What in the World Was "James and Super E.D."?

Well, I'm pretty certain you know the story, but if you don't, let me recap. One rainy day, James is sent away to work at a coal plant to his disdain. The coal dust mixed with rain would get his paint dirty, which would take the yardmen two days to clean up, which James didn't like because he hated being washed...for some reason. But as he's working, BOOM! The coal plant is struck by lightning and fries the system, lifting up a coal truck before James is uncoupled and spilling coal all over the guy. So James is out of commission, so Sir Topham Hatt decides to bring in a new engine. Say hello to E.D., a technologically advanced electro-diesel engine...at first. He starts off really rough and not fast, but before he knows it, BOOM! He gets struck by lightning and...you're not gonna believe this...he becomes superpowered. Even the script doesn't know how to explain it, as it reads "For some reason, the electric shock from the lightning had converted E.D. into Super E.D.!". This is real. Sir Topham Hatt is so impressed that he decides to give Super E.D. a whirl at the express, which he does extremely well. As a result of this, Super E.D. starts to get a big head, causing the other engines to despise him. But here's the kicker, the other engines blame James for this because his accident was the grounds for Super E.D. joining the railway and they don't let him into the sheds...okay. The next day, Super E.D. and Gordon are sat at Knapford when...there will be dramatic turns in the story from this point. You ready? Good. Because...THIRD BOOM! Lightning hits Gordon, which richochets from his buffer onto Super E.D. He starts coughing up black smoke, and when Sir Topham Hatt takes notice, he demands that the engine causing the smoke be scrapped, not knowing it was Super E.D., and that was the last we ever see of him, Gordon is praised for it and James is let back into the sheds. Yep. You saw that right. Super E.D. is dead and Gordon gets praised for killing him. What I find so funny about this is that Sir Topham Hatt doesn't know what engine it is. For all he knew, he could've killed Thomas, or Henry, or even James. He just went in with a "shoot now, ask questions later" mindset, and I gotta respect that.

...what the hell was that? I remember showing this to my friend and his first reaction was "no wonder Britt threw it out, this sounds like bad fanfiction". And honestly, he couldn't have put it better. This script is so...fascinating. The fact that E.D. just randomly gets superpowers because of lightning like he's in that one Family Guy episode (imagine that, Super E.D.'s power being turning every engine into Robin Williams), the fact that James is just randomly shunned, lightning being the biggest "deus ex machina" of the episode, or the fact that this episode contains a brutal on-screen death of an engine. It's so terrible, yet I can't look away. It's like watching a trainwreck in slow-motion. It's a little ironic that Britt questioned this episode's believability while also working on Thomas and the Magic Railroad, but who am I to question that? But the question is, now that Thomas has seen an era where realism has been thrown out the window, could this episode be made today? Um...no? Okay, Super E.D. getting superpowers could be plausible in the BWBA era since we did get an episode with a flying car, but the randomness of the lightning and Super E.D.'s death? I don't think that would fly. And here, we close the book on James and Super E.D., a truly baffling chapter in Season 5's history.