The winter of 'Pushing Daisies' discontent

For all we know about Chuck's dad on Pushing Daisies, and how his death left her an orphan, we've never really heard anything about her mother. Until the jaw-dropper of a revelation at the end of Wednesday's episode.

(I'll be doling out spoilers as heavy as Olive doses her pie with homeopathic mood-enhancers.)

The big reveal at the end of the episode doesn't necessarily Change Things Forever, though it does offer up a number of possibilities. Mostly, though, it makes me sad that this is the last Pushing Daisies we'll see for the foreseeable future (you know why). Here we get a really interesting bit of character development, on top of a pretty strong episode about loss and frozen corpses and cracked do-gooders, and that's that till who knows when.

The mystery o' the week really was secondary: Someone's been offing insurance adjusters who have rejected a heart transplant for a teenager -- who's more Bubble Boy than sad little kid -- and making snowmen out of them in said kid's front yard. The culprit turned out to be the Wish-a-Wish wish-granter (whom you may know as Pam from Big Love), who'd gone off the deep end over young Abner's churlishness and the callous, numbers-driven business at Uber-Life Insurance and took Abner's offhand remark that he wished the insurance guys would drop dead rather literally.

The case offered up a couple of amusing moments -- particularly Emerson and the coroner's digression about Christmas sweaters -- but the real meat of the episode lay in the Ned-and-Chuck story, and her disappearance after Ned revealed that he killed her father when they were kids.

Chuck leaving leaves Ned all out of sorts, unable even to get some fairly simple answers from corpsicle No. 2, and leaves Chuck herself wanting badly to let someone else in on the secret. She tries to do so with Olive, who (understandably) thinks Chuck is blowing smoke and speeds right past it. So it's on to a far dicier companion-in-truth: the sewer-dwelling Oscar (a returning Paul Reubens), who's been collecting hair samples from both Chuck and Digby (ewwwww) to figure out why it is they smell like death (there's a faint whiff of ozone, apparently, which makes me think of this sparking to life, but not so much death).

In particular, there was one really touching scene, when Ned finally finds Chuck and wants to make things right. "Do you hate me?" he asks. "I have to a little, for a little while," is her reply. He wants to stay, then, but she says she'll just end up hating him more if he does. It's quiet and true and a little bit heart-breaking, and it's one of the strongest, most grounded scenes the show has done all season. Just great stuff all around.

She eventually shakes off her little bit of hate, and understands why Ned won't bring her dad back for a minute to say goodbye. "She wished she knew her father. She wished she knew her mother. She wished the piemaker could comfort her by holding her close," the narrator says. Not all those can come true, he adds, but one can.

Which brings us to the big revelation. Chuck does, in fact, know her mother; she just doesn't know it. In a hallucination induced by Olive overdosing the pie, Aunt Lily reveals to Olive that she, in fact, is Chuck's mom.

Dude. That's a lot to chew on. Why did Lily bail? Was it to focus on the Darling Mermaid Darlings? Was she just not capable of handling a child then (there was that scene following her dad's death where she couldn't bring herself to hold Chuck)? How in God's name is Olive going to be able to keep that secret, and when she inevitably lets it out, how will Chuck be able to stay away?

There are a world of possibilities to explore with that bit of information, and it kills me a little that we'll not be seeing anything else from the show for potentially a long time. At least, though, the show has left us with plenty to think about in the meantime.

More frozen treats from tonight's episode:

• Exchange of the night -- Ned and Emerson talking about how he told Chuck about killing her dad: "I blurted it out. It was like word vomit." Emerson: "Then you slipped in that word vomit. You fell on your ass and now you're covered in word vomit."
• The hallucination scenes, with the donut-crab and the iridescent mermaid, were really well done, and Swoosie Kurtz played Lily's doped-up state just right -- loopy, but with the same unsentimental personality Lily has always had.
• Emerson's reaction to seeing the third snowman: "Aw hell. See, I used to love snowmen."
• Olive, trying to snap Ned out of his funk: "I also heard you walking around outside, moaning her name like something out of Tennessee Williams. It may be romantic, but it's not dignified."

How'd you like tonight's Pushing Daisies? Will it tide you over until whenever we see new episodes again?

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