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.

Review

Community

Culture

Film & TV

Monsters

28 October 2025

7 min read

I came for the demon-fighting pop stars and stayed for the existential crisis

A Netflix kids’ film made me rethink shame, friendship, and my Spotify algorithm

Harry Gibbins

Harry Gibbins is a doctoral researcher at the University of Aberdeen. His PhD concerns the intersection between autism and Christian ministry.

K-Popm Demon Hunters lean forward wielding weapons

Rumi and friends.

Netflix.

I am not the target demographic for the hit film K-Pop Demon Hunters. My knowledge of K-pop is incredibly limited, and I’m pretty apathetic about musicals. In fact, my only real encounter with K-pop was as a youth worker, where I distinctly remember its first ‘wave.’ Suddenly, groups of mostly teenage girls were eager to tell me all about BTS, a boy band that rose to popularity the late 2010s. Their dancing was impeccably choreographed, their lyrics a mix of English and Korean; for as much as it wasn’t my thing, I got the appeal. International media finding a place within the British zeitgeist has happened before. I’m of the generation where Pokémon did an excellent job of distracting me from learning my times tables. Yet, the seven very handsome boys that made up BTS seemed to cast a spell over my young people like I’d never seen.

Flash forward seven years. Much has changed. A global pandemic is in the rear-view mirror, and I’m trying to find my place in the north-east of Scotland. I’m sitting in the car trying to simply transport my two wonderful daughters from Point A to Point B. Many parents will know of the strange hypnotic effects of children’s songs in the car. A fifteen-year-old Harry would be mortified to know that Metallica no longer feature in the top spots of my Spotify most-played artists. Now, upon that throne sits an assortment of Disney Princesses, and they rule with an iron fist. Today is different, however. “What do you want on today?” I ask, ready for that day’s third rendition of ‘Let it Go.’ “K-Bop Bear Hunters”, replies my youngest eagerly.

Here, my daughter is trying her best to remember the name of a song she’s heard at gym class. I work it out eventually, K-Pop Demon Hunters, amused by the swapping out of ‘Demon’ for ‘Bear.’ My wife puts it on, and to my pleasant surprise, the songs are like a breath of fresh air. I read a bit about K-Pop Demon Hunters, working out that it’s an animated film on Netflix, and I get the general gist. However, I’m surprised to hear that it’s recently become the streamer’s most-watched film ever. My wife and I decide to watch it together that night, and I’m blown away. I’m seriously not the target demographic for this film, yet it has me completely hooked.

The film follows the three members of a K-pop girl group, Huntr/x (pronounced hun-tricks). We quickly learn that Rumi, Mira, and Zoey, use the power of music to fight off demons, many of which are based on real Korean mythology. Their singing empowers a magic barrier, the Honmoon, that keeps the demons at bay; yet, trouble emerges when a demonic boy band arrives seeking to stop Huntr/x and allow demons to take over the world. High jinks ensue, there are some cracking songs, and, of course, a surprise romantic subplot.

As the film ends, I find myself left with an unusual feeling. Ever since I was told as a boy that the big lion in Narnia was really Jesus, I’ve been intrigued by stories that tell me something of faith. Now, to be clear, I do not think the writers of K-Pop Demon Hunters set out to create a story about Christian faith; it would be very naïve and quite inappropriate to suggest a film so heavily inspired by Korean culture was actually about Western Christian values the whole time. However, I am still personally challenged by the themes it brings up, especially considering the film’s emphasis on belonging, togetherness, and authenticity.

‘What It Sounds Like’

Rumi, our protagonist for this story, hides a secret, a secret which propels the events of the film. It is established early on that you can tell a demon in disguise by the intricate patterns on their arms; sharp tattoo-like symbols that resemble lightning bolts coursing across their bodies. As Rumi gets to the bridge of the song ‘Golden,’ we see her looking at herself in the mirror. The sleeves of her jacket sloping off her shoulders to reveal that she too holds these patterns; Rumi is part demon. This all happens in the first few opening scenes of the film. The audience holds onto this secret alongside Rumi as she tries to hide these patterns from her bandmates. She believes that her job is important, crucial even. The Honmoon must be protected; the barrier to the demon world must be strong. However, Rumi’s secret becomes a thorn in her side, risking their mission. This was where I saw the potential of the story roll out in front of me. What started as a colourful, poppy, sickly-sweet kids film developed into a tale that demonstrates the power of friendship, community, and love. To try and illustrate this more clearly, I want to pick up on some of the lyrics from the song sung at the film’s climax, ‘What It Sounds Like,’ tracing Rumi’s journey as she deals with the secret she hides.

If ‘Golden’ was to set the stage, illustrating the juxtaposition between the song’s words and Rumi's insecurities, then ‘What It Sounds Like’ is the fulfilment of Rumi’s wish. Whilst Rumi originally sang of a duty that provided her strength, “cause we are hunters, voices strong and I know I believe,” now she recognises that she relies on her friends to go her through, “I don’t know why I didn’t trust you to be on my side.” The suspicion Rumi holds that her friend won’t understand the quite literal patterns she hides has only led to division; now, through the authenticity she has learnt to value, through the support of her friends who cast away their prejudices, a new reality is found where Rumi no longer holds shame for who she is.

I am not surprised at all to hear that queer writers have acknowledged the allegory for the shame many queer people hold around coming out. Needing to hide a part of herself, Rumi demonstrates the philosophical cornerstone that has caused this story to resonate with queer folk. This is most potent at the crescendo of ‘What It Sounds Like,’ where all three girls come together and sing as one, “why did I cover up the colours stuck inside my head? I should’ve let the jagged edges meet the light instead.” What I believe is demonstrated here is a rejection of the thin understanding that ‘Golden’ prioritised. Originally, these bandmates came together because of a responsibility that has been placed on them; demons are bad, get rid of them. Now, a more nuanced reality emerges. As the light spills out of them, meeting these “jagged edges” of life like a prism, the world no longer seems as black and white as they first believed. Rumi, being part demon, is not in conflict with their desire to love each other.

Carrying and caring

Fantasy writing does a good job of using a physical object to represent the philosophy of the story. The One Ring in The Lord of the Rings both represents the burden Frodo carries and is literally the burden he carries. K-Pop Demon Hunters takes a similar approach, just not physically. As Huntr/x sing of the scars they carry, of covering up things they thought would lead to discrimination, they acknowledge that they have “listened to the demons, we let them get between us.” The fight they have is with magical creatures from the underworld, yes. But these demons also represent the division between Rumi and those she cares about. However, this shame is rooted in reality; we see early on that Rumi’s friends probably wouldn’t understand her part-demon heritage. What is needed here isn’t for Rumi to simply rip the plaster off and be honest. The shame she feels might well be internal, but it is still projected upon her by the attitudes of others. Instead, as demonstrated by the lyrics, it is only through a genuine life-giving care for one another that these three friends can come together to conquer darkness.

To summarise, K-Pop Demon Hunters spoke more to me about the human experience of community, friendship, and togetherness than most so-called ‘grown-up’ films have ever managed. I am pleased that a film that, I imagine, my children will watch over and over again holds such a comforting message. Against a backdrop of children's media that only exists to empty my wallet, K-Pop Demon Hunters—against all my assumptions—truly demonstrates the artistic value of animated films. I look forward to the enviable barrage of sequels and copy-cats.

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