How it begins: Short Stories of Love and how it ends

2

A Touch of Love

Olive Snook is right, “We all need to be touched.”

             

              It would be very easy to enlist the aid of Pushing Daisies in the Puritanical battle against sex. Dead girl is brought back to life by the man she loves. Dead girl cannot be touched again by said reviver, otherwise she will be dead again forever. However, to reduce the show to a touch no touch line of analysis is not only reductive, it also drastically under minds the creative team’s ability to craft a compelling story. Pushing Daises is defined by touch and intimacy it oozes out of it dialog like a slice of warm apple pie.

Connection is the engine that drives Pushing Daises towards its most thought-provoking insights. Yet, as expected with a story of this sort connection is rather difficult to come by, as indicated previously retouching the resurrected results in instant and permanent death. Death though is an outcome that at first is not particularly unwanted by the moves and shakes of this world of pie making and murder. Private Investigator Emerson Cod wishes as much in response to Olives Snook’s question.

Olive: “Does he touch her?”

Emerson: “Wish they would.”

Though this exchange is played for laughs it begins to illustrate the show’s understanding of connection. The problem isn’t that Ned and Charlotte “Chuck” Charles cannot touch. The problem is that they have never connected. Ned revives Chuck not as a selfless act but as a selfish one.

Chuck: “Was this really an act of kindness, me here? Were you really trying to do something good for no other reason than to help me?”

Ned: “I was being selfish. I’d love to say that I was being unselfish, but I know that deep down in my primal sweet spot I was being unselfish for selfish reasons. I just thought my world would be a better place with you in it.”

That is the key for both of their respective journeys, to allow the other to make their lives better. The show calls Ned’s gift of revival a gift. “It was a gift given to him, but not by anyone in particular”. A gift that gives and takes, perhaps that is a more concise why of stating the above. Ned and Chuck must first understand their connection with the gift of life before they can truly understand their connection with each other. For, as the Narrator says, “The gift of life that Chuck had been given was indeed the gift that kept giving.”