We open in Knothole village with Bunnie stuck in a roof. It turns out that Rotor has been working on her leg extenders, as they're still not working as well as intended. But despite her robot issues, she can still catch a hockey puck from Tails easily. Remember Tails? Remember when it felt like he wa a character? Well, it looks like we're going to get something from him as he feels bummed out by the others having no time for him lately. It's bad enough they usually have to babysit Antoine, it's understandable how they'd lack the time with our two-tailed friend.
Tails ventures into the forest and discovers, of all things, a dinosaur. After teaching the terra-pod the basics of field hockey, Tails gains a kinship with the creature. When hunger strikes on both of them, Tails tries his best to sneak it into Knothole. But it turns out that the terra-pod (dubbed Baby T), is a fast eater. When Tails scolds it, it runs away. Meanwhile, the other freedom fighters are using Bunnie's new apendages for apple harvesting.
Tails informs Sonic and the others of Baby T, and they seem to be fine with the creature, but they know they need to bring it back with its own herd. Since the creature only makes Frank Welker mumbles, it's hard to understand it. Sally claims to have a convenient translator device, but that proves not needed as the herd conveniently shows up. Baby T returns to its herd pretty easily. Tails tries to stop it, but nearly gets crushed by the oncoming Herd, but Sonic comes to his aid. We actually get a bit of character development for Tails, as he mentions that like Baby T missing its mother, he misses his own. Since he is the youngest freedom fighter, that sense of a kid stuck in the middle of a war without his family makes a lot of sense.
Sally mentions that the herd is going the wrong way. Sonic manages to stop them, but ties to get them to move the other way around. Sally uses the communicator on the mother terra-pod. But before we hear the terra-pod speak, we learn that this mess was caused by who else?
Robotnik's plan this time around is to finally get around to roboticizing terra-pods, as they're conveniently the last creature that he hasn't roboticized yet. Once it happens, he'll finally have roboticized every animal, and this weird Noah's Ark-esque plan of his will succeed. Well, every animal but the freedom fighters, much to his angry chagrin. He gets angry at Snively for losing them and sets out to hunt them himself.
The herd runs off again into the great jungle as Robotnik and his stealth bots arrive. Despite Snively's comments that the great jungle is uncharted, Robotnik wants his prize and, let's be honest, hasn't been known to listen to logic. In the jungle, the group run afoul of electric plants that can destroy any ore. Sonic gets caught up by vines (this feels like the fourth time this season) as he gets lowered into quicksand. If only we had Bunnie's robo-legs...
But pushing over a dead tree works too.
Meanwhile, Robotnik and Snively are still searching out the others and has a cage perfectly set up to capture the biggest terra-pod. The freedom fighters manage to finally get the translator to work as the mother warns them of danger. Which is convenient as stealth bots arrive and begin to shoot at them. They catch them in a force field and capture the mother. Sonic leaps to the cage and tries to break it, but gets blasted at.
Bunnie now conveniently uses he legs as Sonic manages to lower the cage. Robotnik decides to make them sweat a while as he's got everyone trapped in the force field. Sonic whips out his power ring of the episode and saws a hole through, giving them enough time to escape. They use the translator to learn that the best way to deal with Robotnik is the plants from earlier. Sonic lures them into a massive patch of plants. And since Robotnik is an iriot, he easily crashes into it. This gives the others time to finally make their escape.
Speaking of convenience, Sally already had a plan to use some of the seeds to plant in Knothole to help in defeating Robotnik. We get some sarcasm tennis between Sonic and Sally as they make it to the home of the terra-pods. Sally has another convent translator as Tails says goodbye to Baby T. Unfortunately, Baby T just sounds like Sonic with all the catchphrases. In other words, this was a really bad idea from Sally.
The word I used a lot in this review was convenient. And that does feel like the case for Sonic Past Cool. Tails is sad and conveniently finds a new friend, its herd is conveniently in trouble, Sally has conveniently invented a translator, and so forth. That aside, the episode was still a fun one. The terra-pods proved to be interesting creatures. It was great to see an episode in a unique location like the great jungle. It was great as always to see Robotnik be more hands on. And most importantly, it's great that after a season of barely being used, we get some actual story involvement with Tails. Compared to Adventures of Sonic the Hedgehog, where he actually feels like Sonic's sidekick, he was pushed so hard to the sidelines that it feels really jarring. One downside, I guess I actually missed Antoine. But not that much.
And thus ends season one of Sonic SatAM. My thoughts? While there were a lot of great episodes, and a couple that felt way too dense, or lacked a lot of quality to them, the 13 episodes flowed well enough. My issue is that I wish that continuity mattered a bit more. Like ReBoot season one, I do feel like the episodic nature really hurts a show with an interesting world to build upon. ReBoot does manage to make continuity matter more from season two onward, and I know SatAM does as well for the most part. But for season one, it's a solid freshman season. But next we have a season involving time travel, a doomsday project, and way more Antoine (yay?). So stay tuned.