Our intrepid heroine Amy Rose is off to Hidden Meadows in order to collect some gum tree berries, through what is implied to be some incredibly dangerous wilderness. Sticks is concerned for her friend's safety and offers to teach her some outdoor survival skills, to which Sonic scoffs that he is much more qualified to instruct Amy on such matters. Amy ends up making a bet with Sonic: She and Sticks will race Sonic and Knuckles to Hidden Meadows, and the losers will have to clean the winners' laundry for a month.
Sticks preps Amy as best she can, and, slowly but surely, Amy becomes a more capable outdoorswoman, even if she still has a tendency to accidently set things on fire. Meanwhile, Sonic and Knuckles do nothing but stuff their faces at Meh Burger until the footrace begins. By the end of the first day, Amy and Sticks have kept on schedule and have successfully foraged for food and set up camp. On the other hand, Sonic ends up setting his shoes ablaze and he and Knuckles fail to find anything edible in the woods. Unwilling to give in despite their increasingly apparent lack of survival skills, Sonic and Knuckles decide to just follow Amy and Sticks and surge ahead to the finish line at the last minute in order to win the bet. Even this dubious plot is derailed when the two decide to spend the night running around blindfolded and wake up the next morning with no idea where they are.
Taking pity, Amy and Sticks resolve to at least help Sonic and Knuckles navigate themselves to the finish line. Their first two tries at this fail miserably thanks to Sonic and Knuckles's consistently-impoverished decision-making skills. While setting up the third attempt, Amy and Sticks accidently back themselves into a concealed pit and fall into one of Eggman's missile silos. Sonic and Knuckles somehow manage to find them, but only agree to help after crossing the finish line into Hidden Meadows. However, using her knowledge of bird calls, plot-convenient circuitry skills, and an elaborate bread-crumb set-up, Sticks manages to launch the missile and she and Amy ride out of the pit on it. Even more fortuitously, the missile zooms past Sonic and Knuckles as they are about the reach the finish line. Amy and Sticks parachute off and land on the opposite side, beating their opponents just in the nick of time.
Amy and Sticks, being the good sports that they are, agree to lead Sonic and Knuckles back to civilization. Amy wonders out loud where the missile will end up landing, and Sticks assures her that she's sent it back to its maker. Cut to Eggman monologuing mere seconds before impact. Eggman's base is destroyed yet again, but on the bright side Mike Pollock had earned his paycheck for this episode at the last minute.
Tropes featured in the episode:
- Epic Fail: Numerous instances;
- When Sticks teaches Amy how to start a fire, Amy makes a decoration out of the leaves and rock she was assigned.
- Shortly afterwards, Sticks teaches Amy how to build a tent, before handing the rock to her and leaving to find dinner. Amy taps the post once with the rock, and the entire tent burns to the ground.
- Next, after Amy carefully studies two mushrooms, and successfully determines which one is safe to eat and which one is poisonous, she tosses the bad mushroom into the rebuilt tent, which somehow burns it down again.
- Sticks plants a twig in the road and draws a circle in the dirt around it, while Amy uses her compass to point north so Sticks can figure out the time (
this is how sundials work). Then Sonic and Knuckles find it, and Sonic holds up a red cape, prompting Knuckles to ram the twig into a tree like a bull! Surprisingly, this helps them tell the time. - On Sonic and Knuckles' side, Sonic tries setting up a tent and, of course, fails. He sees it as "perfect", however, and reclines on it as if it was set up properly, though he's interrupted by Knuckles' failure to get a fire going. Dismissing Knuckles' "bang two rocks together to create a spark" method as the wrong way, Sonic attempts to show him how it's done by running around the leaves the echidna set up... only to set his shoes on fire. Cue Knuckles attempting to put them out by whacking them with a twig, much to Sonic's chagrin.
- Amy and Sticks take pity on Sonic and Knuckles because of their poor survival skills and decide to leave them clues to help them along; of course, they're too incompetent to follow them. First, at a fork in the path, Sticks leaves her boomerang on the branch to the right, and Sonic deduces that an animal placed it there (instead of, you know, the obvious fact that the two actually went that way; even Knuckles assumes such correctly) before he and Knuckles go left (the girls facepalm in response). Then the girls leave a compass, and Knuckles near-instantly stomps on it.
Sonic: "Why did you do that?"
Knuckles: "Nobody tells Knuckles which way is north!"
(Amy and Sticks, watching from a nearby tree root, facepalm a second time) - Half-Dressed Cartoon Animal: Lampshaded. When Amy suggests the loser has to do the winner's laundry for a month, Sonic complains it's unfair because he and Knuckles don't wear pants.
- Girls vs. Boys Plot: Sonic and Knuckles try to prove they are more fluent outdoors than Sticks and Amy, though not out of any perceived sexism but merely Sonic's boastfulness. Due to Stick's Wild Child niches and Amy's better willingness to learn, in contrast to Sonic's arrogance paired with Knuckles boneheadedness, the girls make it through easily, at one point even trying (and failing) to help the boys get through out of pity.
- Killer Rabbit: After Amy sets a rabbit free from Sticks' trap, the rabbit finds a moose, then growls at it with a sinister look on its face, scares the moose, and chases after it.
- Mars and Venus Gender Contrast: Sonic and Knuckles compete against Amy and Sticks in this episode.
- Noodle Incident: While explaining how her knot includes cinnamon to make her closet smell nice, Amy adds "And if you lock yourself in there, you can eat it until the fire department rescues you!...So I've heard."
- Not Hyperbole: Sticks comments that if she had a newspaper for every time she fell into an abandoned missile silo, she'd be able to stack them up to make a ladder out of there. But, since they're all back at her burrow...
- Running Gag: Whenever someone says, "This'll be a piece of cake", they end up falling into something before they can say the word "Cake". Sonic falls into a well numerous times, and Sticks and Amy fall into an abandoned missile silo.
- Shout-Out: The scene with the rabbit growling at and chasing the moose is a shout-out to the Rabbit of Caerbannog from Monty Python and the Holy Grail.
- A Taste of Defeat: One of few times Sonic can be considered the "loser" of an episode (or much any story in a Sonic media for that matter).
- Team Rocket Wins: Amy and Sticks manage to reach the finish line before Sonic and Knuckles can.
- They Killed Kenny Again: Either that, or Eggman miraculously survived the destruction of his fortress by his own missile.
- Women Are Wiser: A more justified characterisation-defined case. Amy and Sticks, due to Sticks' obvious experience with the wilderness and Amy's willingness to learn, manage to win the expedition. Sonic and Knuckles, due to Sonic's hubris and Knuckles...being Knuckles, fail miserably.
