Sonic Prime & The Very Muddy Plot Jungle (And new stuff)

 2023 still seems to be a great year for Sonic already, with new brands joining the merchandise roll outs, and familiar ones adding more to the pile. Collectors and fans are sure to continue having real fast times this year, just as last year. However, this year's difference will probably be that media will keep up with it a bit better. Last year just had Movie Gremlin for most of it (until year's end) but now Sonic Prime Show will have more episodes, and Sonic Frontiers (because it's internet connected) can get content to refresh it a bit and keep people picking it up again. It also did super well with sales, so it provides a strong guiding light for developers to "do more of what works" instead of floundering around with stupid things like OC's and 'boom'. 

Prime Episodes The Boscage Maze
In this set of 2 episodes, the show weakens itself significantly with muddy waters and muddy characters. Hopefully it can rise from this rut in the jungle floor. It introduces a problem with the show-runners that they put premise over plot and created a problem pile that weakened everything so far, including Sonic. What's a problem pile?
Just that- Plot holes, unexplained things, OOC problems, nonsense, etc. You'd actually be hard pressed to find ANY show or book without a single problem, and that's totally normal! The REAL issue emerges when they 'pile up' to be so many things wrong with something that it can't be overlooked any longer, hence the 'problem pile'.

"It's a kiddie show!"
That's always the first thing trotted out, which is that kids are stupid and don't pay attention to anything so no one has to pay attention to quality in kids stuff to have a success, and it's always the biggest lie told about media / the biggest excuse. Avatar Airbender didn't attain mega-status for being stupid and blundering. It's quality thru & thru even though "it was for kids on Nickelodeon". So, with that excuse pushed aside:

Why is it called the Boscage Maze? Unanswered
Why are there plants that live in darkness?
Why are the unnatural trees somehow bad? 
Why is the world empty of all people except for 5 people?
How were 4 people literally ruining acres of jungle?
WHY were 4 people attempting to ruin the jungle? (Breaks the characterization of the show) 
Why is the smartest character now the stupidest? (Breaks the theme of the show where everyone is a variant of themselves that still resembles themselves to fit with the theme)  
Why is Sonic suddenly so bad at everything?*
Even young kids will start asking questions when the problem pile gets large enough, as is here. Almost nothing makes sense.

Premise over plot:
You can tell how it happened, they wanted a cool cave man jungle primitive setting and shoe-horned everything into it whether it would work or not. Having to make the good guys all into badguys didn't sit well with anything that made sense, so it ALL stopped making sense.

Amy's goal here is to kill Knuckles, Rouge, Tails and Big via starvation (or hammer--but she's not quite cold blooded enough to do the latter...) so that she can become the last living person (Flicky birds aren't people) and at last, protect the jungle. Protect it from what?

The other 4 characters because now, for no reason, they attack all food making plants and try to ruin the jungle "because they are bad". Because no one has any communication skills and the 4 are extremely stupid, they're all foes & Sonic has to fix it. When it's as bad as not being able to ask "Why are you attacking the food making plant to kill it?"......that's pretty damn stupid, even for a 'kiddie show'.

Then, Sonic just not getting it that every new place the people there have no idea who he is and have no idea there's others of them / they don't act like his friends and that no amount of "why don't you act like thing you never seen/heard of before" will ever work makes him seem.....boring? Dense? It weakens his character just as well as having Jungle Amy be able to constantly clobber him with the hammer. (Yes he's pulling his 'punches' because he doesn't want to harm her, which puts him at a disadvantage, but still, getting his butt kicked all show long isn't a good look.)

It's too bad because a few tweaks would have fixed it:
Turn the 'bad trees' (Which you know are never going to get solved/explained) into mega mushrooms that thrive in the mushroom jungle so shutting out light is GOOD because mushrooms grow in the dark, have Amy/Pinkbird be obsessed with spreading more of the mushroom jungle (its inedible) because the shard made the fungus go crazy while she was down there foraging and now she went from friend to foe & the others don't know what to do. They try to wreck the mushrooms to make room for 'the great green' to return to thriving & making food but she's always trying to stop them & won't listen. 
Get rid of 'feral Tails' because that makes no sense/that's not a variant of him, (9 is Tails but bitter because he never met Sonic to save him from bullying & the whole world sucked anyway) make him like...he idolized Amy instead of Sonic so he's down about everything or something instead. 

Everything else like 'can't go fast' because of thorny vines, jungle chases, etc. were all fine points to have, but those little tweaks would have gotten rid of the whole OOC issue and problem pile while keeping game elements (Mushroom Hill, etc) in the show all the while. 
Unless there's a return to the Boscage Maze in a future episode to explain the weird trees, darkness plants, lack of any people of any sort, etc. (which there probably won't be) this is going to remain a weak pair of episodes.