Season Review: Hedgehog for Hire Season 8

Clearly THIS was the show with an eighth season that everyone was hyped to see.

Clawing its way out of the rubble that was Machinima.com, Hedgehog for Hire returned to its fans after over half a decade since its original ending back in 2013, now with the boosted rep of being associated with Rooster Teeth. For those who don’t know,  Hedgehog for Hire followed a more raunchy and foul-mouthed version of Sega’s beloved mascot as he, Tails, Dr. Eggman, and Earthworm Jim (for some reason) dealt with jumping through multiple temp jobs to make ends meet. Though because that premise would wear thin pretty quickly, things soon escalated as Sonic became a father, joined and took over the mob, went into space, traveled through time, rebuilt the universe, and became GOD.

Seems like a pretty solid place to end things, right? Well, the creators thought so too since that was where the show signed off. But because the show is back with a legal friendly name and needs to squeeze out at least one more season plot, the story this time around starts with God-Sonic and Tails finding out about the recent release of Sonic Mania (but somehow none of the other Sonic games that came out between 2014 and 2018) and so deciding to forsake godhood to make their own new game. This plot is promptly dropped entirely less than halfway through to deal with Eggman’s daughter, who plans to take over the universe and bring Eggman back to his evil ways. This is in spite of the fact that Eggman (at least this version) has never really showed much of an evil side throughout the previous seasons, pretty much dissolving any potential tension there might be if he had.

The series is cut into three-to-four minute chunks (making each a huge bitch to write 400 words about week to week), but going back and watching the old seasons made me notice that they were each given thirteen episodes, where this season only got eight. And even with as sporadic as those seasons were in humor and pacing, having about forty minutes of room for the story gave them room to create a clear arc that led to a workable conclusion. Season starts with Sonic running the mob, season ends with Sonic getting kicked out of the mob. Season starts with Sonic in space, season ends with Sonic coming back to earth. And so on.

This season, having only a little over half of this usual runtime, ends up both rushing AND dragging as the focus on creating a new game is basically aimless until Eggette shows up at the end of the fourth episode, then begins her conquest of the universe. It’s also where I notice that every previous season also at least focused on a plot that was about Sonic and friends proactively searching for or doing something, whether it was work or power or god, whereas this season is mostly them reacting to the Eggette stuff and not developing their characters at all. Keep in mind that there wasn’t that much development before this point, but it was still more than this.

And that’s without mentioning the ridiculously inconsistent release schedule across both Rooster Teeth’s site and VRV. Sometimes episodes went up on both, sometimes it was just one, sometimes it was neither. Never before have I been so annoyed at NOT getting to watch three short minutes of nonsense that I don’t even like. I don’t know if this has anything to do with this show being a rescue from Machinima or if someone at RT just had it out for this series in particular, but making people slowly distrust whether or not it was even coming out definitely did some damage. Whether or not that damage will mean it’s finally put to rest is up to fate.

It’s hard to say if Hedgehog for Hire will return for a ninth season. They plot kind of escalated as high as it could possibly go back in Season 7 and this return was lackluster at best. And more importantly, do enough people watch and care about this show still to keep working on it worth it? But Rooster Teeth’s policy of renewing shows has often been “if they’re watching, we’ll keep making it”. It’s hard to say how many people are actually watching this, but I guess we’ll find out soon enough. In the meantime, I gotta go fast to get a pre-order ticket for that awful looking live action movie!