alright here’s the birthday party episode analysis. keep in mind that this is all a matter of personal opinion/speculation
for those of you who don’t want to watch the episode:
the episode begins with ten cents and sunshine discussing a surprise birthday party for otis. sunshine is very insistent on keeping the party a surprise, and ten cents promises to help her keep it a secret until it’s time for the party. sunshine invites sally and zorran (and the zero fleet) and further reiterates that the party is a surprise. the episode then cuts to ten cents and otis, who is suspicious that everyone is “acting strange”. ten cents continues to keep the secret and make excuses to throw otis off his trail.
from there, top hat asks for ten cents’ attention, and ten cents accidentally lets it slip that he can’t talk to top hat right now, he’ll see him later at the party. otis immediately catches on, to which ten cents tries to cover by saying he was going to see top hat at “pier t”. otis and top hat are not impressed in the least (or even happy to hear that there’s a party), and top hat says ten cents has spoiled the surprise and immediately departs the scene to go to tell sunshine. otis outright tells ten cents that he ruined the party because it’s not a surprise anymore. ten cents apologizes to otis and promises they’ll still have the party, but otis’ engine breaks down.
sunshine shows up to the scene and is very upset with (a very remorseful) ten cents, who even says that he hates himself for spoiling the surprise. the switchers then go to captain starr to try and resolve the issue, arguing all the while as ten cents insists that he didn’t spoil the party on purpose. sunshine is still insistent that it had to be a surprise, and they may as well cancel the party. otis has seemingly calmed down and says they can just throw a surprise party another time, but sunshine still insists on blaming ten cents for not being able to keep a secret. from there we get the “what do you want me to do, sink myself?/not a bad idea!” exchange.
otis complains about listening to the switchers argue before captain star shows up to ask what’s going on. otis and sunshine explain the situation, and captain star immediately asks ten cents if he apologized. ten cents explains that he did apologize— multiple times. captain star then says that it was for the best, because now she can give otis a new engine for his birthday. she then asks sunshine to forgive ten cents, and sunshine forgives him. ten cents thanks her for forgiving him and promises to do better next time. the switchers taking otis to dry dock for repairs, with otis saying that he hates to miss a party— especially his own. the episode ends with a parade (using footage from “regatta”). otis gives a speech about how disappointed he was that his surprise was ruined, but it didn’t matter— because the real surprise was what they did for his birthday party and his friends being there.
why is this episode so uncomfortable (to me, anyway)?
i think the primary factor is that the episode completely bungles the inciting incident by having ten cents spoiling the surprise come across as a complete accident. i could understand what the episode was going for if it opened with him saying something like “i don’t see why we need to keep this a surprise, because we’ll have the party either way” and dismissing how important this is to sunshine and otis, but he doesn’t say anything like that. in the scenes leading up to it, he seemingly was trying to keep suspicion off of the party, and even tried to cover for himself after he spoiled it. he talks about how sorry he is and how “next time (he’ll) do better”, but honestly i don’t think ten cents did anything wrong in this episode— or at the very least, he didn’t do anything bad enough to warrant such a weirdly severe reaction from sunshine and otis.
there’s also the fact that salty’s lighthouse!ten cents is seemingly(?) written as a child? or at the very least, he’s one of the youngest tugs on the fleet. meanwhile, top hat and otis are characters who are written as full-grown adults even within this series, and they barely do anything to try and diffuse the switchers’ argument or make ten cents feel better when he clearly blames himself for ruining the surprise— if anything, they actively choose to make him feel worse about it! otis doesn’t even have anything to say about the “sink myself” remark, he just complains about “having to listen to (the switchers) argue”. and when otis and sunshine finally forgive ten cents, it’s seemingly only because captain star told them to— even then, they can’t resist lamenting how the surprise party was ruined in otis’ speech at the end.
this episode also heavily uses footage from “quarantine” of the original tugs, meaning that the characters look upset/disgruntled for the vast majority of the episode up until the very end. that isn’t entirely relevant though, because this episode would still come across as weirdly mean-spirited no matter what footage they used.
and i think that’s the crux of the issue; this episode wouldn’t be half as uncomfortable to me if salty’s lighthouse didn’t have such a sugary, heavily-sanitized writing style. in most episodes of the show to have an argument between characters, it usually ends with all parties apologizing to each other and making up— but that doesn’t happen here, so it just comes across as almost 6 minutes of ten cents being browbeaten into apologizing for an honest mistake and none of the other characters apologizing for how they treated him. even captain star seems to be on sunshine’s side— when sunshine tells her that ten cents ruined the surprise, she sounds pretty stern when she asks ten cents if he apologized.
anyway, salty’s lighthouse!ten cents did nothing wrong in this episode and that’s a comically-small hill i’m willing to die on. i wouldn’t necessarily call this a worse episode than the one where zorran raps, the whole episode of vegetable puns, or the one where zorran sings the abcs while stuck on a rock, but i think this episode is an uncomfortable watch in a very different way than most episodes of salty’s lighthouse and that’s why it morbidly fascinates me.
