Sonic Boom, Episode 2.43: Chain Letter

Sonic Boom, Episode 2.43: Chain Letter

Original Air Date: September 2nd, 2017

The title of the ninety-fifth episode of "Sonic Boom" had me hoping it would be about Sonic and friends getting sent a letter about the ghost of a dead girl who will haunt them unless they pass it along to seven friends. Instead, the titular "Chain Letter" is simply the kicking-off point to the plot. When Eggman receives such a message on social media platform FriendSpace, he's remiss to realize he lacks the proper amount of friends to forward the bad-luck-causing letter to. This sees the villain physically going around Hedgehog Village and begging people to become his fake internet friends. He goes so far as asking Sonic and the other heroes to add him on FriendSpace. When the villain proves so annoying, bombarding the hedgehog with notifications and stale memes, Sonic un-"friends" him. This is such a crushing blow to Eggman's ego that he invents a brand new social media platform called Scrambler, designed with the sole purpose of allowing everyone to use it except Sonic. When Scrambler actually becomes extremely popular, our blue hero is annoyed by his exclusion from the superstar app. 

Internet culture moves extremely fast. What is trending on Twitter or Instagram today will be utterly forgotten in a week or two. Since making television and movies – to say nothing of animation – is a crushingly slow process in comparison, big budget shows and films can find themselves woefully behind the tide by the time they become available to the public. In its first season, "Sonic Boom" was still cracking jokes about Justin Bieber as if he was chubby-cheeked child star when he was, in fact, a grizzled 22 year old. Which is to say: This show taking on social media was always going to be a disaster full of hopelessly out-of-date references and antiquated pop culture callbacks. 

You can see this immediately. The social media platform at the center of the story is called FriendSpace, which seems to be largely inspired by Myspace and Friendster, both of which were awash in chain letters and other bullshit. Those are such old shout-outs that there's a good chance the people reading these words right now don't know what they are! In operation, "FriendSpace" seems to function a little bit more like Facebook, in the way you "friend" people, tag them in photographs, and how notifications pop up. The script at least acknowledges that such a platform – which several people talk about using on their computers holy shit – is the social media app of choice for old people. What does it position as the hip, young alternative that is beloved by the trend-chasing glamouratti? SnarkChat, an obvious spoof of Snapchat. When was the last time someone sent you anything on Snapchat? In 2024, if you're messaging people on Snapchat, you might as well be sending them a carrier pigeon. They'll be dead by the time they read it. 

If "Chain Letter" was out-of-date when it first aired, watching it seven years after the fact is truly like stepping back in time. Simply the fact that everyone refers to connecting with people on these platforms as "friend"ing seems ancient. None of us want friends anymore. We want followers. Social media has changed so much over the last decade. There's a scene here where Amy and Knuckles are sending each other messages, chatting and laughing at jokes. Nobody used social media to talk to their actual friends anymore! That's what Discord and Telegram are for, applications that very well may become abandoned ghost towns by the time this review goes up. Social media is for becoming outraged, for watching the world decay in real time. The people in this episode use social media like a bunch of old boomers, sharing faux-inspirational quotes with Minions slapped on them. The only accurate thing about social media this episode gets right is Sonic rushing to make a Scrambler account simply so he won't be left out. Remember when everyone jumped over to BlueSky and Threads, platforms that are desolate wastelands now? Fear Of Missing Out still drives a lot of online traffic, even if it can't sustain a community. 

"Chain Letter's" writer Peter Saisselin couldn't have imagined the way TikTok or AI or Cryptocurrency would make the world worse in bold, new ways. 2017 also wasn't that long ago. It was still the post-Trump era, when it became clear that the spread of misinformation online could have disastrous effects in the real world. (Which is referenced in a quick line about "the Mayor's private e-mail server.") The episode is certainly not socially aware enough to take on a menace like that but it does get one thing right: We are inundated with bullshit on social media. In 2024, it's not clickbait, pictures of people's lunches, and chain letters. Instead, it's conspiracy theories about how Democrats drink baby blood or disturbingly uncanny "artwork" a robot burnt down a patch of rain forest to churn out. And ads. Mostly, it's lots and lots of fucking ads. That is the endgame of Facebook and Twitter and all the rest stealing our personal data to sell to the highest bidder, a habit sardonically referred to in the script. The scene where Eggman and his robot assistants conceive of Scrambler – which, in 2024, would definitely have an easily copyrighted spelling like Scrmblr – details the various ways social media is designed to get people's attention and placate our need for admiration without anyone putting in actual effort. This was before the algorithm started ruling our lives, when every thought your brain farted out wasn't instantly swarmed by porn-bots. The effect is more or less the same, however. Our minds are now deafened by an ever-present storm of distraction, making it difficult to accomplish anything. 

There's a scene in "Chain Letter" where Sonic is walking through the village looking at the citizens, as they wander around hunched over their phones, their faces lit by a little screen, glued to inconsequential internet chatter. This is not that different from a type of old person scolding so commonplace that it has been reduced to a two word phrase: Phone bad. Either by keen observation of the human condition or sheer coincidence, Saisselin's script does get at a deeper truth. Eggman launches Scrambler. It becomes a hit. Everyone on the island is using it. He has thousands of online friends... And he still feels so alone. Cliched as it is to say it, the fact is online fame and attention is not nearly as gratifying as we've all been led to believe. Humans still exist in the real world and we still crave that face-to-face interaction. To hear another person's voice, to feel their warmth next to us, to smell their B.O. wafting up our noses. Our brains have been tricked enough to give us a dopamine hit for every like and heart and retweet and follow and stitch we get. That does nothing to keep us from being increasingly isolated in a world that's melting down. Maybe the scolding old people are right. A look around at the state of things presents the hard-to-deny fact that phone is bad.

"Sonic Boom's" attempt to take on what is new and fresh with a graying, arthritic approach ends up getting a lot of silly shit wrong while also accidentally nailing a few other aspects. At the end of the episode, Sonic confronts Eggman about Scrambler. The two have a heart-to-heart, concluding with Sonic finally accepting Eggman's friend request... Only for the mad doctor to unfriend him. Getting everyone hooked on Scrambler could've been a villainous ploy of Eggman's, a part of his latest scheme to rule the globe. Sonic suspects as much. Instead, his entire motivation is no more complicated than wanting to spite someone who hurt his feelings. I'm going to promote this review on an application bought out – and made substantially less functional – by a billionaire because his pop star ex-wife left him. As I write this, a failed casino owner who conned his way into the White House by weaponizing internet culture war bullshit, on his way to an attempted coup and dismantling of democracy, is trying another go at it. And why? Because he got made fun of him at a dinner thirteen years ago. The world does revolve around the petty, childish whims of rich assholes. A tech mogul sinking billions into a new start-up simply so he can point at one specific person and scream "Up yours!" at them is so plausible, it barely needs to be commented on. As much as I hate to give Aaron Sorkin any credit, he was right about that. 

At the end of the episode, having completed his goal, Eggman deletes Scrambler. This enraged the villagers but Eggman doesn't mind. He's decided that having 500 million enemies is as good as a few friends. This is an amusing conclusion that furthers one of the primary running gags of this show. Despite being an evil genius capable of manufacturing massive weapons of war, Eggman still has the mentality of a moody kid. This is very clear in the scene where he meets Sonic and friends on the soccer field, petulantly whining that they should be his pretend cyber-buddies. It's funny but it feeds back into that dispiriting truth, that pathetic personal grievances too often motivate powerful men. As much as we hate the likes of Eggman, Elon, and ExxonMobil CEO Darren Woods, they are still human beings. Eggman goes around the village, asking people to be his friend, to like him. When they inevitably say no, he walks off in a huff. It is disturbingly easy to imagine Musk or Trump doing that exact thing. How many of the architects of our mutual doom have been inspired by an unfulfilled need to be liked? How many are desperate to have a simple desire for affection sated?

I feel this review got kinda dark. Let me wrap up by saying that "Chain Letter," as factually inept but secretly depressing as it might be, did make me laugh a decent amount. There is a shockingly fucked-up joke about Dave repeatedly hitting Old Man Monkey with his car. It keeps going! Another quality stretched-out gag involves the increasingly nonsensical lingo social media platforms use for basic features, which climaxes in an amusingly sarcastic wink from Sonic. There's some groaners, about old people not understanding technology, the Meh Burger complaint box, or the use of the phrase "fleek." However, I guess it was all worth it for a funny pong reference. Who doesn't love a good pong reference? 

Now that I think about it though... If Eggman had no friends on FriendSpace, who sent him the chain letters in the first place? Maybe the ghost of the dead girl did it. That's scary! So is being horribly left-behind on trends, the pathetic loneliness at the heart of all social media, and the tech giants that run them. I guess that means this was a spooktactular episode of "Sonic Boom" after all! Happy Halloween, Hedgehogs Can't Swim readers! Now, excuse me, I have to go check my notifications on Instagram and see how many upvotes a pithy comment I left on a Reddit post of a weird looking dog got... [7/10]