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.

Article

Books

Culture

Education

Wisdom

15 April 2025

5 min read

We need libraries: they expose our limitations

These physical monuments to our own ignorance instil knowledge and humility.

Jonathan Rowlands

Jonathan is a theology lecturer and Liverpool FC fan.

Children sit in a library listening to a story

Spellow library children's talk.

Children’s Commissioner for England.

On 19 July 2024, my wife, toddler, cat, and I moved back to our hometown of Liverpool. Ten days later, three children were killed and ten more were seriously injured following a mass stabbing at a children’s dance workshop in nearby Southport.

In the aftermath, amid widespread misinformation about the killer’s background, riots erupted across the country. With unrest intensifying, on 3 August rioters set fire to Spellow Library, less than two miles away from our new home. The apparent reason for the fire? It contained Qur’ans. Imagine that: books in a library! (There’s an all-too-easy joke about far-right thugs not understanding what libraries are that I’ll try to resist making here.)

Nothing the country witnessed in those riots matches the unspeakable horror that occurred within that dance studio in Southport. And yet, I found the library fire deeply unsettling. I hadn’t worked out why, until recently.

I’m a theology lecturer and work from home a lot. I’m often listening to music while replying to emails, planning lectures, or marking essays. Recently, however, I’ve been in a musical rut. My usual stuff feels stale and nothing new catches my attention. I mostly use streaming services, and this week it hit me: the platform is the problem.

Streaming platforms operate through search engines: I search for an artist, song, or album, and start listening. In other words, I have to know what I want to listen to before listening to it. Platforms might suggest new music, but this is invariably based on what I already like. It very rarely exposes me to anything outside my comfort zone.

In the build-up to the invasion of Iraq in 2003, then-U.S. Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld was asked about the mythical WMDs that served as the war’s McGuffin. His answer has gone down in political infamy:

“there are known knowns; there are things we know we know. We also know there are known unknowns; that is to say we know there are some things we do not know. But there are also unknown unknowns—the ones we don't know we don't know.”

When teaching students, I constantly stress the importance of ‘unknown unknowns’. Good education exposes us to things we don’t know that we don’t know. It gives us increasing awareness of our own ignorance. Streaming services greatly reduce the chances of finding music I don’t know that I don’t know. Instead, I listen to music I know I know, or music I know I don’t know.

I used to love trawling through music shops, pouring over the vast sea of artists I hasn’t even heard of, imagining my favourite album was buried amid the reams of CD cases. It saddens me that I can’t remember the last time I did that. Music shops are physical monuments to my own ignorance. When I see all the artists, all the albums – even the genres! – I haven’t even heard of, I’m unavoidably confronted with my own ignorance.

So, too, with libraries. How many times I’ve wandered the stacks of university libraries and thought “I didn’t even know there was a book about this topic!” when picking something off the shelves! And this is their value to students: they are physical monuments to their own ignorance. They instil a passion for knowledge, and a deeper sense of humility, as students are forced to grapple concretely with everything they don’t even know they don’t know.

(Incidentally, this is what I’ll tell my wife next time I buy another book I invariably won’t read. I can already imagine her response: “But my love, we have plenty of physical monuments to your ignorance at home already.”)

I found the destruction at Spellow Library so disquieting. It is a supremely, nihilistic act. It is to reject engaging with our ‘unknown unknowns.’

Like music streaming platforms, libraries are increasingly digital spaces. My primary experience of reading nowadays is to type something into a search bar. My reading – just like my music – is increasingly myopic; increasingly confined to the realm of ‘known unknowns’. But true humility is only fostered through engagement with the ‘unknown unknowns’ of our life. We need the physical monuments to our own ignorance. We ignore them – or, as the case may be, set fire to them – at our peril.

There is a significant spiritual element to this, and this is why I found the destruction at Spellow Library so disquieting. It is a supremely, nihilistic act. It is to reject engaging with our ‘unknown unknowns’; a fearful unwillingness to be confronted by our own ignorance.

In a famous graduation speech entitled “This is Water” writer David Foster Wallace encourages those present to think about the ‘water’ in which they swim. What is so ubiquitous in life that it goes unnoticed? We might call these ‘unknown knows’: things we simply take for granted. On a theological level, the physical nature of our existence is one such phenomena. That we exist somewhere and somewhen is not a given; both space and time are creatures, too.

And this ought to make us reflect: why are we made to be physical if we might not have been? The Bible is clear that this physicality is a gift. So much so that God Himself chooses to dwell amongst us in physical form. The Christian story is that, in Jesus Christ, God becomes human. The Christian Gospels go to great pains to stress his physicality. He eats, He sleeps, He cries, He bleeds. He reads from physical scrolls when in the synagogue.

That God-given physicality means I can surround myself with the depth and breadth of my own creaturely ignorance; with my ‘unknown unknowns’. To my shame, I don’t do this often enough, and my increasingly digital life makes this harder. I have become physically detached from my ‘unknown unknowns’.

And so, now Spellow Library is reopen, I am going to make a concerted effort to visit and support society’s physical monuments to my creaturely ignorance. They may make me uncomfortable as I am overwhelmed by the extent of my limitations, but they may also just make me humbler. And that is the real gift of our God-given physicality.

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