ThomasNATION Reviews - Whistle Woes
September 02, 2023
I think we can all agree that the lazy writing is undeniably the killing factor of the entire Nitrogen Era for Thomas & Friends since most of these episodes feel like they were written by the same person...well, they were, but you get the point. It's a shame the writing was so terrible during this time because everything else seemed to be at the tippity-top of their game: the animation was pretty great, the new voice actors were doing a bang-up job, Robert Hartshorne pumped out a fantasric score and the marketing team were paying dividends. Knowing just how good all these other elements were just makes me dislike this whole era even more. It was an era where practically nobody could win, and nowhere was this disappointment among the most die-hard of Thomas fans any more obvious than in the one universally panned episode that every fan young or old hates: Season 15's 'Wonky Whistle. I mean, 'Wonky Whistle' is everything that fans of Thomas the Tank Engine hate about the Nitrogen Era and so much more: alliterative speaking, forced rhyming, characters being dumbed down, railway safety being thrown out the window, the dreaded 'three strikes, you're out' formula, the list goes on and on and on. It's honestly debatable if the writer had even seen a Thomas episode prior to that.
But despite 'Wonky Whistle' being the one episode that every other Thomas episode wishes it wasn't, the original show staff did eventually figure out how to write this story correctly after two more tries using the other two mains of the original series with James in Season 16's 'Muddy Matters' and finally Percy in Season 19's 'Very Important Sheep' which was the best out of the trilogy. Sadly though, the original Thomas & Friends series came to an end and All Engines Go took it place, and in keeping with this reboot's trend of diet rehashes of the original series, it was only a matter of time before it would eventually get to 'the episode that shall not be named'. However, this shouldn't matter for someone like me as long as they can do something new with this concept and possibly improve on it and the answer to that question and shockingly to my surprise is not only did they do something new and improve on the concept, but they also made this story now feel like it could have possibly worked out in the Model Series of Thomas & Friends rather it be during the seven seasons of the Classic Series or even the five model seasons of the Hit Era.
Not only that, but the moral of how you can still be yourself even if you're not feeling a hundred percent as shown when Thomas rescues a runaway Troublesome Truck from smashing into Percy and going overboard at Quickdraw Bridge was an awesome experience...but apart from questioning why Thomas couldn't just blast the stone out of his whistle, does Percy really have to come up with names for those among the shipping community in the fandom?
So yeah, 'Whistle Woes' - an episode that I thought was gonna be the new version of 'Wonky Whistle' managed to blow that disgrace of an episode out of the water and sky high and it's one that I am definitely gonna be coming back to in the future thus I'm giving it a rating of a 3.5 out of 5.
Final Rating: 3.5/5
About the Author: True Blue
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