#meh a belated come back is still a comeback

[tresmontesentertainment]

A Measure of Character - Gold the Tenrec, and Standing Tall as Reality Collapses, With a Dash of History to Taste

It is no exaggeration to say that dimensional shenanigans were an essential piece of Archie Sonic's identity, handily one of the it's longest standing tropes and probably the first thing to truly set it apart from the games and cartoon that inspired it. No joke; this is something the comic starting dabbling with no sooner than Issue 02, way the hell back in 1993, so we might even be looking at the point of origin of this trope for the franchise as a whole, really. If there ever comes a point where it strikes you that Sonic just can't seem to stay put in a single plane of reality, just know that it's all part of a long treasured legacy spanning decades.

Suffice to say there's a fair bit of history to be found here, and set to play front-runner for the re-boot's refurbished take on the concept as she was, I like to think that Gold the Tenrec had the opportunity to revitalize it for the new order of things in some interesting ways, with the introduction of a much more expansive element of character than the comic had ever previously enjoyed being chief among them.

That is a surprisingly loaded statement, and it's one that requires a bit of contextual finagling to fully back up. So let's kick this off by looking back on some recent, and some not so recent, history…

So before we can dig into what Gold might have contributed at the character level of things, we need to do a quick summation of how the comic played about with it's notion of alternate dimensions the first time around. Chiefly speaking, when circumstance brought the action out onto the dimensional stage, it was happening in one of two ways; either somebody was heading out to get something specific done before heading right back to Mobius, or our intrepid heroes were dealing with some trouble falling on their heads on the home front.

Nobody was really "traveling abroad" for it's own sake, is what I mean to say, and this is pretty handily epitomized by Gold's most direct predecessor as resident dimension hopper, none other than Sonic the Hedgehog himself.

Sonic's history of breaking dimensional boundaries is a fittingly storied one. Whether it's getting launched into a confab with a trio of demigods after collecting his billionth power ring, being led by an actual, literal suit to the Casablanca homage dimension wherein he fights the robots from MST3K, to getting hauled off to the lawyer dimension after getting framed by his evil mirror universe doppelganger, this was stuff that our favorite needle mouse just kind of kept having happen to him. And I mean that rather literally.

On most any occasion where Sonic found himself in another time and place, there was an actual guiding influence leading him there, putting him in position to help those worlds in times of dire need and with no speedy blue heroes of their own to handle things. This would've been on a fairly regular basis in-universe, too, and all with said guiding influence gleefully playing coy on just why they were sending the poor guy off on some odyssey or another on what at least had to have been every couple weeks. Which on it's own would still probably be all well and good were it not for the fact that Sonic just never really had very much to show for all the work he'd put in while traipsing across creation.

This is a pretty direct consequence of what went on at the production end of things. See, same as it is today over at IDW, Archie Sonic developed an extensive catalogue of specials and side series over the years, and often as not, it was one & done day trips out into the multiverse that you'd find filling the pages of those specials. As a result, almost none of the places Sonic had gone to and the people he'd met would ever come up again.

This would be the shape of things right up until Ian Flynn took up the writer's chair, but then all that really amounted to was things veering off totally in the opposite direction with alternate universes becoming the least prevalent they'd ever been in the comic's history. Which is hardly surprising, given all the other things Ian was taking a machete to back at the start of his tenure, but the fact that we never got to enjoy the majesty that was Sally McAcorn in an actually decent art style still stings the heart to this day.

Put all this together and you're left with a dimension hopper who never seemed all that impressed with all the hopping around he'd done, which in turn leaves the sheer scope of it all bereft of any particular sense of grandeur. And it's on that one simple point that Gold represents such a major sea change.

It's through Gold that we finally would've gotten someone who truly appreciated the scale they were operating at, akin as it might've been at first to the appreciation one gets for the ocean as they're drowning in it.

Getting jettisoned to parts unknown without warning and with no real home to turn back to regardless, all manner of monstrous nastiness lurking about in the aeither, and with only themselves to rely on to pull them through it as reality tears itself apart. There's really no overlooking this particular element of… sustained severity, let's call it, characterizing the situation Gold and company find themselves in that Sonic never had to deal with. Learning how to cope with that severity would've marked one of the most pivotal turning points of their journey, and while it's something I think Team Psych on the whole would've eventually achieved, Gold would've represented it at it's purest.

Remember, Gold entered this story having only ever known the situation with the Genesis Portals for what it could be at it's most cataclysmic, finding herself powerless to do much of anything about it time and again. From that initial incident that left her stranded in a foreign world and then having to stand by as the closest thing she had to family worked tirelessly to bring that same kind of armageddon to their door, she was about as close to rock bottom as one can be without full-on hitting the ground.

It's hardly any wonder that she took that desperate gamble to seize the opportunity Silver and Schlemmer presented her even when confined to The Council's seat of power. It was probably the closest thing to hope she'd felt for a good many years.

And that's all it really takes, isn't it? A single spark of hope to lift up the spirit and help it find strength in the darkest circumstances. We can definitely see it work out for Gold like this. When that climatic scuffle with the Second Devourer seemed to take a fatal turn and the doom she'd evaded for so long caught up with her, Gold was able to face it head on, standing tall and with a smile. Quite the drastic turn from the way she'd previously been left a panicked wreck in comparably less drastic situations.

And it's through that same newly forged confidence and optimism that Gold would be able to make a rather simple but direly important contribution to the team later down the line. When the moments inevitably come that the team find themselves lacking direction or at risk of getting crushed by the sheer enormity of the task before them, Gold would be the one best able to keep the spirit of their mission alive by reminding them that even as reality itself insists on collapsing around them, they've stayed standing. They're the ones who've proven that this is not, in fact, the end, and that they'll be able to push on through whatever grisly happenstance comes their way.

It's that all too critical element of perseverance that Team Psych would need to keep them heading forward, and it's only fitting that the one who'd most known that kind of hopelessness by heart would be the one to ensure they overcome it and see thing's through to the end.

But, of course, there's still the matter of how they'll actually go about doing that. Because all this heartfelt ishkabibble aside, reality collapsing in on itself is still very much a practical concern they'd need to get a handle on, and there's only so much headway the power of friendship can grant you on something like that when your name isn't Sonic! That's an effort that calls for more than just three sets of hands, and rounding up that extra support was always going to be the natural progression for Team Psych's story.

How those efforts were going to shape up, though, may well have resulted in something… peculiarly familiar, but we'll get into the implications of that another time. And hopefully it'll be before this time next year!