Sonic Boom, Episode 1.50: Cabin Fever

Sonic Boom, Episode 1.50: Cabin Fever

Original Air Date: October 31st, 2015

Ya know, you would think I would’ve learned by now. When I saw that the fiftieth episode of “Sonic Boom” aired on October 31st of 2015, I got excited. Everyone knows that is Halloween and, if you’ve read this blog for any amount of time, you know Halloween is my favorite time of the year. When I read that this episode involved a dark and stormy night and tensions arising inside Amy’s cabin, I thought maybe this might be an episode befitting its air date. No such luck. “Cabin Fever” is just an ordinary episode of “Sonic Boom,” with no spookiness included. Considering how much Cartoon Network jerked this show around, I guess it shouldn’t be surprising that this episode airing on Halloween was a complete coincidence and not a deliberate move. 

Anyway... The Boom team are having a sand castle building contest on the beach, judged by Amy, when a storm starts to blow in. They decide to take shelter in her cabin. The pink hedgehog's micromanaging tendencies kick in immediately, quickly annoying her rowdy friends. Sonic soon uncovers a play Amy has written called "A Rose Without Thorns," where all the characters are clearly based on Amy and her friends. Feelings hurt by their mockery, Amy hides in the kitchen and the situation quickly spirals out of control. Only after the storm passes does Sonic realize his mistake. 

"Cabin Fever" is one of those Reid Harrison episodes of "Boom" that is trying to do a couple different things at once. Ostensibly, this is an episode about how you get sick of people after being stuck inside with them for too long, even if they are your good friends. That's what the title refers to. Since "Boom" only has eleven minutes to explore its premise, and is a farce anyway, tensions arise between the gang almost immediately. Soon, they are squabbling and arguing, to the point where there's genuine antagonism at one point. It all works out, because this is a goofy kids' show and these characters are all exaggerated to begin with. Yet I do wish the unfocused nature of the script didn't cause "Cabin Fever" to wander off to other topics so quickly. I wanted to see more of the Boom Team annoying and aggravating each other. 

The reason the episode's premise of friends slowly turning on each other never quite works out is because... That's not what it's really about. Instead, most everything that goes wrong in this episode is Amy's fault. The minute she sequesters all her friends in her cabin, she demands they play by her rules. She serves frilly snacks that the gang doesn't take seriously. Her attempts to get everyone to do girly arts-and-crafts with her goes off the rails immediately. I guess it is pretty rude when Sonic accidentally breaks the horn off Amy's glass unicorn. Nevertheless, I think she should know her own friends better than that. Amy should probably realize that these wild and crazy guys will not share her passion for quiet hobbies like this. 

In fact, Amy is kind of shitty to her friends. She demands they play along with these activities she suggested, expecting them to perfectly follow her orders. When Sonic and the others instead start goofing off, she gets increasingly offended. In fact, she spends the whole second half of this episode offended. Instead of acknowledging it's a little weird to essentially write fanfiction based on her real friends, Amy just whines at her friends reading her play at all. The climax of the episode is based on Sonic and the gang apologizing to Amy, via putting on a performance of her play. But I'm not sure Amy deserved an apology! She's kind of a bitch for no reason in this episode. 

Even this is not the true sole focus of this all-over-the-place episode. A large section in the middle rambles off with a totally different idea. After Amy storms into the kitchen, Society within the cabin immediately degrades into feudalism. Each friend sets up a base in a different part of the cabin, giving them old-timey names and trading goods for access. Sticks invades and conquers Tails' "Workbenchia" while he's visiting Sonic's Kingdom of Television. Knuckles becomes a tyrant and uses his control of the thermostat, from within his cozy blanket fort, to turn the rest of the cabin into a frozen wasteland. To see polite, modern society fall apart into medieval factions so quickly is a pretty good absurd joke that Harrison easily could've build the entire episode around. 

Instead, "Cabin Fever" remembers its premise of Amy's play and centers the last act around that. This is also a fascinating idea that could've been explored more. By writing about her friends, Amy is showing how she perceives her closest pals. Which is at odds with their own conceptions of self. The joke is that Amy's versions are right on the mark. "Sonar" is an egomaniac, which Sonic derides while proving what an egomaniac he is. "Shoulders" is a dullard strongman, "Taylor" is a fearful fox in Sonar's shadows, and "Twigs" is a delusional conspiracy theorist. 

The idea that the version of us that live in our friends' heads is different from how we define ourselves is a fascinating one, ripe for comedy. Harrison gets at a little bit of that but mostly just plays with the joke of the gang not recognizing their own flaws. Or, when they do – such as Tails leaping between Sonic's legs after thunder strikes, just as "Taylor" was written to do – it is sarcastically acknowledged. Yet more wasted potential! (Though I guess Tails having a fear of lightning is consistent across all "Sonic" media.)

Honestly, this episode probably would've been funnier if it had just presented Amy's play in full. In the finale, we see snippets of it – with Dave the Intern going in drag as "Annie Rose" – but I think an episode displaying Amy's own weird fixations would've accomplished what this script clearly wanted to do better. Despite its unfocused quality, the cast does get some laughs out of the material. Travis Willingham's doofy reading of Knuckles repeatedly asking if he's the topic of discussion or Roger Craig Smith's embittered defense of TV got laughs out of me. 

It helps to have such a strong cast is delivering funny one-liners when the script is as scattered as this one. A funny idea, "Cabin Fever" probably needed more time in the workshop to really be sharpened into an amusing eleven minutes. [6/10]