Main cast: Helen Sadler (Sonnie), Hayley McLaughlin (Jennifer), Time Winters (Dicko), Omid Abtahi (Wes), Christine Adams (Ivrina), Hakeem Kae-Kazim (Simon), and Braden Lynch (The Announcer)
Director: Dave Wilson
Reviewing the fifth season of The Hitchhiker had been a painful ordeal, and I’m not looking to go from that to the increasingly lackluster cape crap shows that are being used to stuffed streaming services these days. Given that Love, Death & Robots have animated sci-fi and even better, each episode is about 17 minutes long, this show looks like a great way to recover from that last show I reviewed.
Sonnie’s Edge is the most conventional kind of episode, and hence, one can argue that it’s the best way to reel the audience in, because it has gore, guts, and glory.
In some distant future, maybe on a different planet, one of the prime entertainments available is genetically-engineered large beasts, controlled by humans, tear into one another in a ring.
Sonnie is one of the rare female human handlers that have a large winning streak. She steadfastly refuses to take part in the tournament organizer Dicko’s attempts to rig the match, but she also has an inconvenient attraction to his mistress, Jennifer—an attraction that Dicko will attempt to exploit in order to get Sonnie out of his way for good.
Okay, the story itself isn’t anything particularly amazing, and I manage to guess correctly this “edge” that allows Sonnie to keep her winning streak. However, watching this episode again makes me pick up the various clues the episode has planted when it comes to this “edge”, and I like that. There is some thought gone into the whole thing, and it also helps that I am not familiar with the source material by Peter F Hamilton, so I come into this one completely ready to be surprised and entertained.
The violence and gore here are awesome, and the episode demonstrates that it’s definitely not for kiddies (or for them, depending on how one looks at it) when Jennifer takes off her top in a naughty scene with Sonnie.
The visuals are great, although I feel that the human characters all have an amplified uncanny valley effect that is tad unsettling to look at.
While I’m not bowled over by this episode, I’ve had a great time. It certainly leaves me intrigued enough to watch more of this show, so what can I say? Mission accomplished.
