Pushing Daisies: Some people just need killin'

It was so gratifying watching Aunt Lilly pull a shotgun on evil Dwight and blow him to bits.

And of course, disappointing when it was all just fantasy, because if anyone ever deserved being blown to bits, it's Dwight.

But it worked out in the end (for us, not for Dwight). Chuck's jaw-dropping decision to keep her un-dead father alive, even though the consequences meant someone else would have to die in his place, ended up killing Dwight after all.

Whew. Just when I was lamenting the lack of satisfying violence on television.

Chuck (or as Emerson called her, "Killa") essentially murdered Dwight, but we're okay with that because at the very moment of his death, he had a gun trained on Chuck to kill her. So we'll chalk that up to karma and move on to more interesting things like ... Olive and Ned.

Olive and Ned -- so cute together at the Comfort Food Cook-off -- spend the episode investigating the murder of Colonel Likkin, the master chicken chef who is found battered and floating in his giant deep fryer. When Ned brings the Colonel back to life to retrieve the secret recipe for his upset widow, the Colonel is all crusty and gross and tells Ned he wasn't felled by a heart attack, but by a murderer who stole his recipe.

Once the killer is found, the reenactment of the murder is one of the more disgusting things i've seen on TV lately. For all its celebrated whimsy, Pushing Daisies can quite often be very dark and macabre.

Kristen Chenoweth absolutely shines in this episode. She has tons of quick, hilarious lines, and she gets some much deserved time alone with Ned (without pesky Chuck). Olive assures Ned she's over him, but it's so not so. At the end, alone behind closed tent walls, Olive sings a heartfelt version of "Eternal Flame" to her clueless love.

I like the Ned-Olive pairing a lot more than I like the Ned-Chuck pairing (I'm a little nervous about where they might go with that whole plastic wrap thing), so I hope in the episodes left, these two get together. Please!