Re: Pushing Daisies Season 1 thread
Quote:
| I have tried not to apply any logic to this show. It is a fantasy. |
Fantasy suspends the rules of
fact, but it should not suspend the rules of
logic. The magic used within a fantasy story should follow internally consistent rules or it becomes impossible to tell a story that is both coherent and fair to the viewer. It is "just fantasy" (or "just science fiction", for that matter) should never be an excuse for sloppy writing or actual lapses in logic.
Quote:
| We know people can't really bring back other living things back to life by touching them. |
This, again, is a question of
fact, not of
logic. Logic is merely a tool for analyzing arguments, it has nothing to do with truth or fact.
Quote:
There are certain sequences or developments (cases of one thing following another), which are, in the true sense of the word, reasonable. They are, in the true sense of the word, necessary. Such are mathematical and merely logical sequences. We in fairyland (who are the most reasonable of all creatures) admit that reason and that necessity. For instance, if the Ugly Sisters are older than Cinderella, it is (in an iron and awful sense) NECESSARY that Cinderella is younger than the Ugly Sisters. There is no getting out of it. Haeckel may talk as much fatalism about that fact as he pleases - it really must be. If Jack is the son of a miller, a miller is the father of Jack. Cold reason decrees it from her awful throne - and we in fairyland submit. If the three brothers all ride horses, there are six animals and eighteen legs involved - that is true rationalism, and fairyland is full of it. But as I put my head over the hedge of the elves and began to take notice of the natural world, I observed an extraordinary thing. I observed that learned men in spectacles were talking of the actual things that happened -- dawn and death and so on -- as if THEY were rational and inevitable. They talked as if the fact that trees bear fruit were just as NECESSARY as the fact that two and one trees make three. But it is not. There is an enormous difference by the test of fairyland - which is the test of the imagination.
You cannot IMAGINE two and one not making three.* But you can easily imagine trees not growing fruit; you can imagine them growing golden candlesticks or tigers hanging on by the tail. -- G.K. Chesteron, Orthodoxy |
I think the fruit business may be less inconsistent than it seems, for the simple reason that plants and animals are
different. They behave differently in life, why should they not behave differently in death? Fruit is, in a sense, living material, but it isn't even as much alive as the plant itself. Fruit is a genetic delivery system, a way for the actual living entity (the tree or bush) to reproduce. Most fruit is more analogous to sprem cells or unfertilized eggs than to a dog or a person - or even an apple tree.
As noted above, the fruit starts to die as soon as it leaves the tree - and that, I think, is the key. Every piece of fruit Ned handles, no matter how "fresh", is technically "dead". So when he touches it, he "brings it back to life". It is the "revived" fruit that undergoes the cooking process, which helps preserve it. When Ned touches it again, he "kills" it and that's what makes it return to the state it would have been in had it simply dropped off the tree and rotted in the field. Ned may "revive" some fruit that is starting to "turn" in the ordinary course of his business, but I doubt he's
buying rotten fruit and fixing it all. Somebody would notice and report it, and there simply have to be times when Olive is the one who accepts the fruit deliveries.
"Refreshing" fruit may be a side effect of Ned's power that has no analog with creatures in the animal kingdom. Or maybe he can "unspoil" the chicken salad that's been in the sun too long at the company picnic, too.
(But even there we wouldn't expect him to be able to reconstitute a whole chicken, just as his refreshing an apple only refreshes the apple, not the tree it came from.)
I do think the show should
address the question, but I don't think it is an insoluable contradiction.
Regards,
Joe
