Sonic Boom, Episode 1.37: Next Top Villain
Original Air Date: August 1st, 2015
With fifteen episodes left in "Sonic Boom's" first season, it's apparent the writers and showrunners had their favorite minor supporting characters. The lady walrus with the constantly endangered baby was a gag they could return to reliably. Comedy Chimp shows up any time they want to make a gag about the media. Fastidious Beaver is there whenever they want to tell a joke about grammar policing fuddy-duddies. Yet it's been fun to watch Dave the Intern, the most one-note of minor joke characters, evolve in weird ways. Probably created just because the show needed an underachieving teen to work the local burger joint, Dave has become the second most reoccurring adversary in "Boom," albeit an incompetent one. That position was solidified with "Next Top Villain," an episode where Dave is unambiguously the main character.
In fact, Dave's underwhelming attempts at being a super villain is what motivates the entire episode. His mom, disappointed with his criminal antics thus far, tells the capybara to go out and start associating with a higher class of evildoers. After Eggman mocks him, a wacky series of events leads to Dave holding the barrel-chested doctor captive in his basement. He attempts to use Eggman's machines to begin a new reign of terror. Instead, his own ineptitude makes him as much of a danger to himself as anyone else. Sonic is forced to rescue Eggman, much to his annoyance, if he hopes to stop Dave's maladroit rampage.
Dave has always been a stock-parts dork. He was designed to fit the universally recognized visual shorthand of a teenage poindexter. You see this in his braces, his gangly appearance and acne, his breathy voice, and his lackluster performance at a demeaning fast food job. "Next Top Villain" decides to double-down even further on these Milhouseian signifiers. Dave lives in his mom's basement. (Which really isn't a big deal for a teenager, so I'm surprised it wasn't paired with the reveal that Dave is actually in his thirties.) She is overbearing and undermines his attempts at being mature by treating him like a child. Maybe that's because he's still fixated on childish things, as he still plays with dolls which he insists on calling action figures. He even uses an inhaler in one scene, further cementing Dave as a massive fucking dweeb. The only thing that's missing are the traditional Coke bottle glasses and impassionate opinions about "Star Trek," comic books, anime, tabletop gaming, or some other marginalized passion.
Obviously being one myself, I chafe against such cliched depictions of geekdom. Making Dave a standard nebbish feels like "Sonic Boom" bullying a large portion of its main audience. And not in a knowing, self-effacing, "Weird" Al kind of way. Gags like this "punch down" by relying on antiquated stereotypes. Lots of people live with their parents these days, for many complicated reasons! Everyone loves superheroes now! You can still collect toys and live a fulfilling, well-rounded life! What does braces and asthma have to do with social awkwardness and weird behavior? "Next Top Villain" even seems to curb a joke from nerd culture minstrel show "The Big Bang Theory," by keeping Dave's mom as a shrieking off-screen presence with an ambiguously Jewish-Brooklyn accent. I would think, even by 2015, the widespread understanding of what makes someone in an Urkel – usually neurodivergent brain patterns, let's face it – would be more nuanced.
As much as I want to deride the entire episode as a lazy indulgence of freeter character tropes, it's arguable that Reid Harrison's script gets at the darker side of nerdiness. It's not Dave's mannerisms, his clumsiness and niche passions, that make him a mockable loser. It's his seething rage at a world that refuses to recognize his self-appointed brilliance. Like many "Sonic Boom" episodes, this one vividly depicts a character's wild fantasy. In the opening scene, Dave appears as a Magneto-looking supervillain. He uses his massive powers to destroy Sonic and his friends in a variety of elaborate ways. He reduces Sonic to a pair of charred sneakers with a laser blat. He turns Amy and Tails into an ice cube with his freeze breath. He commands demonic-looking bears to attack Knuckles and Sticks, who are presumably then torn to shreds off-screen.
All of this is a little south of your usual childish power fantasies. Dave does not put any effort into learning skills that will make him a more efficient supervillain. He wants all the power without any of the work to get there. This kind of grandiose entitlement, when paired with furious daydreams of violent revenge on the people around him, feels all too familiar in 2022. It's the same attitude that drives so-called fans to harass and threaten actresses, causes the terminally online to engineer wide-spread cyberbullying campaigns, and what makes incels do everything incels do.
Of course, Dave is ultimately harmless. He's too big of a jabroni to ever make his aspirations of destruction and domination anything but delusions. He spends the whole episode wearing a cardboard helmet and a table cloth cape, a crude facsimile of a proper bad guy get-up. Writer Reid Harrison is interested in goofy side-gags, not in deep explorations of the toxicity inherent in the nerd archetype. Dave's subpar attempts at villainy usually have the opposite effect he intended. His "freeze ray" just provides Sonic and friends with a pleasantly cool breeze. His heat ray inadvertently creates a disco light-show. HIs horde of deadly animals are adorable bunny rabbits to cuddle. Even after he jacks Eggman's Octobot, his ineptitude prevents him from damaging anyone but his own home and his pride. These are all solid gags that got pretty good laughs out of me, especially once they come back around at the end with Dave's mom's reaction to his day spree of chaos.
Clever visual jokes or circular writing like that is what saves an episode otherwise preoccupied with pandering to outdated cultural misconceptions. Reid Harrison's best episodes usually pile in the jokes but, unfortunately, that tendency backfires some here. "Next Top Villain" has many funny lines. A gag about quarters comes back brilliantly at the final moment. Sonic seemingly abandoning his friends in the midst of the action got me to chuckle. As did his melodramatic regret about mocking Dave, a call-back to that opening fantasy. What Cubot and Orbot get up to while Eggman is imprisoned is an amusing scene.
I'm mixed on this one too. It has hilarious moments like most Reid Harrison eps (He is probably the best writer of season 1, with Tails' Crush being his only real stinker imo). But the instantly dated 'Big Bang Theory'-esc jabs at nerd culture and Dave as a character, really rub me the wrong way.
ReplyDeleteI also just think Dave doesn't make for a good protagonist. He is good for a supporting role, or a side villain, but not a main role. His jokes run thin too quickly, and is not an interesting enough character for the spotlight. He is just a teenage loser, that's it. It's not deep. Unless if Sonic Boom really wants to make some huge statement or dissection about nerd culture or whatever, but this show isn't smart enough to something like that, nor does it have the runtime.