Season 22: Banjo and the Bushfire

For fuck sake... The end of the season is so close, yet it feels so far away thanks to episodes like this.

I’m getting sick to death of saying it, but it’s now reaching its nadir. People don’t come to this show to watch fucking nature documentaries! They come to watch locomotives have adventures! Leave the nature documentaries to the people who make them interesting!

The plot is also a mess. The main focuses of the episode (Banjo and the bushfire) last for a minute out of 7 (including the foreshadowing), then the rest just feels like a blatant PSA about cleaning up after yourself and protect all the animals. And as much as I love animals, the fact is it’s impossible to save them all.

Absolutely, they need to be saved from abuse, hunters and other things we can control. But you can’t exactly save koalas from being, from what I can tell, lazy bastards. We couldn’t save the dodo because it couldn’t adapt to survive its environment. We can’t save animals who are hunted for food either by other animals or humans who are desperate to survive. And that’s why nature documentaries are better than santitised bullshit like this. Nature documentaries showcase the harsh realities animals face. This is just saying “save all the animals... regardless of the circumstances.” Ironically, it’s just not realistic.

Also, Tamika is a thing. She’s just... there. I could find no character whatsoever with her. Like the park ranger, she’s either spouting exposition, telling Thomas off or congratulating him for saving the koala. As much as I love that the cast is more diverse, this is the problem with the franchise. There are far too many characters and very little time to give them all time and a personality. Mostly because Thomas hogs all the limelight (it’s called Thomas & Friends; it’s as much about them as it is him).

Final Thoughts

What a terrible way to end the international episodes. But, frankly, I expected nothing less at this point. The plot is a mess, the main conflict is introduced and resolved within a minute (maybe they should’ve focused on the difficulty of dealing with a bushfire? Then they could’ve taught kids about how dangerous fire can be? Then again, Fireman Sam did a whole film about something similar, and it was better) and the characters are, again, uninteresting.

When the only good thing about it was the fantasy sequence with crocodiles, you really need to re-evaluate where the show heads in the future, and how to handle the worldwide episodes better.

Rating: Atrocious (-9/10)