I didn’t like Knuckles’ show, but as a long-time Sonic fan, one of his six episodes caught my attention for several reasons. Firstly, it’s easily the most representative of the show’s problems with excluding its titular hero, but it also drops a huge lore bomb in the wildest way possible. All of this is related to the gameplay, which is one of the weak points of the series. Spoilers ahead!
2006’s Sonic the Hedgehog was widely derided when it launched on PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360 for being one of the most broken games in the series. Although it had some great character moments for Shadow and the rest of Team Dark, and the soundtrack remains action-packed, Sonic ’06 is considered one of the worst games in the series’ three decades and currently holds a cult status. 46 on Metacritic. However, for some reason, the Knuckles series implements the game’s complex story into the live-action world in an unconventional way, to say the least.
In Episode 4, “The Flames of Disaster”, Knuckles disappears for almost its entire run. Despite this, we still learn a lot about Knuckles’ backstory that the live-action Sonic movies didn’t touch on. But how does the show do this? Musical number. I’m not joking.
Wade Whipple, played by Adam Pally, enters a dream state to learn from Knuckles without having to actually interact with him. The dream is for Wade to dress up as Knuckles and act out a moment from his past to gain some of his skills, and for the entire part to take the form of a musical. I won’t go into some specific moments about the musical side of things, but the entire sequence feels like an incredibly neat way to explore Knuckles’ past without actually having to have Idris Elba record lines or animate the entire sequence. At least Bali and everyone else in the scene have a blast.
Wade’s play depicts Knuckles’ journey to confront a creature that is never named but bears a striking resemblance to… The devil, the monster that appears in Sonic ’06 and which leads to the end of the world. In the film’s continuity, Knuckles defeats the creature that may be Satan by finding the Flames of Calamity within his “Warrior Heart,” granting him his superpowers.
This deviates from the source material in several ways. First, the Flames of Calamity was a name for Satan and not a source of energy, and second, Knuckles was not connected to the story of Satan at all. In the games, it is Silver the Hedgehog (who first appeared in Sonic ’06) who faces off against Satan. He travels through time to try to stop Satan from destroying the world, then encounters the monster again in the future. Sonic ’06 has a lot of time travel antics that we won’t go into here, but Iblis and Knuckles aren’t related to each other in the game at all.
Silver has yet to appear in the real-life Sonic universe, so it’s unclear whether making the Flames of Disaster and Iblis part of Knuckles’ story is foreshadowing this plot or using the material without committing to a movie based on it. Paramount wants the Sonic movies to have Avengers-style events, so it’s not out of the question that Silver will appear and Knuckles will be more involved in Iblis’ story. But either way, this is unlikely to be the focus of Sonic the Hedgehog 3, which will focus on Shadow the Hedgehog, who is voiced by Matrix actor Keanu Reeves.
