Air Date: September 3rd, 1998 (UK)
The engines are working really hard, and the Fat Controller thinks they need some help. He hires three lorries to help them. The lorries, though, besides being insulting, say that they're taking over the engines' jobs. The engines have the last laugh when the lorries get into difficulties.
Tropes featured in the episode:
- Antagonist Title: The episode is titled after its main antagonists, three unnamed lorries.
- Asshole Victims: The lorries end up facing separate accidents, one by one.
- Beware the Nice Ones: Toby doesn’t usually get angry, which only serves to highlight the nastiness of the lorries.
- Cranial Eruption: Lorry 2’s driver has one when he jumps clear after Lorry 2 falls off a cliff.Lorry Driver: Rotten roads...
- Drives Like Crazy: The lorries, to their detriment.Tow Truck Man: Stupid lorry was reversing and fell straight into the sea.
- Early Installment Character-Design Difference: Butch makes his first appearance here, but does not have a face. He quickly gained one, but was promptly shoved to the background until getting his first speaking role in the fifteenth season, thirteen years later.
- Everyone Has Standards: Despite being furious at one of the lorries mocking him, Toby is horrified when one skids off a cliff. He quickly gets over it, though, when he learns the other two fared no better in their jobs.
- Fantastic Racism: The three lorries to the engines.
- The Freelance Shame Squad: The engines all laugh at the dilapidated lorries for revenge.Thomas: Well, well, well! The Brothers Grim: Smashed, Broken, and Sunk!
- Hypocrite: The lorries make fun of the engines by saying they suck at their jobs. Turns out they themselves are too incompetent to do the engines’ work.
- Ironic Echo: When the lorries first arrive, one of them asks Percy, “What’s that steaming lump of scrap iron doing here?” Later, Percy asks the lorry the exact same thing when he finds him broken down.
- It Belongs in a Museum: Lorry 2, on meeting Toby, tells him that he belongs in a museum instead of working at a quarry.
- Jerkasses:
- The lorries, as the title implies.
- Cranky as well, despite him reforming in his debut episode. He insults Percy and sides with the lorries when they arrive to steal the engines’ jobs.
- Laser-Guided Karma: All three lorries suffer accidents that leave them wrecked after bullying the engines, stealing their jobs, and vowing to have them scrapped.
- Lorry 1 reverses into the sea and is implied to have floated off, likely causing irreparable saltwater damage. The fact that a barge brings him back to the docks only adds insult to injury, and James finds this hilarious.
- Lorry 2 drives off a cliff and is completely wrecked.
- Lorry 3, perhaps overestimating his own capacity, is overloaded at the mill, resulting in him crashing on a railway crossing after his axles break and his systems are ruined by flour.
- One-Shot Character: Lorry 1, Lorry 2 and Lorry 3. The props were reused as faceless lorries in later seasons, but the three characters never appeared again.
- Rule of Three: The lorries are a group of three.
- Self-Disposing Villain: The engines don’t have to do a thing to get rid of the lorries — they wreck themselves and are hauled off the island in shame.
- Shout-Out: Probably unintentional, but one of the lorries calls Percy “the little Green Goblin on wheels.”
- Smug Snake: The lorries.
- Stock Footage: Mirrored stock footage from “Thomas and the Special Letter” is used.
- Tempting Fate: The tender engines scoff at the idea of being replaced by lorries. Soon enough three appear. Best exemplified in the narration:James: Stuff and nonsense!
Henry: We engines run this Island!
Percy: What if a lorry DOES arrive?!
Narrator: I’m afraid it did — along with two more. - Terrible Trio: The lorries.
- Title Drop: Thomas, after being bothered by one of the lorries.Thomas: Bust my boiler! What a horrid lorry!
James: Despicable! - Too Dumb to Live: The lorries’ reckless driving ends up their own undoing. One of them drives too fast on a dangerous mountain road and falls off a cliff, and another doesn’t watch where he’s going and backs up into the harbor. Only the third doesn’t suffer from driving issues — he’s taken out after he’s loaded with too much flour and breaks down.
- We Will Meet Again: The lorries angrily vow to return and get back at the engines, though as the narrator notes, they have yet to do so. Lorries 1 and 2 are unlikely to reappear, since the former has suffered extensive saltwater damagenote and the latter looks completely wrecked, and not even Lorry 3, the only one who doesn’t seem to be a write-off, has appeared since.
