Woah. This was a powerful one!! And definitely the best written episode in this series I have seen so far. I admit I did cry during the flight/crash simulation scene!! And I finished the episode with (I think) a better understanding of Tony’s character than I had when I started watching it.
In a previous post I wrote about the lack of action in Sky Trackers compared with the fantasy and sci fi Australian children’s series I’d seen, but after watching this episode I appreciated more how Sky Trackers was able to dive deeper into it’s explorations of the characters and their relationships without a more urgent main plot (like an upcoming apocalypse or characters trying to escape villains or return to their own worlds) taking up most of the focus.
With Spellbinder and TGFT, I would have absolutely LOVED it if we had found out more details about character’s backstories- learning more about Paul’s past with his mother, or how Ashka came to be the kind of person she was and how she rose to power as a Spellbinder, for example- but with everything else happening in the story, there simply wasn’t enough time.
So I guess an ideal series- with lots of action AND deep delving into the characters to the extent Sky Trackers does- doesn’t exist.
Writers have to choose whether to sacrifice plot or character exploration, so I have to appreciate the plot focused series and the character focused series for what they are.
It was a funny coincidence that in a previous post I wrote about a hypothetical situation of a jealous woman trying to chop off another woman’s hair, and then in this episode, Maggie cut off a chunk of Nikki’s hair!! I swear I hadn’t watched ahead when I wrote that post!!
I thought in that situation, Marie should have punished Maggie- I like Maggie, but cutting off someone else’s hair without their consent is out of order, and I’m sure Maggie would have been extremely upset if someone else had done it to her!! But Marie reacted like it was nothing. I guess it was one of those situations where a younger sibling is allowed to get away with too much just because they are younger!
But of course, the main focus of this episode was the search for Mike’s mother’s missing plane, discovering exactly what had happened in the crash, and the intense conflict between Mike and Tony in the course of unraveling the mystery of Ellen’s tragic end.
And I now have a theory about why Tony behaves the way he does, but I’m a bit nervous to share my thoughts on it in case what I’m about to write comes across as being negative towards people with autism, which absolutely is not my intention.
I know I have criticised Tony’s parenting in previous posts, and I am not saying that autistic people = bad parents, because I know for a fact that lots of autistic people are fantastic parents!! What I am saying is that I now strongly suspect that Tony is autistic, and that in his case, his difficulties with cognitive empathy and being unable to understand some of Mike’s feelings and the way that Mike thinks are the root cause of his conflict with his son.
Also I must make it clear that this is just my personal theory- I am not someone who is qualified to formally diagnose people as autistic!!
But I have grown up with a sister who is diagnosed with autism, so I have a lot of personal experience of how autistic and non autistic people communicate very differently and frequently misunderstand each other. And as someone who is neurodivergent myself (in my case, ADHD) I have a lot of compassion for fellow neurodivergent people who find themselves being misunderstood! Neither can I be sure if the writers intended to write Tony as being an autistic character. He certainly fits the “classic” profile of an autistic man that many people can easily spot nowadays, but at the time Sky Trackers was made, there was a lot less understanding regarding neurodivergence, and very little public awareness about it.
Back then, many people had the idea that all autistic people were like the main character in Rain Man, when in reality autism can manifest in so many different forms. The truth is, everyone who lives in a populated area will interact with several autistic and ADHD people every week, whether they are aware of it or not!
Nowadays some people skeptically say “Everyone’s autistic now!” But in reality, throughout history there have always been neurodivergent people, before the labels of “autism” and “ADHD” existed.
So whether or not the writers or the actor who played Mike consciously portrayed him as an autistic person, I think it’s highly likely that the character was modelled or based on a person with (diagnosed or not) autism that the writers knew.
(I also have a theory that the wild and wacky hyperactive characters we see in so many children’s cartoons and in comedy shows were inspired by real life people with ADHD, but I will stay on topic and not go off on a tangent!
)If Tony is autistic, it might help explain his attitude of not wanting to search for the plane and not wanting to find out more details about how his wife’s life ended- an attitude which came across as bizarre to me at first before I twigged that he could be autistic.
Autistic people tend to find comfort in the familiar, and sudden and unexpected change- in this case, the unexpected new information about the plane crash- can feel overwhelming and distressing.
Clearly, Tony loved his wife and took her death very hard, but his coping mechanism after the bereavement was throwing himself into his work (seeking comfort in routine and structure). Once he had become more accustomed to his life as a widower, he compartmentalised his life with Ellen and all the pain of her death as “the past” and his current life with his teenage son as “now”- and that way of coping worked well for him. But the discovery of the teddy bear unexpectedly threw “the past”- and the pain of it- back into Tony’s current life, causing him to experience inner chaos and turmoil.
So, in an attempt to protect himself from further pain, he spent most of the episode stubbornly refusing to help Mike search for the plane, and even told him off for doing so!
I also believe that in his own way, Tony was trying to protect Mike from pain and distress, because, not having cognitive empathy with how Mike’s mind worked (because Mike in contrast found healing in seeking answers), Tony felt that HIS way of coping, that worked for HIM, would also be best for Mike.
So I felt some compassion for Tony, but at the same time I really felt Mike’s upset and frustration, because, to Mike, it understandably came across as if his father didn’t care. And when Mike accused his father of not caring, Tony angrily responded “How dare you say that to me! When she died, I lost a part of myself!” Which only made things worse, because those lines, and the tone in which he said them, came across as Tony completely ignoring Mike’s grief for his mother AND making it all about himself!! Although I guess that’s not what Tony meant when he said “I lost a part of myself”. But that’s how it would come across to most people. And to be completely honest, I really felt like grabbing Tony during that scene and shaking him and shouting “FOR F**K’S SAKE, SHOW SOME EMPATHY FOR YOUR CHILD!! SHE WAS HIS MUM!!”
And I think that if Tony wasn’t autistic and was behaving like that, then that would be an appropriate response!
But I also remembered past arguments with my sister (before we found out she was autistic) in which she would say things to me which I interpreted as her being cold, or self absorbed, or lacking empathy. And how upset my sister would get afterwards if I accused her of lacking empathy. Because autistic people DO have empathy- they just have difficulty expressing it in a way that non autistic people understand.
And in the powerful scene when Ellen’s last words were played (which I found incredibly intense, especially for a kid’s show), Tony proved that he had affective empathy when he held Mike’s hand as they listened to the recording together, both knowing that Ellen’s life was about to end seconds later.
And in the end Tony agreed to help Mike search for the plane and to listen to the recording, even though he didn’t want to, because he DID care about Mike’s feelings- it took him a while, but eventually he overcame his own fear and discomfort to put Mike’s feelings before his own in that instance.
I was so glad to see this even though it was such a sad scene, because it showed, at last, some improvement in their relationship and because having closure was so important to Mike. And also because, when Ellen bravely sang and left loving messages for Tony and Mike in the final seconds of her life, her last wish was for her husband and her son to hear her words, and finally, they eventually did.
Also, if Tony is autistic then that might explain him failing to recognise how distressed Mike was in the episode when Tony had gone missing. Mike’s emotional state was very obvious to me in the scene where they were reunited, but Tony (despite being a very intelligent man) didn’t comprehend why Mike was angry, or read the nuance in Mike’s words “You didn’t come back when you said you would”. And it could also be that Tony had trouble correctly interpreting Mike’s facial expressions.
I don’t know what other viewers will think of my theory about Tony! I could have got it all wrong and it was simply about Mike and Tony experiencing and coping with grief in very different ways. But definitely Episode 9 was exceptionally well written, and well acted by all the cast.
I hope future episodes I see will continue to be this good!!
I heard that there were a few car accidents caused by the billboard adverts of models showing off their huge cleavages. 
