Sonic Boom, Episode 2.09: Multi-Tails

Sonic Boom, Episode 2.09: Multi-Tails

Original Air Date: January 7th, 2017

The ninth episode of "Sonic Boom's" second season returns to a classic story generating idea: What if, in his hubris, Tails invented a gadget that didn't work exactly as he planned? The fox builds a forcefield to protect the village from Eggman's attacks. This backfired when the villain simply digs under it. Feeling discouraged, Tails decides there needs to be more of him to go around. He creates a machine that can make copies of himself. However, this device also splits Tails' intelligence among the duplicates. Thus, each two tailed fox is kind of a doofus. Sonic and the others endeavor to clean up this mess. 

"Multi-Tails" has a relatable premise for an episode. I think all of us, from time to time, have wished we could clone ourselves. Maybe you wish there was more of you so you could complete all your tasks in the day. Maybe you would force your copy to go to work for you, while you stay at home and pursue hobbies, inevitably leading to some sort of clone uprising. Whatever the cause, it's an emotion rooted in frustration with our own limits. We can't be in two places at once. There's only so much time in the day. But if there were two or five of us wandering around, we could overcome these pesky obstacles. Or so we think.

Tails' reasons for building the copying machine are even more tragic than that. The limitation he hopes to overcome is his own intelligence. Tails is brilliant and can cook up all sorts of wacky inventions. Yet there are still things he can't predict, like Eggman having a big drilling machine at his disposals. Tails is enormously talented but he still feels like it's not enough. He can build almost anything but can't get past his own self-doubts, his own nagging insecurities that he has to always do better. This is spurned on mostly by Mayor Fink being an asshole to him but I also find it to be a relatable emotion. We're all going to fail sometimes, no matter how talented we are. Some of us are better at grappling with that than others. 

Unfortunately, "Multi-Tails" doesn't really utilize this idea. The natural end to this premise would be Tails realizing that it's okay that he can't solve every problem. That just one of him is good enough. That, even when he makes mistakes, he's still loved and accepted. Instead, Marine and Cedric Lachenaud's script goes for the far more prosaic moral of "friendship is magic." As Tails steps out of the copying machine, restored to his normal intelligence, his only thought is that he needs friends more than copies of himself. I'm not really sure how this moral tracks. If you're feeling discouraged about not being able to do enough, just... Hang out with your friends?? I, uh, guess that makes sense. 

Once again, I'm possibly (definitely) overthinking it. This is a simple children's cartoon, designed to make the seven-to-ten crowd laugh and not much else. To facilitate that goal, the Lachenauds repeatedly return to the gag of Tails, usually the smart one, acting like a simpleton. I would say that the writers greatly overestimate how amusing that idea is. The comedic subversion in the normally intelligent Tails being a fool wears off after one time. This episode keeps repeating it. The fox flying upward into a beam, assuming every game is Simon Says, or pestering people with repetitive questions is more annoying than amusing, 

The best gags in this episode play more off the idea of Tails being un-smart than actively showing it. The only one of those moments that made me laugh was when an idiot Tails tries to eat some soup with a fork. Otherwise, Knuckles getting a rare moment of insight around greater idiots is amusing. As is a running gag of a Tails asking Sticks "why," which comes around brilliantly in the final minutes. The funniest moments in the episodes come when Eggman - definitely the best straight man this show has - is forced to react to the incessant annoyance the lesser Tails put him through. A scene where he attempts to get out of the shower summons the kind of awkward laughs this show doesn't usually touch. 

Ya know what is notable about this episode though? Sticks uses some nun-chucks in one scene. The action scene here is not truly above the standards of "Boom's" typical underwhelming theatrics. However, seeing Sticks doing some chucking has some novelty to it. Another sign that maybe the animation budget was slightly increased in season two is that Eggman has a new model of Badnik. Some scorpion-bots with laser stingers crawl out of the ground at one point. That's kind of neat. Though the moment where Knuckles attempts to weaponize Tails' force field really baffled me a bit. The physics do not seem sturdy there, even by the standards of this program. 

Ultimately, "Multi-Tails" has a decent premise for an episode but only explores it in the shallowest of ways. It's as if the writers touch upon the idea of "Tails makes copies of himself but they're all really stupid" and more-or-less stopped there. There's a couple of decent gags but mark this down as one of the "Boom" episodes that didn't really work for me. [5/10]