ThomasNATION Classic Reviews - The Afternoon Tea Express

July 02, 2022

Stephen is a jolly old engine with a positive attitude and a good sense of humour, he is a good-hearted and quick-witted engine and will not take any nonsense from engines like Spencer or Diesel while some of the smaller engines look up to him for advice and he is always willing to get the job done.  In his early days, Stephen was so fast that they called him 'The Rocket'. And when people hear that Stephen is out and about, they always want to see him. But although Stephen is still known as The Rocket, he's not actually that fast anymore-in fact these days, he's one of the slowest engines on Sir Topham Hatt's railway which can be a problem for some of the other engines. So, it looks like more than tea will be spilled when Stephen has been given a special job to do once a week by the order of Sir Robert Norramby himself to collect ingredients that will turn him into 'The Afternoon Tea Express'!

THE AFTERNOON TEA EXPRESS: Stephen is given the job of collecting ingredients for the afternoon teas at Ulfstead Castle, but Spencer teases him about his speed.

To be honest, I find this very underrated since there are many people saying that 'Stephen's out of character, it's unrealistic, etc' and yeah, although I do believe that it's unrealistic, I'm letting it slide since there's bound to be some rule-bending in Thomas nowadays to make the episode a bit more entertaining. Case in point, look at Season 5 with its over the top crashes!  I think the episode could've trimmed down the narration a bit as there was so much of the narrator telling us what we see visually: we know that Stephen is old and we know that Stephen is slow but at the same time, there might be some visually impaired children who watch the show and rely on the depth of narration to have something that explains what's going on. While I understand other people's frustrations with the episode itself, that's just the feeling I get when I watch this episode or any episode with the fattening of narration so that's why I'm not going to too harsh towards it-not to mention that this episode made me realize that although Thomas was based around on railway accuracy, this wasn't by a member of the Awdry family anymore and it hadn't been since 2011 after Christopher wrote the last Railway Series book 'Thomas And His Friends'!
But as for Stephen being "out of character", I've watched the episode and I honestly have to disagree. Since he's The Rocket and he was built for races in the television series and "King of the Railway", I do like how it implies its moral that speed isn't everything, a lesson we haven't heard since 'Thomas the Jet Engine'. But I do understand the error of using the black funnel as his crest is missing from his tender thus this is his "King of the Railway" render. I also like that they mentioned his crew putting on the brakes, it seems they were slowly bringing the crew's interactions towards the engines and I hoped they would bring that back one day in the series.  Yes, engines being on the same track would never happen in real life especially since an engine like The Rocket would never be allowed on a main line in the modern age due to its speed limit. But story comes first and you need something that would work for a character that would later become something conflicting in order for them to learn a lesson.
In the end, I don't really see 'The Afternoon Tea Express' as a Sharon Miller script because the 'three strikes' formula would've dragged out the whole episode if it were one along with pointless rhyming and alliteration, poor character development, morals that'll be ignored the next season or episode, etc. especially since the 'three strikes' in this episode with Stephen being pushed by Thomas as well as James and Emily were over in about ten seconds and then we near the conclusion of the episode.  While this is not the usual five-minute stories from the Classic Series, the show goes about eight minutes now so things like that have to fill the gap thus I see this as a very underrated episode. The episode itself wasn't too bad, it was simple but at the same time not too memorable since I would say that there are some traits of the 'Miller/Barlow' era in this episode such as barrels of jam at the docks and then a spare just in case if another engine messes up the first order but I'm glad that had been toned down to the point it doesn't exist anymore, thus I'm giving 'The Afternoon Tea Express' a 3.5 out of 5 rating.

Final Rating: 3.5/5

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