Review

Culture

Film & TV

9 August 2024

7 min read

Help for the Heelers

The benevolent butterfly effect in Bluey’s season finale.

From Mockingbird

Mockingbird connects the Christian faith with the realities of everyday life.

A cartoon dog family stand in their kitchen

Bluey and family.

Ludo Studio.

Written by Bryan J. This article first appeared in Mockingbird, 23 April 2024. By kind permission.

“Daddy, there’s no God in Bluey’s world, is there?” No joke, my precocious four-year-old PK [Pastor’s Kid] son asked me this question after watching the new Bluey season finale, titled “The Sign.” It’s a deep question, one that comes from a place of honest curiosity — “The Sign” is, without a doubt, one of the most spiritually significant episodes of a series that is known to offer big questions to little kids. The Heeler family is presented with a life-changing decision with no guarantee of a happy ending, and the whole of the episode features the family wrestling the unknown of the future. The fact that my son could pick up on the high stakes of the episode, the philosophical questions about the goodness of providence, and the impossibility of knowing whether the future was bright or not … let’s just say it justifies the tears that come every time I watch the episode with him.

Which is five times now. I have watched the finale five times and wept every time. Isn’t this show made for preschoolers?

“The Sign” reveals a family in transition. After offering a number of hints earlier in the season, we discover that the Heeler family dad, Bandit, has accepted a job offer that pays a lot more money, but will require him to move. Chili (aka Mum) agrees with the choice to move and take the new job, but she has sincere concerns about leaving family, friends, neighbors, city, and a beloved house behind. Bluey, of course, has trouble coming to terms with the idea, as any preschooler would, and Bingo remains blissfully ignorant of the big changes coming her way. The preparations to move coincide with preparations for Uncle Rad’s marriage to family friend (and Bluey’s godmother) Frisky, with the family’s four preschool girls joining in as flower girls.

Big changes bring big questions, of course. Nowhere is this more evident than in Bluey’s preschool classroom. Calypso, the teacher, models a zen-like spirituality for Bluey and her friends. At the end of story time, Bluey asks her teacher “Why do stories always have happy endings?” Her teacher responds, “Well, I guess ’cause life will give us enough sad ones.” (Is this a kid’s show?) This inspires a host of sad stories from Bluey’s peers: a guinea pig that ran away, a divorce, a lonely dad. It’s now that Bluey announces her not-so-happy ending, telling her friends that she is moving. To help the class cope with their sadness, Calypso reads her students a parable of a farmer, who approaches all of life’s good luck and bad luck moments with the simple attitude of “we’ll see.” It’s a story without a happy ending (or without any ending, really), and the kids don’t buy it. “Is that it?” asks one, disappointed. “What happens next?” asks another. “Everything will work out the way it’s supposed to, Bluey” says Calypso with kindness, which Bluey takes to mean that their family house won’t sell (which it does, in the next scene).

Big questions also mean big feelings. An enraged and fearful Frisky, dismayed to discover her fiancé expects her to move out west where he works, runs away the morning of the wedding. Chili hops in the car, with four preschoolers in tow, to track her down. A series of events, which can be only described as providential, take place along the way. Chili, Bluey, Bingo, and cousins run into just the right person, spill juice cups at just the right moment, and make pit stops at the precisely needed spot, to find Frisky in quiet reflection at a local hilltop park. Groom-to-be Rad shows up, too. Frisky and Rad talk through their concerns and move on with the wedding, announcing there that they’ve chosen not to move west as planned. It’s a lovely wedding, with dancing and family and fun and a host of easter eggs for eagle-eyed viewers to enjoy. “You’re having a happy ending!” announces Bluey to her godmother, before turning to her mother and asking “Do you think we’ll have a happy ending too?” “I don’t know,” replies Chili, “But I’m done trying to figure it out. I just wanna dance.” Queue the happy dance montage.

Still, providence has not finished working with the Heelers. On moving day, a whole host of minor events from previous episodes collide to cancel the sale of the Heeler’s beloved house. It’s hard to describe every little flap of the butterfly’s wing that impacted this outcome — a combination of stuck coins, romantic encounters at the drugstore, inchworms saved from being squished on the slip-and-slide, and overzealous real estate agents all played their part. In a moving montage, Bandit takes the call about the canceled sale of the home, changes his mind about the new job, symbolically rips the for-sale sign out of his front yard, and is tackled by a loving family who realize they don’t have to move anymore. The family sits on boxes in their empty kitchen floor eating takeout cheeseburgers, relieved of the anxiety of moving, while the show rolls to credits. The song playing in the background is called “Lazarus Drug,” sung by the same voice actor who plays preschool teacher Calypso. It’s a song about love drawing someone back to life, perhaps a nod to the love of Bandit’s family drawing him back to the reality that they may already have a great life, and money wouldn’t make it any better. The Heelers get their happy ending, too.

The Greeks were the first to use the storytelling tool we know by its Latin name: deus ex machina, God from the machine. In Greek drama, at the climax of a seemingly unsolvable problem, a machine (usually a trap door or crane) would lift or lower an actor onto the stage portraying one of the gods of the Greek pantheon. These gods would step in and provide a solution to a drama’s seemingly unsolvable and complex problem. Nowadays, the term is derisive, an insult that implies lazy writing or poor storytelling. At the time, however, the audience loved these deus ex machina solutions. At the risk of psychoanalyzing the past, one imagines they would have been quite happy to imagine that the Gods cared enough in the affairs of humans to intervene for a happy ending.

Deus ex machina is a criticism that can be leveled at this season finale. After all the adults tell the precocious preschooler that life gives out happy and sad endings, we are not given any sad endings. The only way to navigate change, according to the wisdom of the world, is sit back, embrace a sort of desireless “zen” regarding the future, and say “we’ll see,” but everyone nonetheless gets a happy ending. After bending over backwards to lay out how the future is fickle and unknowable, the show still insists on showing how everything lined up just perfectly for Bluey’s “prayers” to be answered. It’s not just her either. Aunt Brandy’s desire for a child comes to fulfillment, after we are told numerous times that it is not meant to be (S3E31). Winton’s divorced and depressed father meets the mother of the terrier triplets (S3E45), and the two come together and form a new family. The shaggy hair dogs get their house with a pool. Everything works out just fine. Despite the look of a Greek tragedy, in which everything ends poorly for the protagonists, things end up turning out fine, just like every Greek comedy. Or, to put it in Elizabethan terms, what starts out like Hamlet becomes A Mid-Summer Night’s Dream.

In Bluey’s world, the happy endings are real. The parents always muster enough energy to play with their kids. The right parenting lesson is always on hand, and handed down with pithy aphorisms. Hurt feelings are acknowledged and reconciled with emotionally intelligent strategies. The love shown between friendships and family members is realistic and optimistic. Moreover, in this square dog world of Brisbane, Australia, when parents and grandparents are at the end of their ropes, providence steps in to help guide the way. Happy endings are not so much earned in Bluey’s world as they are a given, or perhaps gifted, sometimes by tired and exhausted parents, but also, by an unseen benevolence watching over them. What is grace, after all, if not an unexpected happy ending?

So how did I respond to my son’s question? “Yes,” I told him, “there is a God in Bluey’s world. Who do you think made all those happy endings come true?” It’s not an answer I should have come up with so quickly. I’m not usually one to offer a succinct one-liner that sums up decades of media study and theology in a bite sized nugget for my four-year-old. Perhaps, instead, it was providence that gave the answer for me.

Explainer

Attention

Care

Culture

Psychology

7 November 2025

5 min read

How to help someone with ADHD to live well

Overstimulation, inner critics, and the quiet power that restores balance

Henna Cundill

Henna is a researcher with the Centre for Autism and Theology at the University of Aberdeen.

An emoji-style brain divided in two with active emojis one side and calm ones the other.

Nick Jones/Midjourney.ai.

This week’s headlines about ADHD in the UK paint a troubling picture. NHS England commissioned an ADHD Taskforce which has warned that waiting lists for assessment and support are “unacceptably long”, with services buckling under the pressure of rising demand. In some areas, including Coventry and Warwickshire, NHS boards have even paused new adult referrals to prioritise children. Charities are already preparing legal challenges.

Among the Taskforce’s key recommendations is a call for general practitioners to take on a bigger role. Rather than referring every suspected case to specialist services, GPs are to receive training to recognise and manage ADHD within primary care – a shift intended to relieve the enormous strain on the system. But this raises a human question as well as a policy one: while people wait (often for months or even years) what can families and friends do to help? And might some of these strategies reduce the need for crisis-level specialist support in the first place?

Around five per cent of the population is thought to have ADHD, though the true figure may be higher. Rising diagnosis rates have prompted some scepticism: are we simply getting better at recognising the condition, or is something new happening in our overstimulated modern world?

Psychiatrists Edward Hallowell and John Ratey suggest that many of us now live in an attention environment that mimics ADHD. They call this phenomenon VAST: Variable Attention Stimulus Trait. VAST is not a disorder, and it is not “ADHD lite”; rather, it’s a product of neuroplasticity, i.e., the brain’s capacity to adapt to its environment. ADHD, by contrast, is neurodevelopmental – it is part of how a person’s brain is wired from the start. ADHD can’t be “undone” – nor would many want it to be. ADHD is a way of being that entails many strengths as well as struggles, as I have written about before. But where there are struggles, both ADHD and VAST respond to similar strategies for living well.

Hallowell and Ratey describe the brain as operating through a set of overlapping neural networks. Two of these, the Task Positive Network and the Default Mode Network, play a key role in attention and focus. The Task Positive Network switches on when we’re engaged in a clear, structured activity: writing an email, cooking dinner, solving a problem. When it’s active, we’re absorbed and unselfconscious. The Default Mode Network, by contrast, takes over when we’re not focused on a specific task. It’s the realm of daydreaming, reflection, and big-picture thinking – reviewing what we’ve done, imagining what comes next.

For most people, the brain glides between these two states smoothly. But in today’s hyperconnected, screen-saturated culture, many of us – especially those with VAST – flicker between them too quickly, never giving our Default Mode Network enough time to process what has just happened. The result is stress, restlessness, and mental exhaustion.

In ADHD, though, the problem is different and deeper. Brain scans suggest that both networks may be running simultaneously, and the Default Mode Network in particular has a knack for interrupting. Imagine trying to finish a task while a running commentary in your head constantly questions its worth, urgency, or achievability. That’s the ADHD experience: the Default Mode’s chatter makes tasks hard both to start and to finish.

But the Default Mode Network isn’t all bad. It can be a source of creativity, moral reflection, and meaning. It’s the voice that tells you a task matters, that something is worth your effort. Hallowell and Ratey liken it to the classic “angel and devil” on your shoulders – but the devil often shouts louder. That’s partly because the human brain is wired to prioritise threat. We remember criticism more vividly than praise, and replay social embarrassments more easily than successes. For people with ADHD, this negativity bias can be overwhelming. As Hallowell and Ratey put it:

“People who have ADHD or VAST are particularly prone to head towards gloom and doom in their minds because they have stored up in their memory banks a lifetime of failure, disappointment, shame, and frustration. Life has taught them to expect the worst.”

This relentless inner critic drives many ADHDers to self-soothe – ideally through human connection, but too often through less healthy means: food, alcohol, drugs, or risky behaviours. Statistically, people with ADHD are ten times more likely to develop an addiction, and their average lifespan is at least 13 years shorter than that of the general population.

So how can friends and family help? Is there a way to interrupt the drive to self-medicate in self-destructive ways? The answer, remarkably, is so ancient and simple as to almost seem facile: it is love.

When the Default Mode Network first hits upon a negative self-judgement, its instinct is to reach outward – to seek comfort and belonging. If connection is unavailable, the “devil voice” finds substitutes in addictive or numbing behaviours. But when real, safe relationships are present, they act as a protective buffer. Studies show that people with ADHD who experience strong, consistent love from partners, friends and family have lower addiction rates, better health, and longer lives.

Of course, loving someone with ADHD can sometimes demand extra patience. Your ADHD friend or family member is likely to be the most creative, empathetic, and generous person you know, yet also the one who forgets your birthday, arrives late, or leaves your message unanswered. None of this is intentional neglect; it is the Default Mode’s interference – the whisper that says, “They probably don’t like me that much anyway.” Understanding this dynamic transforms frustration into compassion. It helps us see that behind the missed text is someone fighting an invisible cognitive tug-of-war – a loved one who needs reassurance, not reprimand.

Even for those without ADHD, our era of constant notifications and information overload is training our brains toward VAST-like patterns. We’re pulled between self-judgment and self-justification, between doing and ruminating, with little space for rest. Learning to quiet the inner critic and nurture connection is good for all of us.

When we tune into the gentler side of our Default Mode Network – the voice that says “You are valuable to the people around you” – mistakes lose their sting, and perfection ceases to be the price of self-worth.

The NHS may take years to fully resolve its ADHD backlog. But in the meantime, there is meaningful work that families, friends, and communities can do. We can offer the connection that helps quiet the inner storm by being the person who reaches out, forgives the lateness, and replies with warmth even when the other couldn’t.

This may not shorten the waiting list, but it could lengthen lives. For the millions with ADHD, and the millions more living with VAST, love is not a sentimental afterthought – it is the neurological antidote to despair.

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