![]() Boys who have to leave schools where they aren't learning and try new ones (but most of them don’t have a local school run by a child-whisperer named Calypso where kids are encouraged to lose themselves in a field all day). Boys who hear “sit still” and “pay attention” as if on a loop. “Well,” Rusty replies, “you’re really good at playing army.”Īs a teacher and school psychologist, I’ve worked with many, many Jacks. Jack explains: “There's something going on with me, I’m not good at doing what I’m told, I can't sit still, and I can't remember anything, like numbers or letters or my hat.” ![]() Up in the helicopter/treehouse, when they finally catch their breath, Rusty asks Jack why he left his old school. We see Jack hesitate when asked if he has the skills required to be in Rusty’s army, attempt to learn the code names and hand signals Rusty has invented, and, in the episode’s denouement, help Rusty call for a “dustoff” rescue from the threat of a wandering turkey, by finally remembering the code name for a specific tree and running like hell, one thing that he is confident he's good at. ![]() ![]() The episode is full of exhilarating delights and unexpected moments of deep focus, just like the brain of someone with ADHD. It shows us an ADHD kiddo as he is, living his daily life, doing something every kid does - delighting in a new skill and friendship and, of course, struggling to tell the main idea of a story. It starts with his drive to school, where his younger sibling rats on him for not sitting still in a way that is clearly mundane, and his father, who, after realizing Jack forgot his hat - presumably not for the first time - asks, “What are we going to do with you, Jack?” When they get to school, Jack’s snitch of a sibling informs his teacher that Jack “can’t sit still or remember anything,” to which she wisely responds that he should go play with the kind of intense but also-laid-back kid who is dressed in fatigues and carrying a knapsack. “Army” is narrated by Jack, entirely from his point of view, as he describes his day in great detail (ADHDers do tend to be long-winded). What a wonderful setting, then, for an episode about a child who never explicitly, but quite obviously, has ADHD. But Bluey’s special gift, when it’s great, is the absence of lessons a refusal to portray the lives of children and parents as neat and tidy, and a preference for a light touch rather than a preachy one. Any parent whose child has discovered anger management through a Daniel Tiger song, or learned about autism from Sesame Street’s Julia, can tell you that a children’s show can be a great place to teach straightforward lessons. It is clear to me, and apparently many others on Bluey fan Wiki, that Jack, the protagonist of this episode, has ADHD, and I’ve never seen the story of an ADHD kid told like this. “Army” is my favorite episode of Bluey and it is the show at its absolute best, despite there being stiff competition (" Bumpy and the Wise Old Wolfhound" still makes me snot-cry). Instead, "Army" introduces a new character, Jack, who, on his first day at Bluey’s school, a Scandinavian-designed Waldorf hobbit-house situated on roughly 2,000 acres of land, is recruited into an imaginary game by Rusty, a child whose father, we learn, is in the army. It’s not about Bingo, or Mom, or a magic xylophone, or the almost unbearable pain and beauty of the passage of time. The 13th episode of Season 2 of the beloved and, at times, absolutely perfect Australian kids cartoon, Bluey, is not about Bluey.
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