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molly is such a fascinating character to me. and surprisingly, not because of her content in the show. but her lack of content. molly really felt like to me she was supposed to be the break-out star of the HiT era. let me explain why.

in short, it's all down to marketing and merchandise. i'm a massive HiT era apologist, mostly because it's the era of ttte i grew up with, but as i was looking through my catalogue of merch, i noticed something...molly was popping up. a lot. weirdly so.

i have a good amount of those briarpatch ttte board games, and typically they were for 4 players, and as such 4 engines were provided to play as: thomas, percy, james, and...molly? at first it seems weird, but when you think about it, it makes sense. molly rounds out a quartet themed around red, green, blue, and yellow, and also adds in a female character. i think that last bit is important, but i'll get to it later.

so i went digging, and the 4 player briarpatch games pre-molly usually had mavis in her place, likely also to add female representation, just swapping yellow for black. there are a few exceptions, i recall seeing toby and harvey instead, but again, it was mostly mavis.

looking at more merchandise outside of board games in this era, molly got quite a bit of focus. she was part of a set of 4 bath squirters along with thomas, percy, and james, and what i find most shocking, she was one of VERY few engines to receive a trackmaster remote control engine. molly also was featured on a 2008 great discovery trading card, even though she only had one line in the entire movie.

after this, i went digging deeper into the world of the thomas microsites and online games, where molly also had a strong presence. the quartet of thomas, percy, james, and molly continued in the simon-says type memory game (i think it's called 'peep peep!'?) and molly also appeared in the emotions game, but this game featured 5 engines, and the fifth...was emily. remember my point theorizing that molly was focused on because she was a girl? here's where it's important.

this five engine ensemble of thomas, percy, james, molly, and emily is repeated again in the plug n' play game 'right on time', a game that i own and remember fondly. emily was chosen again to fill the fifth slot, and i think it's because HiT wanted to have a gender-equal ensemble a la bwba. and i think molly was chosen specifically not only because her yellow paint is unique and for her gender, but because she is probably the girl character at the time that had the most opposing personality to emily. as we all know during this time, emily was interesting and had flaws unlike SOME OTHER ERAS- portrayed as having a very strong and opinionated personality, which would easily contrast towards molly's more shy and sensitive personality. both have also been described as having sisterly attitudes towards other engines. i think HiT wanted to prove in this 5 engine ensemble that they had varied writing for their female characters.

for all of this, i think that molly WAS supposed to be a much more important character than she turned out to be, mostly because she was marketed so heavily and disproportionately than her screen time would lead you to believe. molly also appeared more often than the other HiT newbies (bar rosie), but that isn't really saying much with how little other characters like neville or billy appeared. i don't know why molly was dropped so suddenly when the set up for her seemed to be there? only thing i can think of is that emily had just been moved to tidmouth sheds right before series 9, and that they didn't want to repeat that process?? idk i'm just spitballing because i've been thinking about molly a lot recently. on a small related note, her basis is also very specific and her design is SUCH a standout compared to other new characters at this time, so clearly effort was put into her. i wonder how different the series would have been if molly was elevated to prominent secondary character status like salty or mavis, or even main character status!

tl;dr i think molly was originally going to be important but then she wasn't :(