After a fourth episode that brought the crazy like a crazy delivery boy bringing crazy to a crazy party that wasn’t crazy enough, you have to feel like the director of the fifth installment of Knuckles was scrabbling to work out how the hell they were going to follow up such an innovative and vibrantly strange thirty minutes of television. The short answer is, they couldn’t have, even if they somehow managed to score a Jim Carrey cameo and he managed to crawl out of your screen that the little girl from The Ring and the simple fact is that even though “Reno, Baby” manages to finally push some plot along, it just can’t compare to the sight of Adam Pally living Knuckles’ life story while participating in a hallucinatory rock opera while dressed as the main character.
So, I guess it’s back to being business as usual in Knuckles’ penultimate episode – luckily, usual in the world of Sonic The Hedgehog is still pretty trippy.
After battling bounty hunters and tripping balls on a vision quest, Wade Whipple and Knuckles have finally made it to Reno for the bowling tournament and while participating in the sport that the presenters on ESPN 8 (“The Ocho!”) refer to as poor man’s baseball may be daunting enough, it’s nothing compared to the stress of meeting his estranged, bowling champion father, “Pistol” Pete Whipple. Thankfully, Knuckles is on hand to help guide his trainee warrior through an awkward conversation – although some of his directions may be a tad too blunt. However, subtle doesn’t seem to be high on Pistol Pete’s daily agenda as he arrives looking resplendent in a glittering Union Jack suit, cape and top hat and after a rocky start, the two begin to Bond much to the worry of Wade mother, Wendy, who doesn’t want her son hurt again.
Meanwhile, corrupt G.U.N. agents Mason and Willoughby are brought before the villainous Buyer to answer for their failure to capture Knuckles – twice – but after each party lays out their reasons for why they’re doing what they’re doing, the beared inventor give them one final chance and rearms them to help him power his latest (and probably dangerous) creation.
Before you know it, the tournament begins and while Pistol Pete predictably zooms up the ranks, Wade does extremely well too and the final looks like it has every chance to be father vs son in the final.
However, with Mason and Willoughby back in action and Peteproving himself to not exactly be the stand up guy Wade thinks he is and as a result, our hero has to make an agonising choice between his mother and sister (well, mostly his mother) and Knuckles.
Even though I already covered this in my opening, following up possibly one of the wildest episodes of TV you’ll see this year was going to be utterly impossible, so “Reno, Baby” quickly settles back into the show’s usual rhythms. However, even though we get a lot of inevitable moving around of pieces in order to get the stakes appropriately high for the season finale, the fact we now have a bowling tournament as our backdrop means that Knuckles continues to go hard with its jokey absurdity. In fact, it’s actually a shame we didn’t get to spend more time with the tournament as it’s crammed with colourful teams with names like Ball Busters and Split Happens and too many blink-and-you’ll-miss-them visual gags to count. Essentially a PG rated, multicolored merging of Kingpin and Dodgeball, it continues to uphold Knuckles’ exceptionally high quality when it comes to its genuinely exquisite production design and the icing on the cake is Cary Elwes mincing around in the epicentre, hamming it up something fierce with a costume so obnoxiously patriotic, it should be made compulsory wear everytime the Olympics comes around.
While we sort of skip the whole bowling thing in the form of a fun montage (Ah, god bless the sports montage – where would be be without it?), it’s understandable when you consider his much sudden heavy lifting the episode a tyalky has to do. Not only are we introduced the Pistol Pete to the point that we even get a last minute betrayal, but we finally get to spend more time with Rory McCann’s bushy buyer who reveals a rather tenuous connection to Dr. Robotnik (he worked for him – that’s it). While this is a somewhat bland origin, the show drives it home with a neat little scene where he “kills” one of the Robotnik drones in moment highly reminiscent of Judge Doom unaliving that Toon shoe in Who Framed Roger Rabbit – although thankfully nowhere near as traumatic. Weirdly enough, while the Buyer’s motivation feels fairly basic, Ellie Taylor’s Agent Mason actually reveals a motive that actually makes sense as she’s defiantly uncomfortable with the idea of alien woodland creatures suddenly rocking up from another dimension and leaving their nuclear powered quills lying around the place. To be fair, she has a point.
This ever so slightly more serious character work pops up again with a surprisingly moving moment when Wendy warns Wade about his father. While my bingo card for 2024 certainly didn’t include a scene where Stockard Channing takes time out from chatting with a large, red echidna about getting a massage to giving a heartfelt speech about her divorce, I’m certainly glad it happened to add a smidgen of gravitas to a magnificently silly show. However, I have to say, possibly the most surprising aspect of the episode is the fact that I was today years old when I found out that ESPN 8 – The Ocho is actually a real thing and not a fictional show created purely for Dodgeball: A True Underdog Story (cut me some slack on my ignorance, yeah, I’m as British as Pistol Pete’s waistcoat).
A step down from the fever-dream excellence of episode 4 doesn’t necessarily mean that Knuckles is on a downward turn, but with all the character stuff for the finale essentially set up, it’ll be interesting to see how much money Paramount and Sega still have left in the kitty to splurge on a big finish. Still, with Wade’s necessary betrayal of Knuckles still to be addressed, hopefully the show will give us a good balance of lavish action and childishly silly pathos as the wait for Sonic The Hedgehog 3 begins in earnest.
Will this episode bowl you over? No more than usual, no – but the show still continues to be nicely up my alley. Ok, time to strike the bowling puns…
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