All The Way Through To "Kerplunk"

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So....... I've seen the final three episodes of Pushing Daisies.

And I'm not going to be able to do them justice.

It's not that the show becomes something huger than it was during its run... it didn't really need to, of course. It was already brilliant, funny, touching and wonderful stuff. But it didn't get the opportunity to bring itself fully to fruition like it should've... to borrow a pie-maker's vernacular, it never got the chance to ripen into something that brought all the flavors wholly together into a mind-altering ecstasy like nothing we've ever tasted.


What I'm saying is, the ingredients were all there - Bryan Fuller & Co. achieved greatness every episode - but not full-on fullness. That was something beyond their means... something that was snuffed out by the rotten luck of the writer's strike and a network that stopped believing in the show at some point thereafter. ABC tore it out of the oven before it was through baking!


So I'm not going to be able to do these episodes justice because mostly I'm not worthy, but also in the back of my mind I'm filled with what-if's. What if they'd gotten to see this terrific tale through to a wholly realized end? What if these characters lived as long and rich lives as so many of their lesser peers?


But perhaps I wouldn't savor what remains so sweetly if it'd not been tasted on the run. And this final run of episodes - most specifically the post-production-altered finale's final ten minutes or so but yes even before that - do bring us all sorts of goodies and resolutions to long-standing story-arcs though, and for that we should all be grateful. We get a lot, and once the final curtain came down I felt immeasurably happy to have had what we did have. To get what we got. A couple dozen hours with these folks was far richer time-spent than so many of the hundreds of hours that fill the empty swath of television programming otherwise. Bryan Fuller enriched the TV landscape with these folks, and Ned, Chuck, Emerson & Olive... Aunts Lily and Viv... not to mention the countless side characters... they each have their place in the pantheon of Great TV Characters. No matter what, they stand.


I'm keeping this as spoiler-free as I can, in case you hadn't noticed. I'm not gonna tell you what happens. The discs will be out at some point in the future and it's something you should experience yourselves. There's singing, there's swimming, there's sadness, there's love and broken hearts and broken hearts mended. There's everything this show has offered us before, only three more blessed-be episodes of it.


It's bittersweet and I don't care if you think my prose has gotten rosy here, I had cheeks stained with tears as the final credits ran, and I mourn the loss of my pie-slinging pals from the quaint little town of Coeur d’Coeurs.


But if there's anything that they've taught me about death, it's that you can always slap a technicolor dream-coat onto the world you're looking at and sometimes, maybe, you can hum a lively tune and still manage to smile through the rougher stuff.

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