Sonic Underground, Episode 1.39: The Pendant

Sonic Underground, Episode 1.39: The Pendant

Original Air Date: October 21st, 1999 

As we head into the penultimate episode of "Sonic Underground," I really have to ask this question: What was with this show's obsession with neck jewelry? The magical medallions Sonic, Sonia, and Manic appear in every episode. That damnable hillbilly episode revolves around a pendant split in two, that needed to be reunited. "The Pendant," the thirty-ninth, also features a magical two-part necklace that must be reformed. The likely answer to this question is that the writers were strapped for time and unknowingly ripped each other off, out of desperation. Yet I think magical jewelry reappearing so much really does speak to this show's fixation on prophecies and other mystical woo-woo bullshit. Why think of something interesting when you can just have a wizard or glowing rock or necklace motivate the story?

There's lots of magical bullshit in this episode. Somehow the pollution from Robotropolis has revealed a previously undiscovered country, known as the Emerald Peninsula. Robotnik plans to Roboticize the natives. The locals are superstitious and believe in creatures called Boggins, magical imps that surrender treasure when caught. Sleet transforms Dingo into a boggin and uses him as bait to trap the population. Meanwhile, Sonic, Sonia, and Manic investigate, encountering an old fortune teller named Maeve. She points them towards a magical pendent, that allows Sonia to see anything she wishes. Yet it has the side effect of making her body fade away. The siblings must retrieve the second half of the pendent to save their sister. 

I'm sorry if the above plot synopsis reads like the deranged ramblings of a lunatic. "The Pendant" is a Ben Hurst/Pat Allee script and it is, to say the least, not their most coherent work. This episode is awash in half-formed nonsense. Why does the pendant make Sonia slowly fade away like a McFly sibling? The fortune teller is eventually revealed to be a fairy, that couldn't revert to her natural state without the pendants being reunited. Were the royal triplets just tricked into helping a chaotic neutral fae undo some curse that was afflicting her? Was Sonia's limbs becoming transparent just a ploy to insure they help her? If so, how come Maeve is never depicted as evil or even mischievous? What the fuck does any of this shit have to do with anything???

These are far from the only questions I have. If the Pendant can reveal anyone's location, why doesn't Sonia used it to find their mom? What does this entire business with the titular MacGuffin, introduced half-way through this episode, have to do with Robotnik roboticizing the locals? How come we never spend any time with the citizens of the Emerald Peninsula, that are so imperiled? In fact, the second half shifts entirely to Sonia's vanishing act, the script forgetting about the people who were being Roboticized. Were they ever rescued or did the Resistance just forget about them? Maeve, in her fairy form, grants Sonic a wish at the episode's end. Instead of using that wish to free the captured people, undo all Roboticization everywhere, bring their mom to them, or make Robotnik's empire collapse... He instead uses it to play a bizarre prank on the tyrant. 

What does the script take the time to set up this business with the boggins, heavily implied to be real with glowing eyes seen in bushes, and then do nothing with the idea? Why does Queen Alena's opening narration frame this episode's moral as "never forget that magic is real?" When magic is what endangers our heroes? When they have regularly interacted with magic throughout the entire series? Why is there a pink blur sprinting around the peninsula, that Maeve calls a Bog Beast? It shows up several times to help our heroes out of jams, the sloppiest of plot devices. Why does the final, baffling scene reveal this creature to have Robotnik's face? Why did this "Sonic" cartoon take a detour into Irish-inspired mythology and introduce leprechaun-like creatures that sound like hand puppets? WHHHHHHYYYYYY???

Trying to break down this script is giving me an aneurysm, so let's focus on it's more brass tacks narrative flaws. The episode's climax is a standoff between Sleet and Sonic. Sleet has retrieved the second half of the Pendant, needed to keep Sonia from fading away. (How he did this is never explained but let's not focus on that right now.) Sleet and Sonic trade tense dialogue as they try to bargain out a trade, which the canine immediately goes back on. Afterwards, Sonic and Manic kick everybody's asses with ease. Because of course they do. We've seen thirty-eight previous episodes where Sleet is brutally humiliated by his enemies. Why does this show expect to mine any tension out of this joker being a creditable threat? 

This is not the only time this episode completely undermines its own threat. We also find out the SWATBots have fucking off switches hidden in their arms. The original SWATBots were hardly enormous threats but I'm perpetually impressed with how much the "Underground" versions suck. This is just another example of how subpar this cartoon. The animation is stiff and awkward, which is displayed during a scene where Sonia rides Manic's hoverboard up into a ship. The character designs are dreadful. The natives of peninsula are more of the show's hideous bug/alien people. Maeve looks like a cross between "FernGully's" Magi Lune and a blue-skinned donkey and has a giant white flattop for some reason. No care was taken to insure any of this made any sense or didn't look like complete dogshit. 

As if "The Pendant" couldn't get more baffling, there's the matter of the episode's song. Considering the setting and premise, you'd expect this one to be an Irish jig or something, right? RiverDance was huge in the late nineties, would've fit right in. Instead, the song is shoved into the episode's early scenes... And it's a Yankee Doodle style patriotic showtune called "Lady Liberty." The song makes visual references to American iconography like the Statue of Liberty, Washington crossing the Delaware, the flag billowing in the wind, and The Spirit of '76. This is all in preparation for a holiday called Liberty Day, a bit of information that is not elaborated upon. Cyrus' watches the entire song – which is so bad and off-balance that it doesn't really qualify as music – with a frozen expression on his face. I know that was just the shitty animation but it made me laugh because I reacted the exact same way. You think everyone just watches in dumbfounded disbelief when Sonic and siblings randomly enact a music video? I like to think they do. 

Just when this show was starting to get a little better in its last third, it completely blindsided me with a real humdinger like this one. "The Pendant" is bad because it's poorly written, animated, and assembled but mostly because it's so actively defies any sort of logic. The only real response you can have to this is to ask why the fuck any of these things are happening, which is basically what I did. Sorry if that didn't make for a compelling review. Once again, this cartoon has defeated me. [4/10]