Pushing Daisies/Recap/S1 E8 Bitter Sweets

"Olive & Chuck: Don't mess with the Pie Hos!"

The Past
Ned makes a friend in a boy named Eugene who, unlike the voluntarily isolated Ned, is ostracized for being different. The friendship quickly meets an obstacle, however, when Ned accidentally revives a pile of dead leaves the pair play in one day.

The Present
Ned and Chuck decide to assign themselves the boyfriend/girlfriend label, leaving Olive too morose to notice that alternative medicine salesman Alfredo is still trying to woo her.

Meanwhile, brother and sister team Billy and Dilly Balsam open up a candy store across the street from the Pie Hole. Chuck and Olive are instantly defensive about the Pie Hole and its future. Ned, calmer, makes friendly overtures, but the Balsams soon make it clear that their intentions are anything but neighborly. It's not long before all-out war is raging between the two shops... and Ned's stoic pacifism looks more and more like conflict avoidance.

Tropes

 * Braces of Orthodontic Overkill: Sported by young Ned's friend.
 * Cargo Ship: The first murder is by a man who loves his life-sized doll.
 * The Corpse Stops Here: How Ned ends up implicated in Billy's murder.
 * Disproportionate Retribution: Since Dilly believes Ned killed Billy, she sees a murder in revenge for a ruined sign and a food inspector call as this.
 * First Snow: Averted; the snowstorm that hits at the end leaches all of the show's signature color out of the atmosphere and signals a dramatic shift in tone towards the serious.
 * For Want of a Nail: Olive at one points states that an alternate universe where love was always requited would be nice, but something else would probably suck.
 * Fur and Loathing: The The Birds reference has Dilly in a fur coat.
 * Institutional Apparel
 * Jail Bake: Olive bakes a pistol into a pie for Ned. He turns it down.
 * Mistaken for Murderer: Ned for Billy.
 * No Good Deed Goes Unpunished: Ned only ends up as a suspect in Billy's murder because he goes to the candy shop to remove Chuck and Olive's rats.
 * Shout-Out - to Alfred Hitchcock's The Birds.
 * Verbal Tic: Dilly (deliberately) stutters when she's upset.
 * Wham! Line: Ned confesses to having killed Charles Charles.