Sonic Prime, Episode 3.05: Home Sick Home

Sonic Prime, Episode 3.05: Home Sick Home

Original Release Date: January 11th, 2024

As "Home Sick Home" begins, Sonic's ears are ringing from taken a direct hit from Nine's latest doom machine. The heroes and the Chaos Council do everything they can to turn the tide of the battle. Yet the enormous Grim version of Big, and his endless supply of Froggy-shaped bombs, makes it a desperate battle. Only Shadow emerging from his hole in the ground begins to change things in the good guy's favor. Nine still refuses to give up, forcing Sonic to take the fight directly to the megalomaniac fox. 

"Sonic Prime's" team of animators have, during this episode and the last few, really made an effort to emphasize that Nine is growing deranged the more desperate he becomes. Zapping more beams of light into his robot henchman and the dome around his Citadel is physically exhausting the little guy. Instead of making him reconsider what he's doing, this change in his physical state seems to be making him more unhinged. We see this in the way the animators depict him with sloping posture, twisted limbs, and bugged out eyes. All the key indicators, in the visual shorthand of cartooning, that your character is a sick and twisted little dude. It's a nice touch but it continues to make me ask questions. Namely, how did we get here? Nine's leap from antisocial, angsty kid with ultimately good intentions to straight-up supervillain still seems abrupt to me. But "Prime" is seemingly committed to this idea now and it's increasingly feeling too late to turn back. 

Once again, I feel the need to point out that "Prime's" focus on elaborate action scenes leaves little room for character development. This is very evident in "Home Sick Home," which is largely devoted to the fight scenes. It's an episode full of dramatic violence and big explosions. The enormous Big mech pelts the battle field with bombs, before getting blown up later in the episode. Both the Kraken and the Chaos Council's mothership crash to the earth in melodramatic, flaming fashion. The second half of the episode is peppered with slow-motion punches to the face, an attempt to make the audience understand how hard these blows are hitting. 

It all blurs together for me quickly and it's not difficult to figure out why. One of the many moments in this episode occurs when the Scavengers are carrying out there plan to get into Nine's Citadel. This is dashed when the fox spots them and has pillars of crystals rapidly emerge out of the ground, launching Prim, Gnarly, and Hangry Cat up into the air. The intended reaction to such an action beat should be "Oh no! The heroes' plan has been foiled! What shall they do now?" "Prime" has already shown itself seemingly willing to kill off characters, since Sails and Mangey still seem to be most sincerely dead at this moment. 

When the Chaos Council's ship gets shut down seems to suggest similarly fatal circumstances. At this point, I wouldn't be surprised if more of these guys go out on the battlefield. I wouldn't be surprised and I wouldn't be upset either. Because who are Gnarly Knuckles and Hangry Cat, other than goofy variation on regular "Sonic" cast members? We are knee-deep into "Prime" at this point and I still don't really give a shit about most of these guys. This drains most everything that is happening at this point of any dramatic weight. As much importance is paid to the Scavengers being in peril as is to Squad Commander Red or Jack SepticEye's O.C., characters that barely have names and even less personality than the rest of the heroes. 

Of all the "Prime" cast members I don't care about, there's definitely some I don't care about more than others. Can I reiterate, once again, how much the Chaos Council fucking sucks? At this point, these guys' sole function in the story is to provide more chances to slice up evil robots and drop increasingly dire jokes in the middle of a dire battle. Dr. Deep makes a crack about how cats are evil. Mr. Dr. Eggman's toupee flips through the air. Multiple egg puns are delivered. When the mother ship goes kablooey, each member of the Council falls to their knees and bemoans the destruction of some trivial possession of theirs. It's so goddamn annoying, that the serious mood you'd expect from an event like the final battle for the fate of the multiverse is constantly undermined by dumb jokes. But mostly, these jokes are really bad, being delivered by characters that were one-note jokes to begin with and have only gotten more broad and obnoxious as this series goes on. 

The most depressing thing about this episode is it signals how unlikely "Prime" turning things around at this point is. We are on episode five of seven. (Or 21 of 23, depending on how you look at it.) This episode and the previous one have been entirely devoted to the war of The Grim. This one ends on Sonic and Nine dramatically rushing towards each other, suggesting that the next episode will also be focused on this on-going fight. In other words: This is it, guys. This is the climax of the entire series. And it's underwhelming, to say the least. 

Not the least of which because this is one extended action scene being stretched out for multiple episodes. To draw a comparison to Peter Jackson's "Lord of the Rings" movies again... I'm reminded of the last movie in the bloated "Hobbit" trilogy. It was entitled "The Battle of the Five Armies" and almost all of its laborious runtime is devoted to that titular conflict. The long war scenes in the original "Lord of the Rings" trilogy make more of an impact because they are spaced out with other important plot points and character moments. "The Battle of the Five Armies" is an endless slog because it's made up almost entirely of moments that might've been cool on paper but feel tiresome when stacked one atop the other like that. Holding a straight-to-Netflix children's cartoon up to one of the grandest achievements in blockbuster cinema isn't going to do "Prime" any favors. (I don't even like the "Lord of the Rings" movies that much, not being one for wizards 'n' shit, though I do admire the craft that went into them.) But it says a lot about how twisted the priorities of both "Prime" and "The Hobbit" films are, that both seem to spend more time on on-going action scenes without making any of them all that distinctive or memorable. 

With all of this in-mind, it should not be surprising that the moments in "Home Sick Home" that stick out the most to me aren't yet more fight scenes or explosions. Instead, when the episode stops briefly to catch it breath and focus on the gang talking, I'm more intrigued. After the Kraken goes down, Black Rose and Rusty Rose hold each other's hands as they fall through the sky. The two don't die, as Rose Thorn swoops in on Birdie and saves them. Yet that moment where they are facing death and express simple gratitude for the chance to get to know one another means something. So does a scene afterwards, where Thorn and Black Rose tell Rusty that they consider her a sister, much to the cyborg's surprise. You know, a formally ruthless, almost emotionless machine girl learning to appreciate the meaning of life and sisterhood by fighting for the greater good alongside heroic versions of herself, which she eventually forms a familial bond with, something that previously would've seemed impossible... Gee whiz, that's compelling! I wish this cartoon had been about that instead! I guess the writers and show runners decided to focus on the egg puns, instead of the redemptive power of love. 

People yell at me for taking "Sonic" media, all of which is more-or-less designed for babies, too seriously. For expecting too much of a franchise about a fast blue rat that bops cutesy robots on the head. And I definitely do. But even a small, light-hearted bit like Shadow admitting that smashing robotic facsimiles of Sonic was kind of fun adds more life and meaning to this episode than any of the dumb jokes or explosive action beats do. It doesn't take a lot to invest something like this with a little more life, a little more meaning. But maybe that is too much to expect from the churning content mill that Netflix and all its shows are a part of... [5/10]