Headscratchers / Sonic the Hedgehog (2020)

PSA: Headscratchers is a place to try and find In-Universe explanations. Try to avoid natter, going too off-topic and/or first person language. If a bullet has something you feel is incorrect, just fix it.

Headscratcher subpages are Spoilers Off. You Have Been Warned.

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Is Robotnik really a orphan?

• Or did he just make it up?
  • It's possible that in this universe, the person that raised Robotnik (probably Gerald Robotnik) was executed by the military, just like in the Sonic Adventure series. The timeline would kinda make sense, actually.

Sonic the alleged hedgehog

• Sonic is a furry blue humanoid alien from another planet, yet people call him a "hedgehog"?
  • Nobody actually calls Sonic a hedgehog until he calls himself one. Tom even asks him what he is and then Sonic says he's "obviously a hedgehog". Besides, it's not like we've not done something similar before: sea cucumbers and sea grapes, for example.

Sonic's shoes

• Where did Jojo just randomly get those red sneakers? If they're not specifically designed with Sonic in mind, they'd also get shredded to bits by his supersonic sprinting.
  • Well, the sneakers were probably Jojo's and she was giving them to Sonic. And, if his old pair managed to hold together that long (albeit with holes in them), then a new pair of running shoes should handle his speed just fine.
  • Even if they are normal shoes, what stops Sonic from replacing them with an identical pair, to remind him of the first gift anyone ever gave him?

The bomb disposal scene

• Late in the movie, one of Robotnik's miniature explosives attaches itself to Sonic's hand, and he and Tom spend a good deal of time trying to get rid of it. Why didn't Sonic just rip off his White Gloves to get rid of said explosive?
  • Maybe he was just panicking and didn't think of the obvious solution in the heat of the moment.

Why must Sonic travel to the Mushroom planet?

• Why does Sonic have to go to the Mushroom Planet if he can't stay on Earth? Those rings let him travel anywhere, why settle for somewhere he won't like? Is it just because he knows it's a hospitable, if uninteresting, location?
  • You have to have some idea of where you are going for the rings to take you there. The map Sonic was referring to was headered "Safe Planets", so the implication seems that there's only a handful of locations that Longclaw/Sonic have scouted out and are hospitable, but he's rapidly running out of locations / they didn't pan out for one reason or another.

Isn't Tails Sonic's friend?

• Sonic wrote his list of accomplishments is to have a real friend. Tails doesn't count? Tails knows who Sonic is and is actively searching for him.
  • Tails and Sonic haven't met yet in thie continuity.

How much power does Sonic's quill carry?

• Robotnik is still able to match Sonic as long as he has it. Does it have an infinite charge?
  • Yes. The film literally says the quill's power output is infinite. Though for further information, the quill seems to still be drawing energy from Sonic over a distance. Notice that it glows extra bright when Sonic unleashes his full power. Notice that in the climax, Sonic draws that power back into him. It has power as long as Sonic does.

Sonic, the Ultimate Lifeform?

• When Robotnik's machines were testing Sonic's shed quill, the test result said it's power output was "unlimited." But Sonic canon indicates that Sonic's power isn't unlimited, at least not compared to a certain black hedgehog.
  • It's never explicitly stated in the video games that Shadow is superior to Sonic. They are pretty consistently presented as equally matched; the title of "ultimate lifeform" was one given to him by his creators not an absolute term. For that matter, neither is having quills supercharged with unlimited energy a trait either Shadow or Sonic are known for.
  • Also, keep in mind that this is a Robotnik who has been restricted to knowledge of Earth up until his first encounter with Sonic; maybe his equipment just read Sonic's energy output as 'unlimited' because it went beyond what the equipment had been designed to measure at this time. It's not even like it's inaccurate:

Just stop Robotnik from pressing the button

• Why didn't Sonic get the chance to stop Robotnik from pressing the Big Red Button during his Bullet Time?
  • Well for one thing, Sonic's power is super speed, not reading minds. He couldn't see the inside of that cockpit and had no way of knowing that Robitnik was about to press a big red button. As Sonic said while being chased along the Great Wall, no one had ever matched his speed before, so it caught him completely off-guard.
  • Sonic has been on Earth for years and hasn't seen anything that's even remotely capable of doing what he can do. Even if Sonic was paying attention to what a near-frozen Robotnik was doing in his cockpit, why would he assume that button would do the one thing that could threaten him?

Robotnik putting on weight while on the Mushroom Planet

• Since it appears Robotnik will end up looking like his Fat Bastard video game counterpart by the time he returns to Earth, how exactly would Robotnik gain weight on a planet that’s entirely comprised of wilderness? He doesn't even seem like a Big Eater type.
  • Just because Robotnik now resembles his classic appearance more doesn't necessarily mean he'll be fat.
  • Fantastic Flora in effect. Mushrooms from another planet will do strange things? These fungi probably have enough calories that he'd still gain some weight even if he's exerting himself physically every day.
  • Robotnik has been on that planet for 87 days according to his watch. It seems like he's only recently started exploring, shaved, etc, so that implies that he's been wallowing in defeat, doing nothing but eating for the past three months.
  • One of the creators joked that Robotnik would possibly develop an allergic reaction to the mushrooms that makes his body swell up.
  • Perhaps look at this from a different angle: Instead of wondering how he'll get fat, we should be asking how he managed to stay slim as a drone engineer that mostly hung out in his lab all day.

GPS

• Why didn't Sonic decide to use a map or GPS to find the way to San Francisco? He could borrow one from Tom.
  • Sonic and Tom had to make a quick escape from the house because of Robotnik, and Tom didn't have any navigation device useful for Sonic with him. They explicitly mention (albeit a bit later) that Tom had to ditch his cell-phone to avoid them tracking him by it.

Why didn't Sonic just run up the Transamerica Building to get his rings back?

• It is made clear that they can't get to the roof without a pass from the inside. But it is also established in the movie that Sonic can run down buildings, and even on the ceiling.
  • He's a fugitive on the run. He needs assistance from human friends, who tried sneaking in, which worked out better than him running up a famous building.
  • A lot of the poor logic involved in Sonic not using his powers can be explained by his reluctance with actually accomplishing his goal. Sonic (unconsciously) sabotages himself because he wants to prolong the time he gets to spend on Earth.
  • While running directly up a building is something Sonic could theoretically manage with his speed, doing so without practice could be incredibly dangerous. If he's not careful and makes a mistake, he could end up falling from very high up and accidentally hurt or kill himself. With that in mind, infiltrating the building probably seemed the safer option to start with.
• Does he ever run up a building? He can't run up a wall starting from a 90º angle.

Sonic's speed?

• We all know that Sonic is incredibly fast, the fastest thing alive, in fact. When running to San Francisco, he crashes into the Pacific Ocean. Montana and San Franciso are over 900 miles from each other, and while Sonic can supposedly run at the speed of sound, the speed of sound is over 750 miles per hour. Sonic travels from Montana to San Francisco and back in seconds. That would be well above the breaking of the sound barrier, and he seems to do this effortlessly. Just how fast is this hedgehog, and wouldn't breaking the sound barrier cause some sort of loud noise?
  • Sonic is one of the fastest fictional creatures, but in this film his speed means he has to be careful not to be too disruptive or catch any unwanted attention. We never got a real number to Sonic's speed, so we don't know how fast he's "supposed" to be able to run even based on source material.
    As for why he doesn't create a sonic boom, there's two possibilities: he knows how not to (we know how not to - it mostly involves disrupting the air enough - it's just a lot of extra engineering work and not worth bothering) it's just or the nature of his powers naturally prevent it from occurring, akin to how the Flash's powers don't constantly create sonic booms.

Robotnik's goggles?

• How in blue blazes do Robotnik's goggles stay on without an elastic strap, to keep them in place!?
  • Maybe the strap is too thin to be seen.
  • Doesn't the nose bridge sort of act like a pincer, holding the goggles on?
  • Adhesive?

Cell phones in the power outrage

• Sonic's EMP was so powerful it wiped the entire power of the entire Pacific Northwest, which logically should include cell signal towers, then how was Tom able to call Wade?
  • Quite a few cell towers aren't connected to the grid these days, running off their own power sources. If you're being generous you could say they could quickly reboot and/or are shielded to allow communications after a potential EMP attack.
  • The film shows that technology is slightly more advanced than in real life, and we've been working on methods to solve this exact issue (storms, not hedgehogs, obviously). Guess the people in the movie just got around to it before us.

Longclaw eating mice

• Sonic mentions Longclaw eats mice. Does that mean there are non-sapient mice on this planet, or that Sonic was just exaggerating? We can only hope that Longclaw does not eat sapient mice in front of her adopted sapient hedgehog son.
  • Bets are that Longclaw either ate non-sapient mice (every Sonic media has had portrayed there being non-Sapient animals alongside the Sapient ones) or that Sonic, due to being a very young child at the time, doesn't fully remember his time with Longclaw and is using things he learned about Earth owls to subconsciously fill the gaps in his memory.
  • Who says Sonic and other talking animal characters aren't allowed to eat meat?
    • Sapients eating sapients still seems a bit... iffy. It'd also open up some Frige Horror considering how some owls also eat hedgehogs in the real world.
  • At worse it would be akin to a human eating a monkey, it might be seen as a bit weird but its not cannibalism.

Bullet time ship control

• Even if Robotnik's ship could keep up with Sonic from the quill's power, how does he still control it? Was the whole chase on auto pilot? But even so, how would he comment on Sonic's actions? In addition, how did the mime and family at Paris get out of the way?
  • Since Robotnik is inside of this ship all the time, it's very likely that he is affected by this acceleration as well. And about this guys in Paris, maybe that's how Ring worked?

Robotnik's entourage

• Robotnik has a group of extras who... really just follow him around, and then completely disappear later. Who are these people exactly?
  • Fellow government agents doing their job to escort Robotnik. Of course, Robotnik hates people, so he most likely ditched them at the first opportunity. He only tolerates having Agent Stone around because of the lattes.

Why does Rachel hate Tom?

• Irrational Hatred lady, why do you want your sister to divorce Tom?
  • Either a Noodle Incident, or she's simply a jerk.

Buff Robotnik? Robuffnik?

• Robotnik is a skinny-looking dude throughout most of the movie. Yet he mentions that he once beat up a bully so badly that it put the bully in the hospital, and then he later throws that big guy at the bar through the window. How is this possible? How strong is he?
  • Truth in Television. It is very possible for someone seemingly weaker to suddenly beat up a person that is larger than them, usually if they're pushed over the edge.
  • Listen again to what he says — he implies that he built some kind of machine to beat up the bully, not that he punched him out.
  • Why not both? He's had a hand-on approach to most of his work, and it's possible that following the incident with the bully he also put work into improving his body. Assuming it isn't just in physical strength, it's not unlikely that he's also put some technology into his attire that assists with hand-to-hand combat. This goes into WMG territory, but Robotnik's frequent Crazy-Prepared tendencies justify it.

Crazy Carl’s (lack of) nickname

• Sonic calls Carl “Crazy Carl” in his opening narration and so does everyone in Green Hills that we see. Does that mean Sonic heard them calling him Crazy Carl? If so, how does he apparently not know anyone else’s names and gives them nicknames instead?
  • Maybe he has heard and knows their real names, but simply prefers the nicknames he comes up with?
  • Presumably, Carl's ramblings about the "Blue Devil" have probably made him one of the most well-known people in Green Hills, and Sonic must've overheard his "Crazy Carl" nickname from other people as a result of gossip and the like. Comparatively, and this might be a wild guess, Tom is probably as well-known in Green Hills as Carl is for the opposite reasons, but it's possible that some could refer to him as "Sheriff Wachowski", a name that Sonic might have a harder time remembering.
  • Since Carl was trying to prove he exists, Sonic likely has had the most interaction with him, and thus learned his name early.
  • You use nicknames with friends and the people you know, so it might be part of how Sonic considers himself friends with the town's inhabitants despite the fact that most don't know that he exists.

Gift shop

• Did Sonic steal the souvenirs he got at the gift shop from the world's largest rubber band ball? Where did he get the money?
  • It's possible, considering that his den in Green Hills is stocked with things Sonic wouldn't have had the money to buy. That said, he could have scavenged them after they were thrown away or left out to be donated, so the souvenirs could be excess stock that had been thrown out or left in a back room, so Sonic figured it would be okay to take those.

Moving Sonic's things

• The implication during the end is that Sonic spends the day at Tom and Maddie's house then goes back to his cave at night. So how did they manage to move his entire cave in a single day WHILE he was at the house without him noticing? As a side note, does the fact that Sonic's things were even still in the cave mean Robotnik never found it despite being right outside it earlier on? Seems unlikely he wouldn't have ransacked the place.
  • Other then the rings which were no longer there, there is absolutely nothing remarkable in Sonics cave, just old comics and other junk. So more then likely he quickly analysed everything, deduced nothing of importance was here, and then followed the trail in hopes of catching up with Sonic.

Pop Culture References

• I know Sonic spends most of his life on earth and knows a lot of things of earth, but why the heck he makes pop culture references? Have you ever seen Sonic in the games or shows making references to Vin Dinsel, Obi Wan Kenobi or even Oprah? It feels out of character, like he's trying to be the next Ryan Renolds.
  • This is both Lampshaded and has an obvious explanation within the movie itself - Sonic couldn’t have a regular conversation with any regular person for ten years - his cat-and-mouse games with Crazy Carl hardly count - and he’s probably also spent inordinate amounts of time watching movies and TV shows through people’s windows - he even says to the skinhead in the Piston Pit that he’s “seen way too many action movies.” Therefore, he got most of his “interaction” and human contact and connection through that. Sonic in the games exists in his own world - here, he’s transplanted into our world, and it at least makes sense with Sonic’s established character that he WOULD make pop culture references if he could.

Staying Behind

• Why didn’t Longclaw go into the portal with Sonic?
  • The portal doesn't turn off immediately. Longclaw was trying to buy time for Sonic to escape and not allow any echidnas to get through. Taking the second film into account, she might have also wanted to finish the conflict with the echidnas once and for all. If nothing else, that would mean there was one less group hunting Sonic.

No one recognizes him?

• Robotnik using his government blank cheque to declare Tom a suspected terrorist really brings the whole rest of the movie into question. How exactly did he manage to drive all the way to San Francisco, walk into a heavily populated area, and even use his police badge to gain access to a building? Not to mention what he was supposed to do with himself if Sonic left when he was supposed to.
  • The lack of organized roadblocks could be down to Robotnik - Insufferable Genius he is - may have declined to relay that information on to others, wanting Tom for himself. Robotnik's Berserk Button is being punched in the face. Given how absolutely petty the man is, it's a plausible theory that he personally wants to destroy Tom for punching him in the face. Well, that and also running off with his alien guinea pig. Hence, he likely skewed a lot of info so that he could keep Tom for himself or interfered in the government's own attempts at roadblocking, acts which may, to a lesser extent, have also contributed to the government's decision to Unperson him by the end.
  • It's possible that by the time Tom arrived in San Francisco, the government has figured out his "terrorist" status is bogus. Robotnik's citation of the death penalty for treason would have been a strong case to cooperate if Sonic had actually been an enemy of the state. Maybe they figured things out when Robotnik was threatening Tom on the phone, or maybe afterward while investigating his home for clues (which is likely to have occurred off-screen what with the terrorism charges) and figuring out that the damage to the home was exclusively from Robotnik's drone. Either way, it's possible they realized that Tom was innocent and acting in self-defense; in that case, they might have had time to rescind the order to look for him, but hadn't yet issued a public notice to news outlets. Even then, it's possible the news wouldn't report that he was no longer wanted, instead just no longer reporting when other stories get more views.
  • It's established that hiring Robotnik for the job was a Godzilla Threshold for the government. He's a genius, but his abrasive and arrogant personality would piss anybody off. Its possible that Robotnik himself leaked the info to the news, but the government, (or perhaps the military on scene in Green Hills did a follow up examination after Sonic and Tom evacuated, and clarified the issue to spite Robotnik as well). Robotnik's already unpersoned as a classified matter (all but putting him above the law) at the start, which made the government's sweep up very easy.
  • The region was also hit by a massive blackout very recently. This does not make disseminating information any easier, nor does it necessarily make a vaguely-described "terrorist" a higher priority than public health. Plus, Tom's a sheriff; he may have been using his training to avoid patrols.
  • Furthermore, Tom's face doesn't really have any identifying features like noticeable scars. Even if someone recognized his face, they might have thought he was an Identical Stranger to Tom.