Sonic X, Episode 2.20: A Wild Win

Sonic X, Episode 2.20: A Wild Win

Japanese Title: Sonic Battle: Finale!!

Japanese Air Date: February 15th, 2004

U.S. Air Date: February 26th, 2005

Instead of picking up the far more exciting plot point of Sonic chasing after Eggman, the last part of the "Sonic Battle" story arc begins by focusing on the martial arts tournament. The episode quickly progress through a series of matches before coming to the final fight: Knuckles vs. Emerl. The robot's abilities to copy his opponent's moves makes him an ideal match for Knuckles, who quickly relents to the beating he receives. As Emerl is handed the red Chaos Emerald, his electronic brain is overwhelmed. The formally kind robot gains red eyes and proceeds to attack everyone violently. Sonic, Knuckles, and Rouge can't stop him and he's soon tearing the city apart. That's when a very unexpected hero emerges with the perfect strategy to stop the rampaging machine. 

As I've mentioned in the past, tournament arcs are often done to pad out the episode counts of long-running shonen fighting anime. (Usually so the manga can produce more material for the show to adapt.) This means the story lines usually go on for a decent number of episodes. "Sonic X," meanwhile, squeezes an entire fighting tournament into two episodes. "A Wild Win" crams six matches into its opening minutes, before a relatively short final battle occurs.

Admittedly, I have to admire the show for speeding through the match-ups, as I really didn't want to watch an endless series of fight scenes anyway. Yet I mostly came away from the first half of this episode thinking how disappointing a tournament this must have been for audiences to watch. Has there ever been a martial arts tournament before where so many matches end without actual fighting? Or where one opponent just randomly decides to give up? In this episode alone, Chris decides he doesn't want to fight Amy or Rouge in the finals, so he fakes a belly ache against Knuckles. Mr. Stewart forfeits his fight against Lucky, when Scarlet Garcia recognizes him from the "Sonic Adventure 2" subplot. When Lucky is suppose to fight Emerl, the bell-shaped robot just collapses from a sprained ankle or something. I guess Emerl learned to copy Lucky's luckiness? How the hell is that suppose to work? This follows the previous episode, where half the fights ended in boring forfeits or ring-outs.

The semi-final fight is one of the few actual showdowns the tournament presents us with. But the audience in the stadium is denied even the satisfaction of getting to see that. Perhaps remembering that Knuckles beat her the last time they fought, Rouge demands a handicap. (She uses the excuse of being a delicate female, which I can't believe anybody bought considering they've all seen Rouge tear robots to pieces.) Knuckles agrees to fight Rouge in a black-out tent, where the night vision equipped bat will have an advantage... Which means the people watching live see none of the actual fight! They just hear Knuckles and Rouge tumbling around in the dark, grunting at each other. They could be having rough sex in there, for all we know. Considering Rouge emerges, battered and bruised but feeling confident before collapsing from exhaustion, I'm choosing to believe that is exactly what happened. Honestly, if I had paid an exorbitant ticket price to watch this fight, I'd be asking for a refund. 

Of course, there's a reason "Sonic X" rushes through all of this shit: The episode isn't actually about the fighting tournament. Instead, Emerl holding the Chaos Emerald, going insane, and attacking the city is much more important. Not that this plot point is especially well done either. Emerl's ability to copy fighting techniques is believable enough to make him a match for Knuckles, who is not a master tactician anyway. Yet the machine immediately reducing Station Square to rubble is a little hard to believe. We see buildings devastated and the streets inundated with rubble. One little robot did all that?! Nobody thought to call in the military or anything? Station Square just got destroyed by Perfect Chaos not that long ago, so it really feels like the show seriously inflates Emerl's destructive capabilities in a desperate attempt to make the little guy seem like a serious threat. 

Actually, I'm not sure if the show runners wanted us to take Emerl seriously as a villain or not. Because he's defeated by a pre-schooler. Yes, Cream summons the strength to stand up to her former robotic friend. And she doesn't do it by making a declaration of love or an emotional plea from the heart. It looks like it's going to go in that direction but, nope, Cream just beats the shit out of him. There is no "crayon breaky Willow" speech. Instead, Cream touches on the strategy of having Cheese leap in front of Emerl's face whenever he's ready to copy Cream's ability, interrupting the process. The other characters interpret this as "Emerl can't copy more than one person at a time," even though he did exactly that earlier in the episode. 

It's a pretty ridiculous ending for a number of reasons. Sure, Cream and Cheese destroyed countless Eggman machines in "Sonic Advance 2." But this cartoon has portrayed her as nothing but a harmless, even petulant little child. Having her suddenly swing into action hero mode – defeating a foe in a few minutes that Sonic, Knuckles, and Rouge all struggled with – strains believability. I also can't believe that literally no one besides the tiny child thought of disrupting Emerl's scanning abilities before this point. It seems like a fairly obvious solution to me! Or, like, Tails and Chuck could've designed a computer virus and infected Emerl from afar with a drone. Or the government could've just dropped a bomb on him. How are you going to copy a bomb's special move? Anything would've been better than having a cute little bunny punch the murder-bot in the face until he fell into the ocean.

Or, maybe, Emerl's love for Cream could've overpowered whatever ancient mayhem protocol the Chaos Emerald activates. (Rouge crudely wonders if this is the case, by asking if Emerl "likes little girl." I can't tell if that's a pedo joke or just an unfortunate translation choice.) But I don't think this would've been dramatically satisfying either. Because we don't actually care about Cream and Emerl's relationship. Emerl has done almost nothing since being introduced a few episodes ago. His bond with Cream has been talked about more than it's actually been shown. How many scenes have they even had together before this episode? "Sonic Battle: Finale!!" certainly packs in the melodramatic emotion. Emerl cries motor oil as he sinks into the ocean and Cream weeps after he explodes. Yet I have zero emotional investment in these two's relationship, so none of this stuff hits home at all.

There might have been another reason why most of the fight scenes in this episode either occur off-screen or conclude without actual violence: The animator had neither the time, resources, budget, ability, or interest in making the fight scenes look decent. In the back half of the episode, there's far too many scenes of Emerl turning into a spinning tornado and rushing at our heroes. There's in general quite a lot of repetition, frames of people rushing back and forth around their opponent being repeated. A shot later, of Sonic balancing on his toes as he stands at the dock, looks especially shitty. I guess this show isn't like "Dragon Ball Z," when they can just save money in fight scenes by spending three episodes on someone charging up an attack.

By the way, Eggman – who has almost nothing to do in this episode – casually mentions that Emerl is made from ancient technology. This is a callback to the "Sonic Battle" video game, where Emerl was built by some mysterious, long-since-gone civilization. Yet it's definitely pretty sloppy that they mention his origins in an off-hand manner like this instead of, ya know, actually depicting it on-screen. I'm sure, "Sonic" fans being the particularly passionate people they are, that Emerl is someone's favorite character. But I've never thought he was that interesting and this pretty half-assed episode reinforces that belief. After a fun start, the "Sonic Battle" two-parter ends in spectacularly shitty fashion. [4/10]