I didn’t love the Knuckles show, but as a long-time Sonic fan, one of its six episodes stuck out to me for a few reasons. One, 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. It all ties into the game that’s considered one of the series’ low points. Spoilers ahead!
2006’s Sonic the Hedgehog was pretty widely derided when it launched on PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360 for being one of the most broken games in the franchise. Though it had some great character moments for Shadow and the rest of Team Dark, and the soundtrack is still full of bangers, Sonic ‘06 is considered one of the worst games in the series’ three decades and currently sits at a 46 on Metacritic. Yet, for some reason, the Knuckles show implements the game’s elaborate story into the live-action universe in an unconventional way, to say the least.
In episode 4, “The Flames of Disaster,” Knuckles disappears for almost the entirety of its run time. Despite that, we still learn a lot about Knuckles’ backstory that the live-action Sonic movies didn’t touch. But how does the show do this? A musical number. I’m not kidding.
Wade Whipple, played by Adam Pally, enters a dream state to learn from Knuckles without actually having to interact with him. The dream has Wade donning a Knuckles costume and acting out a moment from his past to gain some of his skills, and the whole bit takes the form of a stage musical. I won’t get into some of the specific moments about the musical side of things, but the entire sequence reads like an incredibly elaborate way of exploring Knuckles’ past without actually having to get Idris Elba to record lines or animate the entire sequence. At least Pally and everyone else in the scene is having a blast.
Wade’s stage play depicts Knuckles journeying to face a creature who is never named but bears a striking resemblance to Iblis, a monster that appears in Sonic ‘06 who brings about the end of the world. In the movie continuity, Knuckles defeats the creature that is probably Iblis by finding the Flames of Disaster within his own “warrior’s heart,” granting him his superpowers.
This deviates from the source material in a few ways. First, the Flames of Disaster was a name for Iblis rather than a power source, and second, Knuckles wasn’t tied to Iblis’ story at all. In the games, it was Silver the Hedgehog (who debuted in Sonic ‘06) who faces Iblis. He travels back in time to try and stop Iblis from destroying the world, then faces the monster again in the future. Sonic ‘06 has a lot of time travel antics we won’t unpack here, but Iblis and Knuckles aren’t associated with one another in the game at all.
Silver hasn’t yet made an appearance in the live-action Sonic universe, so it’s unclear if making the Flames of Disaster and Iblis part of Knuckles’ story is foreshadowing this plotline or using the material without committing to a film based on it. Paramount wants the Sonic movies to have Avengers-style events, so it’s not out of the realm of possibility that Silver might show up and Knuckles will be more involved in the Iblis story. But either way, it’s unlikely this is a focus for Sonic the Hedgehog 3, which will focus on Shadow the Hedgehog, who is voiced by Matrix actor Keanu Reeves.