovely sweater vest and two handgun cozies since Chuck's return to life. Aw, handgun cozies. So cute! I wonder if I can get a pattern for those...then I'd know exactly what to give all my neighbors for Christmas. I think a handmade gift says so much, don't you? Such as: "Please don't accidentally shoot me during one of your domestic disputes."
Chuck changes the subject, moping (cutely) that she doesn't like riding in the back of the car. Ned insists that it is for her own safety. "You sound like my dad," she sighs. Ned goes on that if his hand were to brush hers, she'd be dead. She reluctantly agrees. She does not, agree, however, when Ned tells her she really needs to stay in the car and that she can't come into the morgue with him and Emerson. Cut to all three of them walking into the morgue. Chuck is not to be denied. "Did I say 'can'?" Ned whispers. "Because I swallow my consonants sometimes. N'T. Can'T come in." The coroner, who I believe I have already mentioned is my favorite character on this show, is skeptical, especially when Ned goes all Valley Girl on him, saying that they're from "the government safety place?" Through his teeth, Emerson points out that it's not a question. "The government safety place," Ned corrects himself. "Mm-hmm," the coroner responds, as only he can, and the team goes in to view the latest corpse.
The facts are these: Bernard, an automotive safety specialist, yadda yadda years/hours/minutes old, was found dead by the side of the road. Jim Dale takes a certain relish in mentioning that he was the apparent victim of a hit-and-run driver. "Why is everything so blurry?" Undead Bernard, who has tire marks across his face, asks when he sits up at Ned's touch. "Probably," Ned cringes, "because your eyeballs are flat." Nervous about the elapsing sixty seconds, Emerson urges Ned to ask the question they came to unravel: who killed Bernard? But, you know, Chuck can't butt out. I guess she feels like the union representative for recently-alive-again dead people, or something, because she is determined to get Bernard's last wishes or requests before he gets that second fatal touch. Emerson, of course, is frustrated by this, seeing as how, bitch, he's in the general proximity, and passing sixty could end his life. But, clearly Ned has not brought Chuck fully up to speed on the sixty-second rule -- perhaps because the first time it backfired on him resulted in her dad's death (in case you had forgotten) -- so she is perfectly willing to delve into a sideline about Bernard's feelings on Buddhism and world religions. Finally, even Bernard has had enough of her whimsy, and he asks that they get a message to Jeanine in promotions, his one true love. Staring at his watch, Ned finally gets a word in edgewise and tells Bernard that they're trying to bring his hit-and-run perpetrator to justice. "A hit-and-run?" Bernard asks, confused. "I was killed by a crash-test dummy." Well, sure. And, scene.
Back at the Pie Hole, the trio attempts to suss out the meaning of Bernard's final words. Chuck feels like they at least have a clue, but Emerson is not so sanguine. In fact, he's now doubly pissed at Chuck for her interference. "It's a dead end," he says. And he doesn't mean the kind of dead end you can un-dead and then re-dead again like you're supposed to, he says, giving her a significant look. "When you get all jabberwocky in my minute," he says, "it's hard to follow up on 'the dummy did it.' I gotta get some real leads now." Chuck slings it back at him. "Isn't that what a P.I. is supposed to do? Investigate?" she asks. "Isn't that the fun part?" Emerson ain't having it. "The fun part," he snipes, "is counting my money in the bubble bath." Heeeee. Oh, if only Tom Selleck had taken more bubble baths on Magnum...but again, I digress. Chuck and Emerson get all snarky at each other, causing Chuck to give him the sad big eyes, and finally she leaves, with Ned at her heels.
Immediately, Olive swoops in on the disgruntled Emerson in the guise of taking a pie order, but really wanting to get the lowdown on the Chuck/Ned relationship. "What's the poop?" she asks him, much to his irritation. "The scoop? The skinny? The haps? The dealio? The 411? P.I. lingo." Emerson fixes her with his most withering look. "Rhubarb," he answers. Olive is excited. "What's that mean?" she whispers. Emerson: "P.I. secret code for get me a damn slice of rhubarb." Ha! Olive snaps back that this isn't Pies-R-Us, Pie City, or Thousands Of Pies In One Place. No, she insists, the Pie Hole is where one comes to chitchat and share information. "CHIT!" she insists. "Chat," Emerson responds morosely. What Olive wants, she says, is the scoop on Chuck and Ned. "Do you want the truth?" Emerson asks. Olive considers it, and though Jim Dale assures us that she does not, in fact, want the truth, she asks for it anyway, and Emerson delivers. "He digs her," he says, "in a way he definitely doesn't dig you." Oh my God! I hold my breath, just knowing that the Chenoweth is going to leap up, grab the nearest pie, and smash it in Emerson's mean face, but she doesn't. Instead, her face falls, oh so sadly, and she says she'll go get his pie. "Do they touch much?" she asks, in a last-ditch effort to hear some good news. Emerson: "I wish they would."
In the kitchen, Chuck flails around with a rolling pin and a flour sifter while she and Ned hash out her reason for living. All Emerson cares about are the rewards, she says, and he thinks she's useless. She insists that there's a reason she's alive again -- and the reason she's picking right now is to tell Jeanine in promotions of dead Bernard's undying love. "We'll bring pie," Chuck says, forming her master plan. "When someone dies, you bring food. It's what you do." Ned smiles like she has just promised him a hundred heavenly virgins and, as Jim Dale points out, ponders how great his life is now that he Chuck is in it. But how great is it, really? I mean, think about it, it's like a long-distance relationship without the benefit of the distance! Being all hot and bothered for someone you can't touch, soaking in the great irony that here they are, quirking around in your face non-stop? I think I would have to pass on that. But not Ned. No. He is so enamored of his undead, untouchable girlfriend, he follows her googley-eyed out of the store, pie in hand, completely ignoring poor Olive, who continues to yearn for him.
Cut to Dandelion Industries, where Chuck and Ned see a video on the car of the future, the Dandelion XS, which is shaped for some unexplained reason like a horse vitamin and runs on the power of dandelions. Yeah, yeah, the car's great and runs on flowers, but whatever -- what I really want to talk about is the Emmy-worthy costuming in this scene. There are promotional models all around the room, each wearing bright green dresses, go-go boots, and the greatest headwear of all time: huge dandelion puffball hats. Total, show-stealing brilliance. Meanwhile, a car company executive, Mark Chase, leads a group of Japanese investors around the showroom, extolling, in Japanese, the virtues of the Dandelion XS. It runs on a fuel made of weeds, yadda yadda. Chuck strolls over to chat him up, and hits him with some unexpected Japanese action. Ned's jaw drops. "When you take care of shut-ins," Chuck explains, "you have plenty of time to read." Noticing his lasting awe, she asks him if he has any unusual talents or hobbies. Well, you know, not really. He makes pies and brings people back from the dead and all, but... He looks at her like she's nuts. "I mean regular ones," she corrects herself. I don't know where she'd get off busting on Ned for his weird life anyway, as we see in a flashback that she learned a bunch of languages while listening to foreign-language cassettes about cheese.
"Would you like to learn about the sporescar of tomorrow?" a promotional dandelion asks them. "Get it, spores-car?" God. This is Jeanine, and up close, we see that the dandelion hats are even better than we originally thought. My Lord, the circumference on those things rivals Dr. J's afro at its height of power. Jeanine, despite being the cutest dandelion of all time, claims not to know any Bernard. "She lied," Jim Dale tells us. And anyway, she can't think of anything other than the pie in their hands. "It was baked," Chuck says, "specifically for the recipient of Bernard's message." Jeanine begins to drool, saying it would be a shame to waste a perfectly good pie. Ned helpfully wipes her mouth with a hand-held dandelion. "He's dead, right?" Jeanine asks, cheerily. Yeah, Ned says, and hands over the pie. "The flower had a secret," Jim Dale helpfully explains, "but her training as a display model allowed her to conceal any trace."
Chuck and Ned are distracted at this moment by the Mark Chase, car exec, who is leading the group of investors to the crash-test facility. Aha, Ned and Chuck think, where there are crash tests, there are crash-test dummies. "Safely out of sight," Jim Dale tells us, in his best "meanwhile" tone, "the flower begins to weep." Oh, and weep she does. But Jeanine is such a professional that she can't allow anyone to see her weeping...or gorging herself on pie...so she crouches behind the Dandelion XS on the rotating dais and crab-walks in a circle to avoid ever rotating to the front. It is so fantastic, I can't even describe it -- a huge flower afro creeping in a half-circle while throwing down on some pie. When I type it out, it's like I am translating it from Swedish. But don't get distracted by the sadness of a crying flower eating pie, okay? Because Jim Dale explains that, like the sugary dessert she is currently bingeing on, her tears would remain with her for only the fifteen minutes, after which they would be "purged from her body." Uh...harsh, show. Bulimic dandelions? That ain't whimsical at all!
In the crash-test room, Chuck and Ned witness a crash test along with the Japanese investors. It is very exciting and explodey. Sneaking away from the group, Chuck finds a room containing dozens of crash-test dummies hanging from the ceiling. One of them is not, like the rest, clad in the dummy couture de rigueur, the orange jumpsuit. Also, his face has been ripped off. "Maybe Bernard wasn't crazy," Ned says, and he and Chuck use their giveaway dandelions to bump a triumphant high five.
Back at the Pie Hole, Emerson smirks as Ned and Chuck tell him about the clues they've found. "Clue is a board game," he snaps. But he says he has done some checking on Dandelion Inc., and things look a little shady. To Ned's surprise, Chuck and Emerson agree that they need to get back into the car company that night. Subsequently, Ned gives Olive the royal brush-off, heartlessly asking her to close up. "Olive often imagined that there was an orchestra in her heart," Jim Dale tells us. "Music heard only by her, except when her heart broke open and it spilled out into the world." Olive sighs, deeply, and suddenly we hear her internal orchestra busting out -- and damned if it doesn't bust out with "Hopelessly Devoted to You," perhaps the most perfect song in all the world. After running off some potential customers who would dare interrupt her musical stylings, Olive lets loose, dancing alongside Manuel the headphones-wearing floor cleaner, and Digby, her faithful backup singer. Oh, Chenoweth. You had me at "rhubarb."
Meanwhile, as Digby and Olive drown their sorrows in each other's company, the rest of the gang sneaks into the car company, where Emerson haughtily produces a key card for the crash-test room. "Contacted the company that makes these doors under false pretenses," he says, adding that they gave him a sample, which he then digitally altered to match the Dandelion machine. "Is that cheatin'?" he asks. Chuck smiles her little smile. "I don't know, is this?" she asks, pulling a card from her bra. "I gave the security guard a hug goodbye and my upper body distracted him," she says, "while these things I call 'hands' took this off his belt." In your face, man with no boobs. A proud as Ned is of his non-girlfriend's ta-talents, Jim Dale tells us that at this moment, Ned feels a mixture of happiness and trepidation. "Why," Ned sighs, "is it always a mixture?" Good question.
As they wait for Emerson in the crash-test room, Chuck tries again to break Ned's (pie) crust of secrets. And once again, he is not forthcoming, even under the scrutiny of her pouty face. "We all have secrets," Ned says, and he's saved from having to say more by the arrival of Emerson. "Skeletons in the closet," Emerson mumbles, and Ned says yeah, exactly, we all have skeletons in the closet. But, no, what Emerson is saying is that there are actual skeletons in the actual closet. Chuck and Ned rush to check it out and find that, eek, those aren't skeletons. In place of the crash test dummies that were there earlier, there now hang dozens of dead bodies.
Ned sets his watch and gets to touchin'. He starts with a guy on the end. "Hey!" the guy says, all happy. He says the last thing he remembers is reading some sales forecasts in the bath, and no, he doesn't know anything about the Dandelion car company. "You wanna open the kimono on why I'm wearin' a silver leotard and hanging from a hook?" the guy asks, but before sweet Chuck can explain anything to him or get any last requests, Emerson grabs Ned's hand and uses it to smack the guy dead again. "If I wanted to mingle with a bunch of geeks wearing leotards," Emerson says, "I'd have stayed in art school." They touch the body, a woman who wakes up screeching, causing Emerson to screech in turn. She finally stops, revealing that she died on a Ferris wheel, and she knows nothing about the car company, though she did once check a box giving permission for her body to be used for auto safety testing. Aha. Except...huh? Walking out, Ned and Chuck wonder where all the real dummies are. Emerson pauses, savoring the beautiful jokes he is about to make. Alas, before he can make them, he hears a noise in the building. They see a creepy shadow coming ever closer! It's...Jeanine, carrying her dandelion hat.
The team takes her back to the Pie Hole, where she begins to stuff her face with abandon. Hatless, she is a preciously cute redhead who reveals that she and Bernard were totally in love. Apparently, their passion began when Bernard took a long lunch while watching promotional dandelion sales training, during which Mark Chase, car exec, teaches the girls how best to shake their puffballs. What? The dandelion things, you know what I mean. Whatever, pervs, Jeanine and Bernard fell in love. So in love, in fact, they regularly got it on in the Dandelion XS until the launch of the flower car grew closer, and Bernard's hours grew longer. Jeanine began to suspect Bernard of stepping out on her, so one evening, she followed him on one of his mysterious trips to the darkness.
Here Jeanine has to pause in her story, leaving the empty pie tin on the table while she makes a quick dash to the restroom. On her return, she says she doesn't know where Bernard had been sneaking off to. "You gonna finish that?" she asks Emerson, eyeing his pie plate. "Yes," he answers flatly. Chuck says she wishes they knew what Bernard had been doing. "Oh," Jeanine says, never taking her eyes off the pies, "I figured it out." Finally Emerson, afraid for his life, must obey her hungry demands, and he hands over his pie, whereupon she scarfs it down with gusto. Immediately following this binge, Jeanine skips out of the Pie Hole, telling them it's easier to show them Bernard's secret than to explain it, and the team prepares to take Ned's car in order to follow her in her dandelion-mobile. "Shotgun!" Chuck calls, but Ned puts on the kibosh. "Chuck," he reminds her. "Dead. Again. Forever."
Out on the road, they follow Jeanine, who is not traveling very fast. Ned points out that the dandelion car can't have a very big engine. "Maybe," Emerson says, cackling, "she ate it." Ned laughs, too, but Chuck admonishes them both, saying Jeanine obviously has a very serious disorder. "What do you mean?" Ned asks, all innocent. "Seriously?" Chuck says, amazed. "The girl's got a whole secret life in the bathroom. And I know exactly how she feels!" Of course, she's talking about secrets, not bathroom lives, but Emerson identifies with the latter. Not stopping to ask about the P.I.'s digestive issues, Chuck rants on. The truth is, she misses her aunts terribly, and if she can't have them back, all she has is Ned, and he's so secretive she doesn't even have him. Ned tries to disagree, but she won't let him. "You love secrets!" she says. "You want to marry secrets and have little half-human, half-secret babies!" She hates it that she doesn't know anything about Ned's life since he was nine. He shrugs. "It's pretty much I bake pies and wake the dead," he retorts. "I live a very sheltered life." Chuck shoots back that she's already lived a sheltered life -- though it wasn't as sheltered as they think. In fact, she shares, her Aunt Lily had a very extensive set of historic erotica down in the cheese cellar. Emerson shudders, begging them not to have this conversation in front of him. "But it's not in front of you, is it?" Chuck snarks. "It's to the side and behind you!" Ned sighs. "You can't ride in the front, Chuck," he says, all sad. Suddenly, to my delight, all this emotional bingeing is interrupted. Because Jeanine's flowermobile explodes, leaving nothing behind but...a flaming box of laxatives. Yes. The team, appropriately, cringes.
Ah, but following the commercial (during which I reflexively calculated my body mass index), we see that Jeanine survived! She is in the hospital, covered in bandages and being visited by Ned, Emerson and Chuck, who is kindly painting lips and eyebrows on her bandaged head. After the team puts her fears to rest that her bandages, in fact, do not make her look fat, Emerson says that some crazy car bomber obviously went through a lot of trouble to keep her from showing them whatever it was she was going to show them. "The bodies," Jeanine whispers. Ned says they've actually already seen the bodies, back at the showroom. "No," Jeanine says. "The ones in the big hole!"
And, yep, back out on the highway, there's a big hole. Full of bodies. To everyone's relief, it is merely a big hole full of fake bodies, rather than a scary mass grave of actual people -- though I suppose this show would find some way to make a joke out of that, if it had to. Someone has been dumping crash-test dummies in this hole. Emerson puts it all together. The car company is dumping the dummies to destroy the electronic crash-test data contained within their hardware, and using the real bodies in their place. "Because," he says, shooting a sideways look at Chuck, "dead people don't talk. Usually." Before they can begin another argument, Ned looks up to see a rather scary sight -- a living crash-test dummy, standing above them, aiming tasers at their chests. Without further ado, he fires on them all, shocking them into submission.
Meanwhile, Olive and Digby are bedded down in her super-toilled apartment, unable to sleep. All she can see when she closes her eyes are Ned and Chuck laughing happily in a bubble bath together. "We are up," she tells Digby. "We are walking."
Suddenly, we see Chuck, back at the Dandelion showroom, lifeless in a body bag. to her are Ned and Emerson, similarly bagged. All of them are crammed into a Dandelion XS. Finally, Chuck got shotgun. As they struggle crazily to get out of their bags, the creepy dummy appears in front of the car. He staggers forward, full-on horror style, scratching the metal test hook across the windshield. Somehow this scratchy noise bothers the team worse than, I don't know, being sealed in body bags. Their screams are silenced, however, when the dummy removes his mask. It's Mark Chase, Dandelion Inc. executive!
Jim Dale clues us in. The facts were these: Bernard (remember him from, like, thirty minutes ago?) had discovered, through intrepid safety testing, that the Dandelion cars were duds. He begged Mark Chase to cancel the launch of the cars, but the greedy exec refused, trying instead to bribe the honest Bernard. When that didn't work, Chase put his evil plan into action, donning the mask of the crash-test dummy, tasering poor Bernard, and crash-testing him to death. Chase, mad with power, explains all this in an awesome rant outside the car where the gang is struggling to stay alive. "The Dandelion car is the culmination of my life's work!" he screams. "It is a flower-powered phenomenon born of a thousand sleepless nights, an intense Ritalin abuse, and a long-sublimated interest in botany!" So what, he says, waving his arms around, if, say, just to pick a for-instance, the car gets up to a speed of seventy miles an hour with the headlights on and the seat-warmer on low, and a short in the radio might cause a cataclysmic chain reaction that, maybe, causes the car to explode? I mean, what are the odds? Apparently, they're not too bad.
Unaware that the bagged trio in the car cannot hear him, he rants on as Chuck ponders her life, death, second life, and now, what looks to be her second death. "She always seemed to die," Jim Dale points out," just when things were starting to get good." She looks hard at Ned. "Son of a bitch," she says in frustration, and though Ned can't hear her, he suddenly feels the urge to tell her every secret in the world. "This was the end, all over again," Jim Dale says, as the untouchable lovers lean toward each other, body bags between them, and kiss through the plastic. Hmm. Kissing plastic. This is exactly what Rick Salomon feels like every time he goes to bed. With anyone.
Meanwhile, Emerson is busy in the back seat, using his trusty travel knitting needle to free himself from his bonds. He is able to unzip himself and Ned and Chuck, and the three escape the car company somehow in the Dandelion XS, which I suppose they simply drive through a wall, pursued by Mark Chase in his decidedly non-eco-friendly bright yellow Hummer. Jim Dale worries that the trio, racing away, heard nothing of the car exec's rant on the radio-short kaboom catastrophe they will face, and indeed, Ned puts the pedal to the metal, pushing the "dandelion-fueled time bomb" to the limits.
"I thought the car of the future was supposed to fly!" Ned wails, as Mark Chase barrels down on them, crushing the cardboard bumper of the Dandelion XS. "What the hell happened to flying cars?!" Knocked off the road by the Hummer, Ned, Chuck and Emerson hurtle through the woods, somehow surviving all of that to end up back in their neighborhood, where, just before they reach the speed of seventy miles an hour, with their seat warmers on low, they are saved when they have to slam on the brakes to keep from running over Olive and Digby. "The pie-maker had never been so happy to see Olive," Jim Dale tells us, with palpable relief. And she, he goes on, had never been so happy to see him. Regarding them all as they are, in body bags with their hands tied, she concludes that nothing terribly romantic must have been going on that evening. Well, I don't know what kind of parties Olive gets to...romance is a matter of personal taste, is all I'm saying.
Meanwhile, Mark Chase is foiled when he attempts to escape the police and realizes his Hummer is out of gas. Score one for Ralph Nader! Jim Dale brings it home: the Dandelion car company does not survive once its secrets are revealed. Jeanine, scarred and burned, seeks nutritional counseling. Emerson, accepting that Chuck seems to be sticking around, takes his frustration out by knitting reward money cozies. Olive, her love renewed, decides not to give up on Ned. And Ned, happy to have survived another death-defying day, installs a plastic shield in the front seat of his car, to safely separate Chuck from his fatal touch. "What is that?" she asks, noticing a hole, featuring protective gloves, at elbow level. "It's for uh, steering emergencies," Ned says. Oh, steering emergencies. Just insert the hand-job joke you're all thinking, right here. Damn this show for making me type the words "hand job" and having them ever Google-able with my name. I apologize in advance to my unborn children and grandchildren. You'll never be president, once they find out your ancestor said "hand job" on the internet. Three times, I've said it! Listen, just forget I said it. Forget it, and remember instead that, as they reach through the -- let's call it "conveniently located" -- hole, the sweethearts can finally hold hands.