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

Culture

Migration

Politics

5 September 2025

6 min read

It's 2029 and PM Farage has reformed asylum

Are refugees really no longer deserving of our protection?

Steve Dew-Jones

Steve is news director of Article 18, a human rights organisation documenting Christian persecution in Iran.

Nigel Farage stands and gestures in front of a flag.

Reform.

The year is 2029 and Nigel Farage has just been elected as the new prime minister of the United Kingdom.

As one of many sweeping reforms in his first few months in office, the new PM has deported thousands of asylum-seekers to countries including Eritrea, Afghanistan and Iran.

Upon return to these countries, it has been reported that several of these asylum-seekers have faced arrest, torture, and even execution.

Now of course this is only a fictional depiction of one possible future, but it is a future that would appear at least conceivable, given recent polling and the pledge of the Reform party leader to deport every individual who travels illegally to these shores, whether or not they may face a risk to life upon their return home.

Such statements would have been almost universally lambasted not so many years ago, but the current status of our immigration system - and politics - has seemingly rendered them palatable to a growing number of Brits.

“I don't think it's about hate,” said one caller to BBC Radio 5 Live when Reform’s plans were announced last week. “I think it's about the way [immigration’s] been handled up to now by this government and the previous government, [which has] created a lot of unease.”

Another caller admitted the issue had divided opinion, but provided a contrasting perspective:

“This is Nigel Farage all over,” she said. “It's what he's done since before Brexit. What does he need to win in this country? He needs division. And what's the most divisive issue we can come up with? Immigration. And what a privilege we have to live in a safe country where, God forbid, none of us will ever have to pick our children up and flee persecution!”

All of which brings us nicely back to the particular - and certainly complex - issue at hand: namely, what should be our response to those asylum-seekers who have genuinely fled from persecution and may face more of it should they be returned home?

The safeguarding of such individuals is at the very heart of the 1951 Refugee Convention, which all Western democracies (including ours) have ratified and long defended, and which includes the principle of “non-refoulement”: prohibiting "the forcible return of refugees or asylum-seekers to a country where they are liable to be subjected to persecution”.

“Our values have always been that where people are under a real and substantial risk of physical torture or persecution … then we as a country have always been prepared to have them,” former head of the judiciary Lord Thomas explained on another BBC Radio show last week. “I don’t think we should abrogate values embodied in the convention … because that’s part and parcel of our history and our tradition and our standing as a liberal democracy.”

And yet, as Lord Thomas’s interviewer correctly pointed out, this is precisely what Reform are pledging to do, should they come to power.

Indeed, an increasing number of politicians here and elsewhere now argue that the Refugee Convention and other similar treaties, such as the European Convention on Human Rights, must be reformed - or even ignored - in light of a much-changed world.

We are not the only country facing an immigration crisis, of course; nor are we the first to consider drastic measures to stem the tide of asylum-seekers arriving on our shores.

In his own first few months back in office, the US president, Donald Trump, made good on his own pledge to tighten up America’s borders by, among other things, deporting illegal immigrants.

Among them were several Iranians who claimed to have a reasonable fear of persecution should they be returned home, given their expressed conversions to Christianity.

In May, a US congresswoman proposed that legislation should be amended to protect such religious refugees from deportation, naming her bill, the Artemis Act, after one of the Iranians who had been deported to Panama.

In June, the issue returned to the headlines when another Iranian asylum-seeker was filmed having a panic attack as her husband and fellow Christian convert was taken away by the US’s immigration enforcement agency, ICE.

In July, the couple’s pastor - another Iranian Christian who had arrived in the United States as a refugee some years ago - travelled to the White House to conduct a three-day hunger strike in protest against the detention of his church members.

And in August, in an interview with the director of the advocacy organisation for which I work, the pastor called for “deep reforms” to the immigration system, saying that “most [Iranian Christian asylum-seekers in the US] tried many times to come through a legal way, like a refugee pathway, but there is no legal way for Iranians to become refugees in the United States.”

“If you were in the UK, and you had nothing to feed your children or grandchildren, what would you do?”

A legal pathway for religious refugees is also something that has been called for in the UK, including by the frontrunner to be the next leader of the Church of England - another Iranian former refugee, Bishop Guli Francis-Dehqani.

So the need to reform the asylum system here and elsewhere is something that would appear to be agreed upon by all sides in the debate.

Reporting on the plight of refugees was not something that was considered part of my remit when I first joined Article18 midway through Trump’s first term in office. Back then, our focus was only on documenting the persecution Christians were (and still are) enduring in their homeland.

But as the years have passed and the numbers of Iranian Christians seeking asylum have grown while the opportunities for them to be resettled have drastically shrunk, the issue has become an increasing and ultimately un-ignorable concern.

In the last two years alone, my organisation has released reports on the plight of Iranian Christian refugees in Turkey, Georgia and, closer to home, Sweden, while concerns have also been raised about Iranian Christian refugees in several other countries, including Armenia, Iraq and Indonesia.

In each of these countries, as in Blighty, the common denominator appears to be simply that these refugees - however worthy their claims may be - are unwanted and untrusted by their hosts.

During my research, I came across a refugee support group in Colchester, Refugee, Asylum Seeker & Migrant Action (RAMA), whose director, Maria Wilby, I had the privilege of interviewing, and whose perspective has stayed with me.

Ms Wilby picked me up on a comment I had made, when I suggested that “one could understand why people may feel less sympathy for economic migrants, but surely not refugees”.

Her response was not dissimilar to the words of the second caller to 5 Live:

“If you were in the UK, and you had nothing to feed your children or grandchildren, what would you do?” she asked. “You’d go to the next country and ask them to feed them. And that’s what it means to be an economic migrant. It’s not about, ‘Oh, I’ve got a nice car, but I want a nicer car.’ These are people who are literally starving, and feel so disadvantaged that they think the next generation will also be equally disadvantaged. And of course then you try and move.

“And back in the day, it used to be that if you had a child in another country, they would basically be a native of that country. We’ve changed the rules to mean that migration and borders grow and grow. And actually, we’ve created this system – all of us have created this system by standing by and letting it happen – and it’s not right. If I believed in God, God certainly didn’t intend there to be borders. Nobody would. Why would you? It’s an unnatural concept. We are one world, and we should share it.”

I’m not sure Nigel Farage would agree, but whatever one’s perspective on the need for border control, surely we should all be able to agree that those with genuine claims to have fled persecution should be afforded our help, or at the very least protected from refoulement.

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