elly brewer – Fire Breathing Dimetrodon Time

There’s a very, very fun midair rescue in tonight’s episode of Thunderbirds are Go, written by Elly Brewer. Up in orbit, Lady Penelope and Parker are hearing a sales pitch by the remarkably obnoxious Miss Edmonds, voiced by comedian Ruby Wax, when the satellite, which is meant to be sending a beam of focused solar energy to Earth, goes haywire. A transport plane that’s carrying a giant panda gets hit by a plasma blast and is going down in the Pacific. There’s a tradition of the Thunderbirds franchise making predictions of the future that are totally wrong in every way, but we certainly hope there are still giant pandas a hundred years from now!

Gordon lets everybody know that he’s always wanted to see a giant panda up close. Our son took this as gospel, like it’s been an integral part of the character since he was created and he’s been stymied in seeing giant pandas in countless hours of entertainment. He doesn’t get his wish. In fact, the animators found a pretty novel way to get around the challenge and the expense of designing a big hairy animal for any length of time. As Pixar’s people could probably tell you about bringing Sully in Monsters Inc. to life, building a giant panda in the computer would be incredibly challenging for a world like this one for maybe a minute of screen time. So the animal stays in the crate during the whole ordeal!

Interesting timing. We watched Journey to the Center of the Earth just two weeks ago, and here we are in Atlantis again, with Francois Lemaire, the reckless trillionaire adventurer we met in the series one episode “Comet Chasers,” splashing around the geologically dangerous site in his mini-sub, the Jules Verne. Brains wants a good look at the place as well; there’s allegedly an ancient steampunk supercomputer to be found. Lemaire just wants to prove that Atlantis was populated by mermaids.

This is the first script for this series from Elly Brewer, who has been writing for several British children’s series over the last quarter century. It maybe puts Francois Lemaire as too much of the center of attention at the expense of our heroes, but all his talk of mermaids had our son laughing out loud at him, so it seems like it was the right decision.