Sonic Boom, Episode 1.51: Counter Productive

Sonic Boom, Episode 1.51: Counter Productive

Original Air Date: November 7th, 2015

Ya know, I gotta hand it to the "Sonic Boom" writers. Even when dealing with episodes that are only eleven minutes long, it had to have been tricky to think up fifty-two distinct premises. It used to be common for TV seasons to run for a long amount of episodes but daily children's television remains pretty much the last domain where that is normal. And, as someone who has sat through over one hundred episodes of middling nineties cartoons, you tend to run out of genuinely novel ideas fairly quickly. While "Sonic Boom" has leaned on parody and well-trot troupes to extend its episode count plenty of times, I do admire how the show runners have kept "Boom" fairly true to its original premise all throughout season one. 

Perhaps this is only because "Sonic Boom's" original premise – what if Sonic and his friends basically starred in a workplace sitcom, where the "work" is being a hero/villain? – is extremely mutable. This especially comes to light in "Counter Productive," another episode that attempts to expand the Boom Team's rogue gallery outside of Eggman and his associates. There's only so much you can do with an egg-fixated mad scientist, after all, so it's pretty common for "Sonic" media to eventually add further bad guys to the setting. Alongside the Thunderbolt Society and Nominatus, this episode introduces the fearsome threat of... Charlie.

"Counter Productive" is also another episode that begins in one place before wildly digressing to an entirely different one. During a contest to see who can stay up longer, Knuckles stumbles upon a TV interview with Soar the Eagle. Soar's new book seeks to teach people how to be productive and includes, as part of its philosophy, apologizing for past misdeeds and making up for them. This prompts Knuckles to find Charlie, a former apple salesman that he got fired a few years back with his antics. Charlie is now an archeologist, digging up mysterious technology built by the Ancients. Knuckles quickly integrates himself into Charlie's life, his attempts to make up for past mistakes actually ruining Charlie's life. This pushes the mild-mannered nerd into becoming a super villain. 

Attempting to analyze, as I do, episodes of "Sonic Boom" is tricky sometimes. This is just a goofy kids' show, after all, and frequently leaves little for me to dig into. About halfway through "Counter Productive," I couldn't help but wonder if this episode is inspired by how, usually, we create our own villains. Everybody has had moments in life where they've been careless, selfish, or rude. It's human nature. We're all going to fuck up sometimes. And, inevitably, some folks only ever see us in these bad moments. I suppose I'm an optimist, since I think the majority of people are not actively acting maliciously most of the time. Typically, we're all trying to do our best. Yet we still manage to piss some folks off and give them cause to hate us. And, let's face it, most of the time it's our own fault. We all make mistakes. We're all assholes occasionally. The unavoidable consequence of that is, sometimes, people will be mad at you. 

To put it another way: We all must face the consequences of our own actions. We all most reap what we sow. This is a common narrative tactic in fiction to give the antagonist a little more dramatic heft. If the hero genuinely screwed up and inadvertently led to the creation of his own enemy, it makes their rivalry more compelling. (This is especially common in superhero comics and their cinematic adaptations.) "Counter Productive" seems headed in this direction. Knuckles' buffoonish actions results in Charlie devoting his life to ruining Knuckles'. His attempt to make everything better and heal a past wound just makes it all worst. Maybe the moral could be interpreted here as "We can't repent for everything. The best thing we can do sometimes is just move on with our lives." As Charlie initially does before Knuckles just keeps pushing it. 

It's hard to tell if that was the intended message of "Counter Productive" though. Because this is a goofy comedy show and tends to favor wacky gags over all else. In execution, this means "Counter Productive" is an episode devoted to Knuckles deciding to randomly ruin a regular Joe's life. Knuckles is such a big dum-dum that he doesn't realize his attempts to help someone, to earn their forgiveness, is just making them hate him more. Yet the joke operates more like "Let's laugh at what a colossal idiot Knuckles is." In effect, that makes "Counter Productive" about watching Knuckles be a belligerent dumbass until it drives a perfectly sane person to madness. 

"Sonic Boom," in one of its more subversive moods, could've made a sharp eleven minutes out of this idea. Of watching a so-called hero act like anything but. Instead, the joke is just reduced to Knuckles doing the least helpful thing in every scenario. That means throwing out Charlie's lunch, destroying the artifact he uncovered, getting him fired, and alienating him from his wife. Watching Knuckles just be a doofus over and over again has its values but this one isn't the most inspired use of that idea. It gets tiresome quickly. 

The result of Knuckles' incompetence, of Charlie using the Ancients' technology to make himself into a super villain, leads to probably the funniest bits though. Namely, that would be Charlie's less-than-impressive attempts at being a bad guy. He has some sort of freeze ray in his armor and briefly uses it to be intimidating, before screwing everything up. From there, he just prettily torments Knuckles like a schoolyard bully. He steals his lunch money and dunks him in a garbage can. Contrasting someone calling themselves a super villain with actions that amount to petty dickery is a decent joke this show has gotten good mileage out of before. 

Instead of running with that idea, "Counter Productive" bends in an even weirder direction. Charlie's wife kicks him out because she says he "never stands up for himself." Later, Knuckles decides to stand up to his own bully, namely Charlie. It bends towards an unfocused moral about school bullying and how you shouldn't let people walk all over you. Yet it's hard to root for Knuckles when his own foolishness is what brought Charlie to this point. Charlie similarly looses all sympathy when his wife takes him back and further encourages his evolution towards super-crime. In effect, everyone is a dick here and any meaningful message is lost. 

Not that I demand cromulent morals from my children's cartoons. Least of all "Sonic Boom," a cartoon that excels at being flippant. Yet "Counter Productive" just feels unfocused, swirling around various ideas in a desperate attempt to make us laugh. Which it never quite does, as the episode's slapstick feels more sadistic than amusing. While it's one-liners are all pretty uninspired. This one probably should've stuck to its initial idea, of Sonic and Knuckles both trying to stay up for days on end in increasingly wacky ways. Or of mocking the self-help book industry Soar is obviously a parody of. Instead of going in this tangent of Knuckles creating his own archenemy by being an utter doofus. [5/10]