Sonic Boom, Episode 1.38: New Year's Retribution

Sonic Boom, Episode 1.38: New Year's Retribution

Original Air Date: August 8th, 2015

Holidays are, traditionally speaking, a time to be with the people you love. I doubt anyone spends President's Day with their mom or favorite uncle but all the big ones -- Christmas, Thanksgiving, Valentine's, Yom Kippur -- involve spending time with your family and/or romantic partner. Even lesser festivals, like July 4th, Easter, or Memorial Day, are usually accompanied by big family meals of some sort. Yet not everybody has loved ones to spend these festivals with. This can make holidays times of bitter isolation. For lonely, miserable bastards, New Year's Eve is, in many ways, the most melancholy of all celebrations. Not only are you by yourself when everyone else is partying, you also get to ruminate on another twelve months wasted, another set of hopes dashed and dreams deferred. 

But enough about my depression! How does this relate to Sonic the Hedgehog? Well, ya see, the thirty-eighth episode of "Sonic Boom" revolves around one year ending and another rolling in. As Sonic and friends prepare for their New Year party, Eggman attacks... And is, once again, humiliated. As midnight draws closer, he gets increasingly depressed that his New Years resolution – to finally defeat Sonic – will go unfulfilled. That's when he gets an idea: Build a device that will slow down time, giving him further chances to defeat Sonic before the clock strikes twelve. As the minutes before midnight are stretched, Eggman and Sonic face-off against each other in a variety of challenges. 

Considering going fast is Sonic's primary superpower and his entire ethos, I'm surprised there haven't been more stories devoted to machines that slow him down. He sometimes has his speed limited, by circumstances or age, or even has it magically zapped away. Yet I'm not thinking of any other plot where someone invents a slow-motion ray in order to render Sonic merely a normally fast hedgehog. In the movies, we got to see Sonic observe the rest of the world as frozen and sluggish. Doing the same thing to him would be a fittingly ironic obstacle for the hero. Doesn't every speedster hero deserve their own version of The Turtle? Eggman even has a pretty good trap here, as Sonic immediately destroying the slow ray will just trap everyone else at 0.25 speed. The hedgehog is forced to play by his rules. 

I guess you don't see more slow-motion rays in fiction because it's a pretty improbable idea, even as far as sci-fi technology goes. Somehow, if you weren't effected by time slowing down, the now frozen oxygen molecules around you would still make it impossible to move. More practically speaking, everyone slurring their speech just sounds funny. Plausibility is not a concern for a comedy show like this. (Which is evident in the absurdly off-hand way Eggman powers his latest miraculous gizmo.) So "Boom" immediately subverts the idea for comedy. Sonic and Eggman being stuck in a world where everything moves at a crawl results in many ridiculous sights. Lasers and weapons are rendered sluggish, so the two have to find other ways to fight each other. This amusingly results in ping-pong balls, checkers, and coins slowly twirling through the air, much to the duo's annoyance.

While the slow-motion gimmick is a very solid, organically funny premise, "New Year's Retribution" is good mostly because it gives us more insight into Eggman's personality. This is another episode where the villain's depression plays a role. No matter all the glorious, ridiculous machines and robots he's effortlessly invented, Eggman still feels like a failure. Rolling into the New Year by playing checkers with his robot lackies makes him feel pathetic. Despite his massive ego, Eggman can only measure his own value by crushing his enemy. His self-worth is dependent on other people. And maybe that's because, as a throwaway line of dialogue reveals, Eggman had a father whose approval he was desperate to earn. This recharacterizes the villain's desire to rule the world merely as another way to make his presumably distant dad respect him. Damn, why do the funny "Sonic" cartoon inevitably give Eggman the more tragic backstories? 

If Eggman's emotional hang-ups are one of my favorite things about this show, the way his depressive episodes are usually resolved is one of its best running jokes. Eggman doesn't want to have a lame New Years. He cooks up a dastardly scheme under the pretense of destroying his archenemy. This actually plays out as Sonic and Eggman spending the extended minutes before midnight competing against each other. They play board games, have contests, and finish the night with a dance-off. In other words: They have fun together. When Eggman was at his loneliest, Sonic was there to distract him, entertain him, and keep him company. They even acknowledge this in the final minutes of the episode, when Eggman realizes his time-freezing device prevented anyone else from seeing his victory. Once again, "Boom" comes to the suitably ironic conclusion. Eggman thinks Sonic is his greatest foe but he's actually the closest thing the mad scientist has to a best friend. 

This is a Reid Harrison script, the writer packing in as many jokes as possible per usual. Unlike his previous, derivative episode, he makes sure the jokes are genuinely funny this time. (This is also the third of Reid's scripts to include a dance scene. Read into that what you will.) There's a number of nicely absurd moments here. Tails attempts to shorten the amount of time it'll take to decorate for the party by inventing a tinsel gun. This simply results in everyone, Sonic included, bullying him. There's an extended discussion, between Eggman and his geometrical sidekicks, about the philosophical quality of slow-cooked meat. While I've never given much thought to "Boom's" Mayor Fink character, his expected qualities as an underhanded and weaselly politician leads to a pretty funny awkward interview here. 

Easily the episode's silliest, and therefore best, reoccurring bit involves Knuckles. He has no idea how to celebrate New Year's and proceeds to mix it up with Easter, Halloween, Christmas, and Groundhog Day. He describes each of these other celebrations in similarly garbled, misunderstood ways. What would normally be a simple joke about Knuckles being an idiot is made much funnier by everyone else having no idea what he's talking about. New Year's celebrations are universal but, clearly, none of our other standard holidays exist in the "Boom" universe. 

 

In fact, this is the first holiday we've ever seen anyone celebrate in "Sonic Boom." All throughout this review, I was tempted to refer to the episode as taking place on December 31st. But I guess there's no way to know when the "Boom" year ends and when it begins. If they don't know what Christmas is, they probably don't know what the Gregorian calendar is either. (Though they still play "Auld Lang Syne" and drop a big ball at midnight, so clearly this celebration has something in common with Earthly traditions.) This makes Cartoon Network's decision to air this episode in August – probably a result of "Boom" constantly having its schedule fucked with – a little less irksome to me. Only a little.  Anyway, overall, "New Year's Retribution" balances rapid-fire goofball sight gags with a little more character introspection, which is really the ideal place sitcoms like this need to operate. [7/10]