Pushing Daisies: Sticky situations

So my cable's back up, and thanks to those strike-inducing network websites, I've had a chance to catch up on some of last night's TV, which I'll be working my way through blogging in between viewing the Thursday NBC shows and Cowboys-Packers.

Spoilers for "Pushing Daisies" coming up just as soon as I dust myself for prints...

As someone who watches almost every episode of the shows I like, I'm more sensitive to over-use of formula than some (see my weekly complaints about "Reaper," though I still haven't gotten to see that one), and therefore more excited whenever a show deliberately gets away from that formula.

"Pushing Daisies" hasn't been too married to its formula, but this week's episode still seemed like a deliberate attempt to go off-template -- and a funny one, at that. What seemed like our Murder of the Week (complete with Jim Dale's "The facts were these...") was solved 10 minutes in, apparently never to be dealt with again (only for the Real Doll-loving killer to pop up again in prison), then the episode seemed to shift into a bunch of wacky hijinks between the Pie Ho's and Molly Shannon (ala the "Bar Wars" episodes of "Cheers"), and then we got a second, more important Murder of the Week -- and yet one that, in the end, was solved almost entirely via Jim Dale montage. And just when it seemed as if Ned had decided to put off telling Chuck about her dad so we could have one of those predictable "Why didn't you tell me the truth!" break-up moments around May sweeps, he just blurted out the news at episode's end. Never a dull moment in this one.

It helped to have so many funny bits -- none funnier than Emerson's "I mean, it's a broad generalization, but my guess is an attractive man who makes pies for a living shouldn't even spend a short amount of time in prison," but also including Olive baking a gun-pie, Chuck and Olive as cat burglars (complete with cleavage window for Olive), and another bit of formula undercutting, when Jim Dale said, "Then he considered how being locked in a prison was actually much worse than some silly metaphor about truth."

Don't know how many episodes remain from pre-strike production, but we're probably not going to see any of them till January, which makes Ned's confession a mid-season cliffhanger of sorts.

What did everybody else think?