Grade: A
More than any other show on TV, I can count on Pushing Daisies to give me a reason to smile every week. That’s because Daisies has yet to truly let me down, even in its roughest weeks, and “Bad Habits” sticks to the very good habit of crafting an hour long escape that leaves my cheeks feeling the slightest bit tingly and my heart a little warmer.
Olive and Ned are both dealing with abandonment issues this week: Olive feeling abandoned emotionally by Ned, and Ned still not over being dropped to the curb by his father. Their separate but related issues collide when one of Olive’s sisters falls from a bell tower and she brings Emmerson, Ned and Chuck in to help solve the case. So these dilemmas are nothing new, but their finally coming face with them and with each other. Olive’s run away to keep her guard up and her secrets inside it, but she gets the chance to spill it all to Ned in the nunnery and can instantly feel a heavy burden pulled off her like a plastic bag from the head.
This season has demonstrated in more than one way its insistence on these characters to move forward, out of the past and into the future. The problem is that they’re scared of both their pasts, with all its dark corners, and their futures, clouded by uncertainties that point back to the past. Olive’s admissions to Ned and his subsequent apology to her, for not being the slightest bit sensitive to her feelings in his whirlwind romance with Chuck, allows her to finally move out of the past and toward that future.
The Scene on the Screen 