Sonic X, Episode 3.05: A Chilling Discovery

Sonic X, Episode 3.05: A Chilling Discovery

Japanese Title: The Battle on the Ice Palace

U.S. Air Date: October 8th, 2005

Japanese Air Date: April 1st, 2020

The quest to retrieve the Chaos Emeralds before the Metarex continues in the fifth episode of season three. Chris has developed a machine that can detect Chaos Emerald energy, leading the Blue Typhoon to the frozen planet of Breezy. They immediately encounter Metarex forces and the ship is damaged, forcing Tails to do repairs while everyone else seeks out the emerald. They soon discover the gem is encased within impenetrable ice and guarded by a fierce Metarex warrior named Crystal. Meanwhile, Eggman and Rouge both have schemes of their own. 

If you ever wanted to know what a "Sonic" version of "Star Trek" would be like, this gives you a pretty good idea. (I'm really surprised Ken Penders never wrote a parody like that, since we all know he's a huge nerd.) There's an elaborate sequence where the Blue Typhoon activates its warp drive, which includes generating a portal and passing through it via sparkly rainbow colors. Eggman gets one of those two, though his warp drive involves the amusing visual pun of wrapping his ship in a CGI egg. Later, after the ship is damaged after arriving on Breezy, there's a few scenes of Tails pulling off some Geordi La Forge shit and doing repairs. I'm curious if the show was lightly poking fun at sci-fi tropes like this, as Tails laments that he doesn't get to act like your usual starship captain very often. 

But intergalactic work place drama is not the main focus of this episode. Instead, “A Chilling Discovery” focuses mostly on the novelty of the ice planet setting. There’s a long tradition of ice levels in the "Sonic" series, starting with the third game and continuing onward. This episode even includes a scene of Sonic riding a board across the slippery surface and through spiraling icy structures. (Though his board here looks and acts more like the Extreme Gear hoverboards, that wouldn’t premiere until the next year’s “Sonic Riders.”) The episode even manages to play this series tradition for some comedy, such as when Sonic drops up to his nose into snow. I guess he likes solidified water particles as much as he likes regular water. 

While the Arctic shenanigans are mildly distracting, “A Chilling Discovery” eventually turns it’s focus to less interesting action sequences. The Metarex is seemingly waiting for Sonic and the gang and have prepared a small army of floating, crustacean-like troopers. Unlike previous Metarex threats, which were impervious to all the typical Sonic Team attacks, these guys are pushovers. A long, repetitive action scene is devoted to our heroes wrecking, exploding, and twirling Metarex Troopers around like they’re nothing. It’s quickly revealed these guys are leading the heroes into a trap but they are still super easy to destroy. 

At least the Metarex generals are still creditable threats. Metarex Crystal is not as girly as his name implies. Instead, the machine is encased in indestructible ice crystals. He’s also the size of a kaiju and able to launch further crystals as a projectile weapon, essentially making him the “Sonic” version of Space Godzilla. As unstoppable as Metarex Crystal seems at first, it turns out he has a weak sauce weakness. It is, in fact, the same weakness all ice has: Heat. A blast from a super hot laser beam cleaves off Crystal’s arm and another, more direct blast leads to a shockingly graphic scene of him melting alive. In other words, this week’s Metarex villain is defeated the same way as almost all of them have been so far. The good guys just shoot a big-ass gun at them. It makes a climax that starts out as exciting melt into a big nothing, like ice under a heat lamp itself. 

But there are a couple of moments in this episode that stand out. Not long after arriving on Planet Breezy, our heroes wander across the planet’s bitter surface. (Chris wears winter gear but all the Mobians are buck-ass nude, which raises some interesting questions.) Cosmo soon comes across a tree standing in the snow. She has an empathetic connection with this plant life, dismayed that it seems dead and hopeful that it can be restored to life someday. At the episode’s conclusion, after the Planet Egg is restored, Cosmo spots some blades of grass poking through the snow. It’s a nice visual summation of her personality, of holding out hope that life goes on and that dark times are not the end. 

This episode also continues the rehabilitation of Chris Thorndyke… But now I’m wondering if the show isn’t overcorrecting with that character. In the opening scene, Chris casually reveals that he’s invented a device that can detect Chaos Emeralds across the span of the universe. The Blue Typhoon has to warp to Planet Breezy, so something Chris cooked up in his spare time can locate a faint signal across hundreds of millions of miles of open space. It strains believably and that’s before Chris sends Sonic a hover board he also invented. Having Chris mature from being a mentally ill child is nice but turning him into this improbably brilliant inventor pushes too far in the opposite direction. (Not to mention it sidelines Tails as the smart one, reducing the fox to simply a pilot.)

And what about Eggman? He’s yet to do anything actually useful in this season thus far. He follows the Sonic and gang to Breezy. Rouge continues to fuck up his plan, this time by having Bokkun bring sake and rice cakes to the igloo, shaped like his head, that the doctor is hanging out in. Eggman immediately downs the booze and passes the fuck out. (Decoe and Bocoe do too, which raises some real questions.) Considering the mere sight of a rice ball was enough to send 4Kids censors into a blind panic, it is unsurprising to read that this entire sequence was cut from the dub. But it amuses me to know there’s an officially endorsed-by-Sega cartoon where Eggman gets blackout drunk.  

This episode also seems to confirm that Rouge is just doing this shit because she wants to own the shiny, shiny emeralds. This reveal sets up a last minute plot twist that pissed me off. While taking a bath — a scene that was not cut from the dub, presumably because she’s wearing her gloves the whole time for some reason — Rouge realizes the Chaos Emerald is a fake. It turns out this entire episode was a wild goose chase, a massive waste of time. Why the Metarex created a fake Chaos Emerald, which apparently put off a convincing enough energy signature to fool Chris’ super-duper machine, may or may not be important later. But it does reveal this entire episode as superfluous filler. 

And that’s disappointing, especially when most of the rest of the episode is underwhelming. I guess the season would be over too quickly if Sonic and the gang immediately found the other planets containing the Chaos Emeralds. But the show has to find better ways to occupy its time than with lame filler episodes like this. [5/10]