Sonic X: Episode 80

Is anyone familiar with Sonic X? It used to air on that awful, awful 4Kids block every Saturday morning. Sonic X was a cartoon based off of Sonic the Hedgehog, featuring such characters as Shadow the Hedgehog, Rouge the Bat, Miles "Tails" Prower, and Amy Rose. When the series ended a few years ago, it had aired at least seventy-eight episodes, except for two that were never meant to be seen: Episode 79 which featured the gruesome murder of Sally Acorn from the Archie Sonic comics and Episode 80, which is what I'm going to tell you about now.

## The Pasta

A few weeks ago, I was dumpster-diving as usual, looking for old computer hardware and whatnot to tinker with. I was looking for pieces to an old Apple computer from 1979 when I suddenly felt something like a dusty CD at the bottom of the dumpster. I gently grabbed the CD with just my fingertips and dove up out of the junk.

I managed to get a good look at it. The CD had the words "Sonic X Episode 80" written on it in what I presumed to be a red Sharpie or some other permanent marker.

"What's this doing in a dumpster?" I wondered.

I was baffled to see a perfectly good CD being thrown away like that in a pile of several thousands of now-worthless computer parts. So I decided to take it home with me and clean it up.

After cleaning up the CD, the words that were written on it intrigued me: Sonic X has only seventy-eight episodes, right? So why is this called "Episode 80"?

I figured it was probably unaired, so curiosity took a hold of me and I loaded this disc into my own computer: a Toshiba laptop that ran Windows 7.

The disc started playing on Windows Media Player and I was in for the shock of a lifetime.

The Sonic X intro played as usual, but instead of the usual theme song, the Terminator 2: Judgement Day theme played.

"What's with the change of music?" I thought.

After the intro ended, it cut to Tails and the ghost of the Grass Seedrian Cosmo conversing over something. At first glance, the conversation seemed normal. Tails recapped to Cosmo what had happened since her death. Cosmo's ghost nodded her head everytime she responded to him with a comment here and there. A few minutes after that, Cosmo's ghost suddenly started crying. I was freaking out by this point. Why was she crying? Was it because she hated being dead? I had no idea what to think.

When Tails asked her what was wrong, Cosmo's ghost screamed at him that it was none of his business in a distorted child-like voice. She then used her ghost powers to strangle the life out of Tails. He screamed at the top of his lungs repeatedly that he had done nothing wrong until he died. Then he was thrown into a crack into the ground and he ended up in... Hell?

"Why is he in Hell? Why is Hell even there? This is supposed to be a kids' cartoon!" I thought again and again.

Tails, now in Hell, woke up again. He looked around and saw his friends being tortured alive: Sonic's intestines were being used as a noose to hang him from a rack on the wall, Amy was repeatedly being hit with her own hammer, and Knuckles was forever on fire with his skin melting off and regenerating itself every single time. Then it cut to the rest of Purgatory with young and old folks being killed in horrifying ways for the rest of the episode.

I quickly paused the episode, ejected the CD, and threw it at the bedroom wall, shattering it into several big chunks.

No one should have to see this episode..... I hope this was the only physical copy. Otherwise, several other people will get the same nightmares I did of Tails being strangled by a ghost and skin melting off of Knuckles.