How nice was it to see that that Pushing Daisies continued last night to explore how Ned figured out the rules to his “gift.”  I think they answered several of my questions from the first episode, including what dies when he brings fruit back to life.  I still want to know about whether it's an equal and opposite reaction or whether it does not need to be “equal.”  We saw flowers die last night as Ned was bringing peaches back to life for his pies.  Does it have to be flowers?  Why could it not be a customer?  I think the show will get there eventually, and I am beginning to have some faith in it.   

It all makes me wonder if I'm too harsh, I want to know things like the the rules during the first episode and have a tendency to believe that if I'm not told them it's because they haven't been thought out.  At the very least, I need promises up front that the rules are in place.  Maybe it's a once bitten, twice shy kind of thing. 

Happily, Chuck found out the main rule last night (one dead for one alive).  That's the exact sort of thing that causes me great upset when it's drawn out, and let's not pretend there aren't shows that draw that sort of thing out.  It's the exact sort of tension shows like to create and draw out and then have no idea quite how to solve, so it getting taken care of so early on really makes sense.  And, it makes me happy, and really, that's what counts.

Also, for the record, any show that references Winnie the Pooh getting stuck in the opening to Rabbit's house is fantastic. 

Then there was Kitchen Nightmares.  Have I told you how much I like Kitchen NIghtmares, because I really, really like Kitchen Nightmares.  What's more, last night the restaurant they were at, The Olde Stone Mill, is just an olde stone's throw away from where I grew up and spent (save school) the first twenty some-odd years of my life.  Actually, I've even eaten at the restaurant.  I thank the Powers That Be that there was no disgusting kitchen scene in the show last night.  I love that scene, but to know that I shared a crab cake (or whatever it was that I ate as I honestly don't remember) with a roach or a mouse or a… gulp… rabies infected rat would have been distressing.  Now I can just going to tell myself that the place was completely clean which is why there was no such scene.

I still feel as though the storytelling doesn't really work on the show.  I know that they have a set agenda for each episode:  show the place awful, show Gordon trying to fix it and people disagreeing, show everyone accepting Gordon's idea, show the restaurant as a success, but not everything quite fits the mold.  It's like trying to get a chopped salad into a funnel and then dumping it onto a plate so that you're serving a conical chopped salad (amazingly, just like last night's episode).  What if the lettuce doesn't want to stay, what do you do then?  You keep chopping and cutting and changing a little bit here and there, some nipping, and some tucking.  By the time you're finished the salad might fight in the funnel, but maybe it would have looked better just, you know, as a regular salad in a bowl.

Did you see that the show has been picked up for another cycle?  I'm excited.  Maybe Gordon will get to do restaurants outside the tri-state area and Los Angeles (where he ventures next time around).  It may not be worth having him fly to Oklahoma to fix the only restaurant in the state, but surely he could venture down to Philadelphia, Baltimore, or Washington, D.C., right?  And, frankly, there are some restaurants in the San Francisco Bay Area that could use a little help too.

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