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.

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Tropes:

• Actor Allusion: When visiting Burly Bruce, Chuck's disguise consists of a black brim hat and green shades. Of course, many fans immediately pointed out her resemblance to Elphaba.
• Bait-and-Switch: Before they break into Balsam's Bittersweets to unleash some "inappropriate vermin", Olive asks Chuck if she has a credit card. Not because she knows how to pick a lock, but because she will need one to pay for the damages she is about to cause, before she breaks through the glass door.
• 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. invoked
• 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.
• 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.
  • Burly Bruce's plotline is pretty much a retelling of Lars and the Real Girl.
• Smoking Gun Control: Subverted. The perp gives clear, concise information that quickly leads to the killer. it's the SECOND murder, for a different reason, that's troublesome. The victim from that one also knows who killed him, but because he was drowned in a vat of taffy he's unable to coherently say the name before Ned touches him again.
• Special Guest: Molly Shannon as Dilly, and, to a lesser extent, Mike White as Billy.
• Verbal Tic: Dilly (deliberately) stutters when she's upset.
• Wham Line: Ned confesses to having killed Charles Charles.

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