THESE ARE MY OWN OPINIONS AND ARE NOT INFLUENCED FROM THE THOMAS & FRIENDS FANBASE
THE SMELLS OF SODOR
Craig Carlisle
Directed by
Campbell Bryer
Produced by
Suzie Gallo
Air Date
29/06/24 - CAN
19/09/24 - US
Plot
Thomas loses a boxcar of treats and he uses his sense of smell to find it.
And finally we are at the last episode of S3! But the episode was pretty mediocre for a finale not that the show needs something grand or spetacular but it's just about Thomas and Percy puffing around Sodor to find the dinosuar pancake van and that's it. There was conflict of the van being missing and all but it just feels weak. Its like if you take 'Not So Slow Coaches' from S18 you have Thomas chasing Annie and Clarabel from Caitlin's train but take out the comuppance that Thomas had to face which was almost loosing his coaches after not taking them seriously about their criticism of Thomas' cheekiness towards them. Like in the 'Smells of Sodor' episode, you have Toby shunting around quickly not paying attention and giving the van to James to take.
Why not have him trying to take the responsibility and go and find it with them since it was an important journey and learn not to rush around, at least there would be some character development or why not have Thomas opening the van's door three times to let his friends have a smell until it was all gone by the time he arrives at Vicarstown?
The song meanwhile, as usual, adds nothing to the story to fill in time. I said this many times but the songs don't need to be in every episode! Sure they are made just so Mattel can make a mandated album to sell digitally and promote on their social media pages instead of telling people about the show.
As I said, the episode was mediocre and could've been better. But at least it beats last season's finale where that episode just reinstated the old tour of Sodor and labelling it as brand new.
SERIES OVERALL
(Some mild swearing)
I'll be blunt, this season sucks. Season 2 felt like a small improvement over its first season that it made me have four personal favorite episodes and it introduced us a great character who is a represenitive towards people on the spectrum, Bruno. In comparison, Bruno only had one titular role and one secondary appearance this season and was barely in many of the episodes despite that S2 was kind of showing or implying that he was part of the main cast.
You think for a toy company that wants to have some representation that maybe they could put him in the main cast but then again this is the same company who ten years ago donated money to Autism Speaks for the sake of PR and didn't want to associate the Thomas brand to the Autistic Community after getting a request from a theme park for a sensory event, despite the fact that Thomas has an audience who are on the spectrum since research was made back in 2001.
For this season there had been two episodes that I'd liked which were 'Bruno's Blustery Day' and 'Night Lights'. For the former because of its inspiration by the writer himself and the latter because it used a character that was not part of the main cast and was offering something rare, variety. The rest of the episode apart from some decents ones were either bad, mediocre, forgettable, boring and bland.
I HATED 'Abraca-Diesel' with passion for its lack of conflict in the story and its crappy friendship song when there was nothing that makes it about friendship and that it feels like a forced moral because they had no idea what to tell in the story. You could at least have Diesel and Sandy fighting over who wants to be a magician instead of just nothing. Kids can get into arguments and fights over something trivial and childish so why not implement that? To me it was the worst episode of this season.
You might be reading this and say 'Get over your hate for AEG, it's been three years, it's just a kids show!' while you're still rattling on hating BWBA despite that is also a kids show and that iteration had been over for four years so that's pretty bad logic and hypocrisy, something that I cannot stand.
It just feels like for some people in this fandom and to people in the general audience, criticising a kids show is a bad thing because 'it's made for kids' which just makes me think that you don't care about quality for children and just want them to sit through mediocrity while plenty of people have criticised other kids movies and shows over the years towards the likes of Pixar with 'Cars' or Disney with 'Wish'. If you care about quality and see that it is lacking, then speak out because if you just sit on the sidelines and just letting it be you're just being in favour of mediocrity. Just because something is made for kids doesn't mean that lack of quality and no criticism should get a pass, hell the Thomas Creator Collective series was critcised for its content eight years, and to be honest I don't think it'd aged well, and they made that 'it's for kids' excuse.
Also I've seen a few people trying to play 'gotcha' over the whole thing of railway realism. While I had always said that railway realism had been thrown out of the window since the original series' 5th season it's sometimes nice that railway realism has a little play in some episodes but it was never done as a way of respecting this world of trains running on a real railway system like what the Rev.W.Awdry himself had created because the realism was only there for plot purposes only. So yes it's great that James can't actually push a tree aside in the Farmers Market episode of the show but it was only done so James can get lost when making a shortcut to get to the farmers market. Sure it's easy for James to jump over the tree, regardless of the passengers because its fueled by cartoon logic, but then you don't have a story but even so the realisim would be contridicted anyway because later on in the episode the other engines jump over a bridge with their vans of things from the market and the Fat Controller inside.
So the whole 'gotcha' thing is just really shallow as the one second of realisim is just meaningless afterwards. BWBA has more realism than this show and even then some of its moments are unrealistic as hell!
We are just five months away to the start of the 80th anniversary year and despite that there are plans I am not putting any high expectations towards it since so far this year, Mattel has done horrible marketing towards the show and the brand. Look on their instagram page alone there had only been, as writing this in July, FIVE posts so far during this whole year, the last post was from June promoting some pretty pricy children pajamas from The Sleepy Sloth and not one thing about the show or the Christmas special that Corus annonced back in February. To me this just feels like Mattel doesn't care at all about this brand that they'd bought back in 2011.
This is why I feel that there'll bad marketing for the 80th anniversary year because they are showing no sign of care or awareness and not helping the brand to have great toy sales despite having a whole brand new marketing team four years prior to solve that mess. Now let's compare their marketing to the Japanese instragram page which not only promote toys that they want to sell to people or events that they want people to attend, but they also tell their followers, which is about 16k compare to Mattel's 106k followers, about upcoming episodes on NHK.
How hard is it for Mattel to tell their 106k followers about the show? They have more followers than the Japanese page and the latter is doing a much better job at marketing which furthers my belief that Sony Creative Products would and should be a better owner of the Thomas brand not only for their great commitment to market Thomas on a daily basis on Instagram but they also respect the past iteration of the show, prior to AEG they'd made products of the model era, when the CG era of the show was dominant, giving it much better accessability last decade, with them being released on DVD, streaming and on Cartoon Network, compare to Mattel's handling and I'm betting on for sure that SCP would be doing something better for the Railway Series' 80th since they'd carried the weight on their shoulders for the 75th back in 2020, even if it means AEG merch.
One positive thing about this season is that it's just 26 episodes like the original series and it's better than having 52 like the last two seasons and I hope the fourth season is like that as well. But I have very, very strong doubts that S4 would be any better.
Anyway, now with S3 out of the way the only thing left is the upcoming Christmas special that'll be coming out in a few months so watch out for that when it's released.
Series Rating:
What's the Buzz - 4.5/10
Bells are Ringing - 4/10
Abraca-Diesel - 2/10
Overcommitted - 2.5/10
Sandy's Fine Mess - 4/10
Nia's Green Surprise - 3/10
Duck Duck Whoosh! - 1/10
Choo-Choo Check In - 5/10
Percy's Little Problem - 3/10
Fill-In Friend - 4/10
Cake It Easy - 1/10
The Can-Do Crew - 6/10
Pizza Picnic Problem - 3/10
Travels With Terence - 2/10
Crab Crossing - 1/10
Driving Winston - 6/10
The Slowest Race in the World - 2/10
Bruno's Blustery Day - 9/10
Night Lights - 7/10
For Love or Muddy - 1/10
Percy's Duck Dilemma - 4/10
All for the Nest - 3/10
Winter Games - 1/10
The Accidental Bad Guy - 6/10
Farmer's Market...on Wheels! - 6/10
The Smells of Sodor - 3/10
Overall Rating (So far):
93/250
93/250