Sonic Boom, Episode 2.35: Mister Eggman

Sonic Boom, Episode 2.35: Mister Eggman

Original Air Date: July 8th, 2017

The second Sam Friedberger penned episode in a row is also an Eggman-centric story, I guess proving his favorite character is. While buying some evil supplies at the evil supplies store, it is revealed that Eggman never finished his degree in evil science. This means he's not actually a doctor. News of this spreads through the village quickly, resulting in Eggman being utterly humiliated. Determined to regain his pride, he goes back to evil university. There, he comes under the cruel tutelage of Professor Kingsford, the harshest teacher at the college. Eggman struggles with the various tests and projects, suffering greatly from anxiety and questioning whether he's cut out for being a supervillain after all. Meanwhile, his archenemies enjoy some time off. 

The homage-heavy run of "Sonic Boom's" second season continues with "Mister Eggman." The episode seemingly based its entire premise on one iconic line from "Austin Powers," about spending six years in Evil Medical School. The episode uses that as a jumping off point, continuing to put Eggman in highly relatable, everyday scenarios. If the previous installment showed us how Eggman would do in a demeaning, average job, this one puts him through the ego-deflating challenges of going back to school. As he was a mediocre hotel manager, he's a mediocre student too, suffering through humiliating failure one after another as he struggles to please a hyper-strict professor. We've all been there, man. 

All of this plays on an easy enough joke, designed to contrast Eggman's inflated image of himself as a master villain with a sadder, far more pathetic reality. In fact, this episode hammers home the image of Eggman as a sad sack wannabe. He repeatedly screws up in school, dropping his pencil, not doing the reading, flunking out on tests and projects. The entire kerfuffle also costs him his reputation, everyone in town mocking him and losing all respect for his threatening ability. By the half-way point, I was genuinely starting to feel bad for the guy. Sonic and the others have always called Eggman names or slung one-liners at him. Here, especially in a scene where Team Sonic plays keep-away with the last piece he needs for a class project, playful battle banter seems to have elevated to full-on bullying. I wasn't yelling "Leave Eggman alone!" at my TV but I was definitely starting to feel like Sonic was the asshole here. It's all at Eggman's expense, as his repeated villainy makes him an acceptable target. Yet the script putting him so totally into the role of a bullied outcast, a perpetual loser, made me look at the heroes in a much worse light. 

This puts "Mister Eggman" in a somewhat uneasy position as an episode. On one hand, we're obviously supposed to relate to Eggman. I think everyone, in their academic careers, has encountered that one teacher that seemed to have it out for them. When this pairs with a subject you aren't great at – for me, it was anything math related – it can result in going to class everyday being an anxiety-inducing nightmare. At the same time, we are clearly meant to derive some comedic pleasure from seeing Eggman in this position. It gets to the point that he's hanging out in Dave's basement as part of a study group, making the comparison that Eggman is merely a goofy nerd worthy of our scorn all too apparent. Are we suppose to cheer with Eggman or laugh at him? It's possible to do both but that requires a balance of tone that an eleven minute cartoon doesn't have time to invest in. The result is an episode that ends up feeling a bit more mean-spirited than I think was intended at times. 

Then again , it tracks that a village that is constantly being terrorized by Eggman would revel in any chance to mock him. And I mean "revel!" Within minutes of this episode starting, Staci calling up her sister to spread the hot gossip turns into a village wide musical number, just about everyone in town getting involved in the singing and dancing. Ya know, I gotta admire the "Sonic Boom" team for swinging for the fences with this one. An otherwise non-musical episode including a big musical number is usually a reliably amusing gag. All the more so when the song is – if not an instant toe-tapper – at least well realized enough that I didn't cringe all the way through it. I guess I have to take back what I said the other day about how "Sonic" characters breaking into song is usually a recipe for disaster. I want to say that the difference is that this is some Broadway musical style shenanigans, instead of a typical rock number... Except the episode also features a rock number, during a scene where Team Sonic have a montage of them having radicool adventures together now that they aren't spending all their time fighting Eggman. That's right, there's not one but two musical numbers in this episode and neither one made me want to rip my ears off. By the standards of this franchise, that's a massive success. 

A montage devoted to mocking the very concept of montages certainly isn't outside the norm for the kind of meta wackiness "Boom" specializes in. However, this episode is notable for how conceptual its gags get. This is most noticeable during an elaborate, and rather bizarre, nightmare Eggman has that features such unusual sights as a giant Sonic and Eggman bleating like a goat. That is followed shortly after an extended "Mission: Impossible" parody sequence. The episode has the typical jokes you expect of "Sonic Boom," like hyper-verbal banter about inconsequential things and jokes that lean on the fourth wall. (Like Sonic hoping he has more to do next week, a joke that only really works if you watch this episode and the previous one back-to-back.) Yet these two scenes definitely feel a little denser and wackier than is the norm for even this show.

Unfortunately, as amusingly out there as parts of this episode is, it still leads to a highly predictable ending. Eggman steals the test answers, gets everything wrong on the final exam, but because stealing the answers is what a villain would do, Eggman still passes. I guess the little children watching this cartoon in 2017 probably would've been caught off-guard by the subversion of "person did bad thing but succeeds anyway," when the double subversion of "Eggman fails anyway because Eggman sucks" would've been much funnier and more in line with the thesis of this episode. I did like him attempting a freeze frame at graduation, only to end up awkwardly standing in place for a few minutes. That's the kind of surrealism that elevated this episode for a handful of moments. 

Ultimately, this one is kind of a weird episode that feels a little bit like it tossed together a bunch of random ideas for gags into something resembling a solid whole. Having said that, I still laughed a decent amount. Eggman being forced to put up with mundane bullshit is almost always a good recipe for a "Sonic Boom" episode, even if this one missed the mark on a couple of key attributes. [7/10]