Sunbow Sundays

[Shockprowl]

I am so far behind Pinwig's Sunbow Sundays it isn't even funny. I just don't have the bastard time. But everyone I read is just pure brilliance. I'm not joking, Pins'. This stuff needs to be 'gathered' in some kind of hardcopy book-like thing. The research, the depth of the reviews, I don't think anything like this has actually been done before.

[Pinwig]

I expect it has. All I'm really doing is collating info from existing interviews and a few of my own opinions.

I have been pondering what to do with it all. It keeps growing though, every time I think I've got an entry nailed, some other interview turns up that can add another angle.

I find it fascinating, but it does absorb a lot of time.

[blueshift]

Mar 15, 2017 21:36:08 GMT Pinwig said:

I expect it has. All I'm really doing is collating info from existing interviews and a few of my own opinions.

I have been pondering what to do with it all. It keeps growing though, every time I think I've got an entry nailed, some other interview turns up that can add another angle.

I find it fascinating, but it does absorb a lot of time.

Make a book Pinwig!!

[Pinwig]

Here we go then. Start of a new month seems a good time to get going again. Obviously I write all these in Word with bold/italics etc which help to keep things clear, but all that gets lost cutting and pasting it into here and it'd take forever to go through and add all the bbcode manually. I'm trying to find a convertor online that will turn rich text into bbcode, but haven't found one yet that actually works. I also want to make sure I'm crediting sources properly and keeping to a consistent style, but I'm not quite there yet. These entries were also written after I started what has become a mammoth look into the production process of the series and how it worked, so it may refer to staff names as if you're supposed to have already had their backgrounds explained. That is an ongoing project I'm hoping to polish off over Easter, but it got a bit out of hand. I think I spent all of January writing that and it's only half done.

Anyway... A bumper entry to start season three looking at the fallout from the movie and the effect it had on the series.  


3.01 – Five Faces of Darkness – Part 1

Left to pick up the pieces after Transformers: The Movie, the third regular season of the cartoon followed quickly in its wake with a five-part story that not only deals with the movie’s world-changing events, but also takes its upbeat resolution and re-shapes it into something that restores the conflict necessary to make an ongoing series work. It continues the individual narratives of the film’s key characters, gives debuts to a host of new ones, revisits important locations, and most importantly introduces a new underlying threat to both Autobot and Decepticon by giving the Quintessons a proper purpose.

It’s the longest multi-part story in the entire series, and unlike those of the first and second seasons needs to be watched in its entirety to be fully appreciated. Although earlier segmented stories worked best as complete tales, careful construction meant that each episode could also work as a self-contained narrative, sometimes connected only by cliff-hangers and some loose topping and tailing. Five Faces of Darkness – the second and third parts particularly – does away with this to run as one ongoing story. When cut together into one movie length sequel, it’s hard to see the joins and outdoes the original film’s running time.

It’s the brainchild of Flint Dille, who, having worked on the cartoon at Sunbow’s West Coast studio since the later episodes of the first season as a producer, found himself put in the position of having to find a way forward from the film. In terms of the syndicated series, Dille’s name is one which until this point has remained largely in the background, but as creative control of the show moved from Marvel Productions to Sunbow for the third season, and having impressed Tom Griffin and Joe Bacal with his re-writing of Ron Friedman’s “unworkable” movie script, Dille was asked to come up with a new pilot story to re-launch the Transformers on television. In doing so he chose to expand ideas from the film and drew on his own rejected movie script – The Secret of Cybertron – using the five-part mini-series format that had proved to be a repeated success for GI Joe. As such, just as the original three-part pilot established the premise the first and second seasons would build on, Five Faces of Darkness would do the same for the third.

It was a necessary re-boot for two reasons. The first was simply that almost every episode of the series to that point had recycled the same ‘Autobots foil Megatron’s energy plan’ formula and a new direction was badly needed to prevent it going stale. Secondly, Hasbro had exhausted the existing Japanese toy moulds it had been mining since the line started, and was beginning to introduce its own radically different designs which moved away from the original ‘Earth form disguise’ premise. From Dille’s point of view this meant changes to the series were inevitable:

“We felt the idea that the Autobots and Decepticons were on Earth fighting over energon was played. We got more interested in What are these weird creatures? Where did they come from? What else is out there? What’s the mythology? What’s the bigger battle? We wanted to see that stuff, not one more story about Megatron taking over an oil field for energon.” [Moonbase 2 podcast]

“The truth is the product line for 1986 was all space based stuff anyway, so it really didn’t fit in on Earth – there was nothing in disguise; we don’t have space ships on Earth. We lost the simple charm of the Transformers being secretly disguised; you know - your family’s car might well transform into something. We ditched that altogether and a lot of the stories went more deeply into the Transformer mythology. We very rarely went back to Earth and when we did we did it at a whole different level.” [Kid Rhino DVD]

For viewers, this meant that when the series returned to television on Monday 15th September 1986, less than six weeks after the film’s release, it was unrecognisable from the one that had concluded in January. A new arrangement of the theme and a title sequence unique to the Five Faces story heralded the change, but it also assumed that viewers had seen the cinema film by replaying snippets from its finale as a recap.

Although the focus was on continuing the film, Dille was careful to ensure continuity with the previous TV season by giving many of the older characters voices, and particularly with the Decepticons a sub-plot that dealt with the fallout from their defeat. On the planet Chaar, their remnants struggle to survive in secret, leaderless and (because of Megatron’s continual quest to steal fuel rather than find ways to create it) without energon. These sequences of desperation contain some of the best characterisation in the entire story, and highlight the fact that the Decepticon rank and file became cannon fodder in a war between Galvatron and Unicron. The rag tag assortment of faces left over from the previous series looks deliberately random from a cursory inspection, adding to the feeling of decimation, but comparing the faces on screen to the 1986 US toy catalogue quickly shows that none of those included in this story are there by chance and that Hasbro’s directives regarding toys to feature in the series were still firmly in place (see below, Picking Up the Pieces – Who Survived the Movie?).

When Cyclonus and Scourge arrive, despite being in the same situation as the others without Galvatron to lead them, they are shown to be superior and aloof to maintain their position as the newer and more exciting Decepticons. Cyclonus’s calls to his ‘brothers’ to rally to the Decepticon cause is evangelical in its approach, and the viewer is left to wonder who his requests for the brethren to “give until it hurts” will truly serve. The shift in the balance of power from old to new is reinforced for the long-term viewer by moments such as Devastator being unable to combine, and in the bewildered and subservient Astrotrain – the powerful self-serving menace of his own introductory episodes such as The God Gambit now long forgotten.

The Autobots meanwhile are shown from the start to be much more integrated with the rest of the galaxy than before. Needing a way to show them as victors and saviours, not just of the Autobots but also having freed the universe in general from Unicron, Dille has Rodimus Prime opening an intergalactic games as a way of showing his new position as celebrity and protector, which is nicely balanced by Rodimus’s own disenfranchised opinion of the situation he has found himself in. At this point he is very much the reluctant leader, more intent on shirking responsibility than accepting it (much like Lion-O from the Thundercats cartoon, which had begun the previous year), and showing the traits of his previous form. He does grow through the story as enlightenment from the Matrix shows him the way forward, but this Autobot leader will have an underlying childish temperament until he faces Optimus again in Dark Awakening. This may also be a reason why the original animation model for his character (much older and wiser looking, as with the toy) was changed to match the personality he ended up with.

Embedding the Transformers in the wider universe is a far cry from the previous seasons where they were largely restricted to Earth and didn’t even have a proper presence on Cybertron. Stories such as The Gambler showed Megatron beginning to expand his empire, and others like Cosmic Rust showed the Autobots had moved away from their home world in the distant past, but contemporary Autobot operations aside from Optimus and his crew to this point had been contained to oddments and renegades such as the bounty hunter Devcon. Changes in the twenty years between the 1985 setting of the second season and the events of the movie in 2005 effectively ended the narrative that the series had been based on – the underdog Autobots fighting against the rise of Megatron – which also explains why Dille decided to build up the role of the Quintessons from being the sideshow they were in the film to the more omnipotent menace they become in the series. Having introduced a super-menace above the level of the Decepticons in the film, Dille clearly felt the series needed to maintain that level of omnipotent threat to compete with it. The irony is that in the film, the threat of the Quintessons is in their position as shadowy judges on high; their rotating pedestal appearance and suggestion of corrupted god-like judgement is fascinating and chilling. As soon as they become poorly animated and over-lit characters in the series, all that is lost and they begin to look like overinflated balloon puppets.

As said however, refining the movie universe for use as a series backdrop is what these opening episodes are all about - evidenced in the case of the Quintessons by the decision to remove their home world altogether in the second part. Because this episode is the first of five, it runs at a more leisurely pace than viewers would be used to, and the interwoven nature of the different plot threads suggests a narrative complexity the first two seasons couldn’t aspire to (even if it doesn’t ultimately fulfil that). Although the Decepticons are once again in search of energon in this story, Cyclonus’s mission to find Galvatron and a source of fuel only comes to the attention of Rodimus when he is trying to solve his own problems. The feeling is that everything is on a much bigger scale now, and it’s almost possible to think of the restrained and reactive Optimus Prime being totally out of his depth with the freedoms afforded Rodimus. Optimus wouldn’t know what to do with himself if he didn’t have Megatron to stop each episode. In that regard, the series at this point is much more about the characters and their place in the wider universe than it is the rinse and repeat stock story of the previous sixty-five episodes. There is a feeling that anything could happen and that the Decepticons are only a part of that.

In contrast to the simplicity of the Decepticon plot, the Autobots have to juggle a larger number of new faces, which means separating them to give each their star moment. Blurr and Wheelie are paired up by Perceptor to take Metroplex’s replacement transformation cog to Earth; Spike, Kup and Ultra Magnus are kidnapped to bring them in contact with the Quintessons; Springer and Arcee take off after the abductees to rescue them; and after receiving the location of Chaar from Blaster, Rodimus heads off with Grimlock to investigate possible Decepticon involvement in the attack on the Olympics. This then accounts for the film’s core cast of characters (apart from Wreck-Gar, who Dille obviously saw as a supporting cast member from the way he briefly appears later). Among the big names, the first of six new Autobots introduced in the story appears as Blaster’s side-kick on Earth - notable only because being called Outback gives voice artiste Dan Gilvezan the chance to try out a truly awful Australian accent.

The story branching allows Five Faces to continue the structure of the film, which also broke the key characters up into their own plots. This again shows how Five Faces is about pushing the ‘stars’ of the film individually, rather than as the ensemble of the older series. Dille is trying to create a core cast to hang stories around, also seen in the way Galvatron, Cyclonus and Scourge run the story for the Decepticons, being the only three focal characters in their ranks, while the older cast become a background chorus (later referred to by Cyclonus as “gun fodder”). Most tellingly, Grimlock is shown apart from the rest of the Dinobots for the first time, promoted momentarily alongside the other key cast because of his popularity, but reformatted to fill a comedy side-kick role instead of being the terse leader of the Autobot heavy artillery he used to be. With the core cast re-established and the seeds of the plot in place, the story moves on to its second part.


Picking Up the Pieces – Who Survived the Movie?

Transformers - The Movie did an exceptional job of decimating the ranks of the Autobots and Deceptions in its mission to make way for Hasbro’s newer toys, but rather than being a complete reset, many of the previous range were still available to buy after the film’s debut in summer 1986. As part of its job in rebooting the series and establishing a new status quo, Five Faces of Darkness begins the job of demonstrating which of the older toys survived the film, even where that doesn’t quite tie up with events seen in the cinema.

In the first episode alone, twenty-four of the Decepticons from season two reappear, and by the end of the five-part story it is only Starscream, Ravage, Buzzsaw and Frenzy of the older retail toys still available in 1986 who aren’t shown on screen (not counting the Deluxe Insecticons who were never used anyway). Further into the series, Ravage will gain a brief encore appearance, and despite his dramatic death in the film, even Starscream will reappear in ghost form to remind potential buyers he was still a potential purchase.

Looking in the other direction, of the newly available 1986 toys not brought in by the movie, Five Faces of Darkness introduces Trypticon and the Predacons, and later episodes will bring in the Battlechargers and Ratbat - meaning of the entire assortment of forty-eight Decepticon toys on sale in 1986, only the Deluxe Insecticons, Frenzy and Buzzsaw and are missing from the third series as a whole. Frenzy does appear in Sunbow’s cast list for Five Faces of Darkness Part 2, but ultimately has no dialogue in the recorded script – suggesting he may have had lines that were cut or given to someone else. Soundwave’s lesser two cassettes barely appeared in the first two seasons anyway, and because they were only purchasable with other toys (and were visually identical to Rumble and Laserbeak) they were obvious choices to ignore in an already packed line-up.

This explains what is sometimes put down to animation error – that characters who were seen to die in the film inexplicably re-appear here. While animation studio AKOM is far from innocent when it comes to animation problems, in this case the fact the Insecticons were clearly shown being transformed by Unicron, yet are seen in their original form here, is purely down to direction from Hasbro listing specific toys be included in the series. Perhaps at the time of the film, Shrapnel, Kickback and Bombshell were on the chopping block, but far from being a random assortment of characters stuck on Chaar, the line-up is very much about what children could still buy. This may also account for why the shot showing Optimus destroying Dirge before his final showdown with Megatron was cut from the film – the ‘Coneheads’ were still part of the toy line after the film.

For a toy range which usually favours the good guys, the Autobot line-up matches the Decepticons’ for numbers in the 1986 assortment, having an equal forty-eight toys (both counts not including the appendage figures with Metroplex and Trypticon). The difference though is the number of individual characters rather than easily grouped together sub-teams, and just fifteen of the range appear in the first episode of Five Faces because of the focus on the film’s ‘stars’. Thirty-two will have done by the end of the story, including all of the surviving season two cast except for Omega Supreme, Seaspray, Snarl, Swoop and perennial latecomers, the Protectobots, all of whom appear during the rest of the season. Jetfire is unique in that although he appears in the 1986 toy catalogue, he had quietly disappeared from the series already due to his murky heritage. Of the new and unseen characters, Outback, Metroplex, Sky Lynx, Tailgate, Pipes and Swerve debut in Five Faces, and over the course of the season the other two triple changers, Broadside and Sandstorm appear (Although Broadside’s jet mode appears in Five Faces as a generic Autobot ship, it seems unlikely it is actually him).

This leaves some oddities. Arcee survived the film to become a regular character in the series, despite not having a toy at all, and Hot Rod was still available so Sunbow were careful to fashion a way for Rodimus to appear later in the series in his original form. Another instance of the list of Hasbro mandated characters for the third season not tying up with the end of the film can be seen in the way Cliffjumper survives the film, and is in the reprise at the start of Five Faces, but then disappears completely. His Moonbase One companion in the film, Jazz, fairs slightly better and makes several minor third season appearances despite his toy having been retired - perhaps suggesting that at one point he and Cliffjumper were due to survive the cull like Starscream and Bumblebee did.

Sadly, Jazz’s voice artiste, Scatman Crothers, was diagnosed with lung cancer late in 1985 and subsequently died in November 1986. His wikipedia entry notes that damage to his oesophagus meant that by the middle of 1986 he was unable to speak, which may account for why Jazz’s third season appearances are silent as the voice recording sessions would have been done in the spring of that year.

Of the remaining available toys, just Roadbuster, Whirl and Hubcap are unaccounted for. Like the Deluxe Insecticons, the Deluxe Autobot vehicles were never used at all, but they and Hubcap share the notoriety of having had extended character biographies written for them by Marvel Comics’ Transformers chief, Bob Budianski, but don’t have associated animation models. As such, they were absent from the comics and don’t appear in the character compendium Transformers Universe, which goes some way toward explaining why they may also have been missed out of the series. Somewhere in the chain between Budianski’s original definition of the characters and their visual realisations by Marvel Productions, these characters were missed out. The exception to this is Swerve, who has a biography and an animation model, and thus appeared on TV, but oddly doesn’t appear in Transformers Universe.

At the tail end of the third season, as was the case at the end of the first and second, some of the early toys from the following year’s line began to make appearances. In this case, predating the Headmaster relaunch of the line, the Technobots, Terrorcons and the new Decepticon cassettes Slugfest and Overkill all slipped into the last five episodes of the main series. Then, in the final two-part story The Return of Optimus Prime (which came three months after the other episodes in February 1987) the Throttlebots made their debut.

[The Huff]

Wonderful to have this back again, Pinwig! A really nice in depth look at Five Faces that thankfully examined the story rather than the poor animation that everyone else simply references and judges it by when this is reviewed. Looking forward to more!

[Philip Ayres]

For lack of a more suitable home

[Pinwig]

Onward!

3.02 – Five Faces of Darkness – Part 2

Throughout Five Faces of Darkness each new episode continues directly from the previous one, with a recap to catch up viewers who weren’t watching the day before. These are longer than the recaps used on older stories because of the more involved nature of the plot, but are unremarkable except in the case of this second part because Rodimus’s voice is noticeably different to the way it sounded before. This is because a different actor, Ted Schwartz, voices the lines in the recap instead of Dick Gautier, Rodimus’s usual voice artiste. TFWiki notes that this is a rare example of a character being recast in the series after lines had been recorded, and that Schwartz was originally hired for the role but replaced after the initial sessions for Five Faces had been completed. The shots of Rodimus in the first episode’s recap are the longest of the few examples where the original recordings slipped through.

Comparing the two, particularly Rodimus’s rash exclamation that they will “trash every Decepticon in the galaxy” if they can’t find Ultra Magnus and the others, shows that Schwartz’s version has a much softer and more resigned tone, more like Judd Nelson’s Hot Rod from the film. The difference is subtle, but Gautier’s deeper delivery is more leaderlike and decisive than Schwartz’s version would have sounded. Although Rodimus shows many traits of his former ‘teenage’ self in the series (not least the “Why did I have to be the chosen one?” type lines) and Schwartz’s voicing would have been able to pick that up better, Gautier’s version brings more weight to Rodimus and his more Southern ‘drawl’ is perhaps deliberately closer to Peter Cullen’s Optimus Prime. The Autobot leader again sounds like a typical ‘Western’ sheriff.

With Dille writing all five parts of the story, the second begins to focus on the main points that will drive the plot after the first episode’s general reintroduction to the characters. It is primarily concerned with three key developments: the return of Galvatron; the revelation that the Quintessons were behind the kidnapping and thus have an interest in the Transformers; and that Rodimus can gain insight from the Matrix in dire circumstances.

In the case of Galvatron, his plotline starting out separately to the main story means his return can benefit from a build-up unhampered by other events. Having used memories from Unicron’s (still suspiciously vocal) head in part one to pinpoint the last known location of his leader, Cyclonus travels to Thrull with the Sweeps to find him after gleaning energon from the other Decepticons to make the journey. This reinforces the new pecking order in the Decepticon ranks. To Cyclonus, the older characters are inferior and the differentiation between old and new is demonstrated when he suggests to Galvatron that, “The Sweeps and I shall serve as your elite guard and the other Decepticons shall make excellent gun fodder”. Megatron’s previous lieutenants, such as Soundwave or Astrotrain, are no longer considered important enough to feature. The viewer is also reminded of the weakness of the other Decepticons in the way their attack on Rodimus and Grimlock fizzles out because, as Vortex notes, his weapon “just don’t pack the wallop it used to”. [1]

To Cyclonus, his position as second in command is important to him and he attempts to assert control without question from the other Decepticons. It’s even possible he could be attempting to keep other likely candidates at bay by deliberately depriving them of energy through his ‘donation’ plan. This is significant – in this continuity Cyclonus needs a personality because of his status as an ongoing character. It’s clear from the Marvel Comics biographies of the film characters that at this point they were only expected to exist inside the film – hence Cyclonus’s lacklustre writeup saying he is devoid of personality and has “no interests other than conquests for the sake of Unicron”. Here, because the series jumped forward twenty years where the comic didn’t, the two versions of the characters separate in purpose and personality more strongly than in the first and second season characters.

This raises the point that except for Starscream’s coronation, the film doesn’t explore the impact of Megatron returning to his older troops in a new form. The question of how much Galvatron remembers and how much of Megatron remains isn’t properly answered by the series, and Dille deliberately uses the plasma baths of Thrull to turn Galvatron insane not just to make him more reckless and aggressive, but to separate him from Megatron and put blocks to his past in place to skirt the issue. The fact he inexplicably destroys Thrull in a show of his newly rejuvenated and awesome power is another bit of tidying on Dille’s part – if the plasma baths were left to exist, their restorative powers could be used by anyone, and Galvatron needs to ensure that he stays top dog by denying even his own troops access to them despite the fact rejuvenation is exactly what they need to become an effective fighting force. In this way, Galvatron reflects Megatron’s largely solo existence from the previous series: he is surrounded by minions, but his mentality is to use them as tools to further his own power instead of recognising them as individuals.

Meanwhile, for Galvatron’s nemesis Rodimus, the episode is all about setting up his relationship with the Matrix and reminding viewers of the lore the film established. Having been surprisingly badly damaged by the power-depleted Decepticons, the story deliberately recycles Optimus Prime’s death scene using Rodimus to re-establish what the Matrix is. However, the scene only serves to point out the lack of empathy the viewer has for the new Autobot leader at this point. Optimus dying in the film is often cited by fans as being the most emotional moment in the entire series, coming after 65 episodes of his wise and considered leadership, so here an attempt to restage that with the sulky Rodimus when the audience barely knows him lacks any kind of gravitas. The clunky exposition doesn’t help and makes the comparison to the film even worse. Lines such as Arcee’s, “That’s what Optimus Prime said when he was dying” [2] and “He's preparing to pass the Matrix of Leadership to you” are far too obvious, as is Springer awkwardly assuming Ultra Magnus’s ‘I’m not worthy’ stance because he just happens to be the most senior Autobot present. More than anything, rather than reinforcing the significance of the Autobot symbol of leadership, this scene only serves to cheapen it.

We then learn that because the Matrix hasn’t “emerged”, Rodimus isn’t dead, and in his delirious state he is able to interface with it and receive a vision to guide him. While the Matrix is new to the series, this kind of spiritual transcendence isn’t - Optimus having gone through similar revelatory journeys in the second season episodes involving Vector Sigma. The relationship between Vector Sigma and the Matrix is made more apparent later.

What Rodimus sees is symbolic of the relationship between the Quintessons and the Transformers, and is prophetic in that he witnesses the destruction of Quintessa (established to be the Quintesson world in the previous scene) before it happens. The moment is dreamlike in tone with Rodimus receiving a jumble of images fused with swirling, vortex-like visuals that suggest inspiration from the scenes of transcendence in films such as 2001: A Space Odyssey or Star Trek: The Motion Picture. Without truly understanding at this point, Rodimus sees that the impending destruction of Quintessa will bring the Quintessons back into the lives of the Transformers as rulers, shown in the way Rodimus replaces Optimus, who is then replaced by a Quintesson face, who promptly demolishes a line of Autobot leaders in a show of power (other instances in literature of this kind of vision, such as when Macbeth seeks knowledge of the future from the witches and sees a line of kings that will replace him (Shakespeare, Macbeth: Act IV, Scene I), may suggest that the Autobots are descendants being wiped out rather than ancestors, although their appearance is more ancestral and ‘knight-like’ than futuristic). Regardless, it is a surprisingly surreal moment for what is usually a very straightforward series, designed to highlight the spiritual nature of the Matrix, and when originally broadcast would no doubt have benefited from the increasing numbers of viewers with home video recorders who could rewatch it.

Although the Quintessons are kept largely in the shadows in the first episode through use of the Skuxxoid, there’s no ceremony about their reveal in this one. The purpose of the film’s court scene wasn’t properly explained on screen (in early scripts Hot Rod and co were on trial simply for daring to trespass on the surface of Quintessa, which if anything made the sequence look even more like padding), so Dille gives it one here while promoting the Quintessons to chief bad guys for the series. The eventual reveal is that the Autobots are on trial for stealing Cybertron from them, and that Kup is abducted because questioning the planet’s chief of security will allow the Quintessons to assess Cybertron’s defences. Reading between the lines, this suggests that Kranix was on trial in the film for an equivalent offence, and that the Lithones are another race of robots created by the Quintessons. The Transformers Universe entries for both Kranix and his friend Arblus point out they also come from a race of transforming robots. As such, the appearance of the Quintessons simultaneously with Unicron suggests a need on their part to retake their ‘possessions’ before Unicron devours them. Beyond that, the relationship between Unicron and the Quintessons is another matter entirely, as is the link between the Matrix and the Quintessons - who are happy to destroy their entire planet in the hope it takes the Matrix with it. This of course also means the Quintessons need a new base of operations, so just as Unicron slowly drifted toward the conquest of Cybertron in the film, his replacements now begin the same journey in the TV series.

Aside from building the universe, Dille’s sense of humour also begins to creep into the writing, showing him becoming more comfortable with it. One example is Spike and Kup discussing football tactics before they try to escape the Quintessons with a reference to “the Bears versus the Lunar Colony” picking up on Dille’s own love of the Chicago football team. In interviews, he claims to have based the personalities of many of the characters in this story on players from the 1986 Superbowl winning Bears team – notably connecting Rodimus Prime with Quarterback Jim McMahon. Following this, Kup’s self-referential “Why do I feel like I’ve seen this before?” raises a smile as he’s dropped into the Sharkticon pit for a second time, but then Dille can’t resist a reference to the 1979 Peter Sellers film ‘Being There’ when the Quintesson judges appear and say, “Pay us no mind. We just like to… watch”, recalling Sellers’ misunderstood character in Hal Ashby’s comedy[3].

In all, the second part of Five Faces of Darkness is more enjoyable than the first because the three key plot points it focuses on all further develop the world established in the film. The disjointed nature of the first episode, with its space Olympics and need to involve as many characters as possible, is put aside to focus on questions left by the film, such as what happened to Galvatron and what the point of the Quintessons was. It adds a little more depth to Rodimus, and begins to dangle the hooks that will form the conclusion to the story.



[1] This point was obviously worth spelling out clearly as Swindle’s direct reply, “Yeah, because we’re out of energon dummy”, isn’t in the dialogue script for the episode. Numbering in the script suggests ten lines were cut at this point, with Swindle’s the only one put back in, or perhaps that the available dialogue script for this episode is actually a transcript for use by foreign language dubs and that the removed (unanimated) lines included Swindle’s by accident.

[2] Even though he did no such thing. Rodimus says, “My time in the light is short…” which TFWiki notes is a reference to an early draft of the film script. An approximation of the line is in Ron Friedman’s last draft, dated 27th April 1985, which reads: “Autobots… do not grieve… my time in the light has ended… In accordance with our tradition I now summon my successor… Ultra Magnus!” Dille may have refined this in his later revisions before it was removed completely, but it’s interesting to note that he may have been working on Five Faces at the same time as the film script redrafts for Arcee’s anomalous reference to occur.

[3] The film’s comedy relies on misunderstandings. Sellers’ character, Chance, is simple in nature and derives his understanding of life from watching television. When Shirley MacLaine’s character, Eve, begins to make sexual advances toward him, he re-enacts kissing he has seen on television to engage with her, but stops at the point the scene finished. She doesn’t understand and asks him what he wants, to which he replies, “I like to watch”, meaning television. Eve misunderstands and begins to masturbate in front of him, but, disinterested in sex, Chance ignores her and goes back to watching television.

[Pinwig]

3.03 – Five Faces of Darkness – Part 3

The most significant thing about the middle episode of Five Faces of Darkness is the introduction of the Earth Defence Command – a pseudo-military human operation working in conjunction with the Autobots – and the immediate impact Galvatron has on it. Otherwise, it doesn’t do much to further the basic plotlines set up in the first two episodes, feels very padded in places, and doesn’t work well as an individual episode without part four to explain how the new location, Goo 8739-B, fits into the bigger picture. Currently available versions of the episode still have the title sequence made specifically for the Five Faces mini-series, which is the most spoiler-filled of all the title sequences because it acts as a highlights reel of key moments from just this story, albeit reanimated as a flowing montage. In subsequent years, this has been replaced on parts one, two and four with the normal season three title sequence (if they ever had the other version at all), which is more generic and far better animated.

Being a ‘bare bones’ episode devoid of big reveals or plot developments, the way in which Flint Dille is telling the story comes much more to the fore than in others. Most notably, because of the brevity of the dialogue in the cartoon and the speed at which events happen, the universe he is unfolding around the characters starts to feel a little cardboard at this point. For a start, the locations are bland and very similar. With the Autobots on Goo, the Decepticons on Chaar and Blurr and Wheelie on Io, there’s little to differentiate what are effectively three uninteresting balls of rock. Thrull was the same and Quintessa better only because it benefited from the setup it gained in the film. Goo is introduced in the same way Junkion was in the film - as a stopping point for the dispossessed Autobots - but the lack of any indigenous flora or fauna makes it feel like it’s been put there simply to hold the Autobots somewhere the Decepticons can attack them. Elsewhere, even new character Marissa Faireborn seems to sit on standby like an emergency service response team in her ship on Mars, waiting for something to happen. There’s no hubbub from the base around her to make it feel ‘real’.

The way Galvatron and the sweeps flit between these places also makes this new expanded universe feel physically small, and the sudden appearance of a warp gate to allow him to reach Earth’s solar system just at the point Blurr and Wheelie do (they having been travelling there since the middle of the first episode) makes everything seem too compact, and also begs the question why the intrepid duo didn’t use the gate themselves. It doesn’t help that Galvatron’s run around the solar system makes it sound as though Pluto, Jupiter, Mars and Earth are all stacked up next to each other, and elsewhere, Ultra Magnus’s calculation that the Autobots will “impact with an object two hundred thousand kilometers away” puts the distance between Quintessa and Goo at just over half that of the distance between Earth and the moon[1].

Another problem that hampers the establishment of the new universe Dille claimed to want to create is the feeling that these places are nothing but inconsequential backdrops for the action, particularly in the way they have a habit of being destroyed as soon as they’re no longer useful to the plot. Not only do the Quintessons destroy Quintessa, but Galvatron destroyed Thrull in the last episode, the EDC outpost in this one, and will apparently dispense with Goo in the next. This tidying of loose ends is far too obvious on Dille’s part and, oddly, the series constants – Cybertron and Autobot City on Earth – are yet to really feature. This means the viewer has no anchor in the story at this point; the Autobots feel just as homeless as the Decepticons stranded on Chaar.

The question of exactly how long this story is set after the end of the film is also brought up by the presence of the EDC space platform (bearing in mind the introduction to Five Faces specifically states it is still 2005, but not how long it’s been since the destruction of Unicron). If the EDC was around during the events of the film it could be that Megatron’s attempt to “slip by their early warning systems” in the commandeered Autobot shuttle included EDC 1 (or others), which would give a longer timeframe for building such a significant undertaking, but Cyclonus’ update to Galvatron on events since his disappearance implies it is a new construction assisted by the post-war Autobots. The way it is referred to also suggests the “warp gate out beyond Pluto” is not only one of many, but part of a transport system the Autobots have helped set up – otherwise destroying it would make more sense than building a space platform to defend against it. Where the Autobots suddenly gained the warp technology that runs it is another matter, but they do now have control of Cybertron (and therefore the space bridge technology) and also a vast number of new and adoring alien friends who could have helped.

The EDC is clearly an invention of Dille’s and intended to be a resource for other writers to build on in future stories, but sadly within a few episodes of Five Faces, the EDC is largely forgotten beyond Marissa. There are obvious connections to GI Joe in the way the EDC works as an international defence organisation, and it is well established that Dille intended Marissa to be the daughter of Joe characters Flint (whose given name is Dashiell Faireborn) and Lady Jaye, even though in this timeline that would make her no more than a teenager in 2005. Thematic connections between GI Joe and the Transformers grew in the third season as control of the show’s creative direction came more in-house at Sunbow, with Dille (who started on GI Joe before moving to Transformers and whom GI Joe’s Flint is named after) and other editors such as Steve Gerber and Buzz Dixon having worked on both shows.

The parallels to the film continue in this episode after the re-enactment of Optimus’s death and the Quintesson court scene in the last. Not only do the Autobots crash land on Goo, mirroring their arrival on Junkion in the film, but a significant character is dismembered soon after. While that part fell to Ultra Magnus in the film, in this case it’s Springer who bites the dust when he is processed by the recycling scow roving Goo – deliberately shown to be left in pieces like Magnus was. Equally, the Quintessons continue their pursuit not so much of the Autobots, but of the Matrix, as Unicron did in the film. Their alliance with the fuel depleted Decepticons is interesting in that it initially suggests it’s just the Autobots they have a problem with, but ultimately controlling the Decepticons through rationing their fuel and getting them to fight the Autobots shows their desire to reassert control of both factions. Dille continues to drop unsubtle hints through the episode that the Quintessons are the Transformers’ original masters with lines such as, “You were never programmed for self-sacrifice” when Deliberata sees Rodimus risk his life to stop the scow, but the inherent evil in them is demonstrated when they decide the Decepticons’ “programs are not nearly so tainted as the Autobots’”, either suggesting they have a natural affinity with the Decepticons – both being evil in nature – or perhaps that they are more submissive and subservient than the Autobots, mostly being easily pushed around henchman stereotypes.

While the film took advantage of the need to remove deleted toys from the ongoing story by using the shock of real character deaths on screen, the series obviously couldn’t follow suit with the ongoing cast. However, the introduction of Galvatron’s army of Sweeps provides the first example of disposable Decepticon troops in the series and gives Dille a way to approximate the grittier feel of the film. This is a step up from the characterless Sentinel/Centurion droids used for such purposes in the previous season because of Scourge’s availability as a toy; even if his Sweep clones lack individual characterisation they do at least express opinions and appear sentient. Different colour schemes would have brought them close to being the Thundercracker and Skywarp of the third season. This means that when Wheelie shoots one above Jupiter (surprisingly in the face, and notably with a blaster instead of his more child copyable slingshot), Galvatron’s, “Please meet your end with dignity. I despise whiners” enforces the new improved leader’s unforgiving nature as well as trying to show that characters aren’t infallible. Galvatron’s return in this episode is all about showing how much more impulsive and trenchant he is than Megatron – waging devastation at any opportunity and certainly killing multiple humans in the destruction of the EDC platform, as he coldly says – for “sport”. It’s hard at this point to see him crying, ‘Decepticons retreat!’ under any circumstances. This could also be part of Dille’s remit from Hasbro to target the cartoon at an older audience and differentiate it from the more child-like Gobots.

With so much focus on pushing the new film characters, it’s perhaps surprising that the most engaging moments in the episode come from the outcast second season Decepticons, now reduced to living in caves on Chaar. While the new characters are largely inseparable in personality as generic heroes and villains, Dille doesn’t forget the better defined individual traits of the older cast. Dead End’s suicidal resignation when he goes out to find out what’s happening (“What does it matter if I meet my fate now, or when my circuits fail?”) shows more depth of personality than someone like Scourge or Ultra Magnus does in the entire story, as does his reference to the situation being more Swindle’s “department” when he learns a deal is to be brokered. Blitzwing is also a standout character despite the brevity of his appearance, firstly with the tantalising revelation that he can almost remember who the Quintessons are, and then the way his scepticism of them leads him to become the single forlorn Decepticon to remain loyal to the maniacal Galvatron. This thread is picked up in the final episode and will make Blitzwing the most interesting character in the entire story.

Saying Part Three is the worst of the five individual episodes that make up the whole story is doing it an injustice because of the way it’s so heavily reliant on the previous and following instalments. It doesn’t satisfy by itself, but then isn’t designed to; it’s keeping the plot ticking along between the introduction and the more exciting and revelatory final two episodes. It is largely redundant, but because it’s a cog in the bigger machine it helps maintain the feel of Five Faces of Darkness being a cohesive whole rather than a string of individual stories. But while the other episodes all have at least one significant moment in the story telling, such as Rodimus’s vision in Part Two or the story of Megatron in Part Four, this episode simply acts as a bridge between the beginning and the end, bypassing anything of real consequence in the middle.



[1] While the distance between Quintessa and Goo is likely to be a simple oversight in the scripting, because 200,000 kilometres does sound like a long way, it’s possibly significant that the Quintessons refer to Goo as a number: “They live. And plummet inexorably toward Goo Number 8739-B”. Rodimus identifies that “This isn’t a planet” when they land there, and Kup notes the surface is kept gooey by a forcefield. It isn’t until the following episode that a direct connection is implied between Goo and Junkion – the former being an asteroid set up to collect space debris in the manner of fly paper for the latter. The Quintessons being able to name this Goo specifically, and its proximity to Quintessa (and probably Junkion), suggests an historic link between the three. Being another race of transforming robots like the Cybertronians and Lithones, it seems the Junkions are the original recycling and repair arm of the Quintesson production line and the ‘Goos’ a vast system of asteroids used for trapping and harvesting raw robot production material.

[Pinwig]

3.04 – Five Faces of Darkness – Part 4

The fourth part of Five Faces of Darkness is primarily concerned with finally revealing the connection between the Quintessons and the Transformers, if it wasn’t obvious enough from the number of hints alluding to it in the previous two episodes. Half of the third act revolves around this, replayed through a second visit into the Matrix for Rodimus, and includes a brief origin story for Megatron that gives him vague parity to the more complex one Optimus had in War Dawn. It also moves the pieces into place for the final part by setting up the Quintesson attack on Cybertron and unveiling Trypticon on Earth - a Godzilla styled equivalent to Metroplex that will allow the story’s exciting final battle to play out on two fronts.

Additionally, the beginning of the episode details how Galvatron comes into contact with the Quintessons, which is neatly played out through the eyes of the beleaguered Season Two foot soldiers whose tale of woe has carried the Decepticon banner from the start of the story. Dead End, the Eeyore of the Decepticons, is clearly a character whom Dille liked to write and again comes across as comically resigned to his fate – being shot at from the front by Autobots and by his own leader from behind. Unfortunately, when sarcastically talking about how benevolent the Quintessons have been, giving them the opportunity to fight the Autobots, Swindle is audibly cut off in the middle of his line, “He means one of their opportunities”, with the emphasis on ‘opportunities’ rather than ‘their’ suggesting his sentence isn’t finished. The dialogue script for the episode jumps line numbers at this point, implying like the beginning of episode two that lines have been deleted for timing purposes, in this case another ten. It’s a shame that these minor characters are the ones always affected by this kind of editing as their perspective on the bigger events unfolding around them is among the best Decepticon character dialogue in the story. Being so early in this episode the missing lines would probably have further re-established the scepticism they have about the Quintessons.

AKOM’s reputation for being less than accurate with model use and colouring is never more prevalent than in these scenes, where all manner of odd looking robots fill the screen to pad out the Decepticon army as it descends towards Goo. The volume of mistakes suggests more than just laziness; the number of Decepticons on screen in the battle scenes is far higher than usual and would have taken considerable time to animate. Consequently, the episode has an even more rushed feel to it than the others, and the older Decepticons generally fair very badly, looking like disregarded generic fillers reminiscent of the way character models were used at random in the original pilot episodes. Most shots feature the wrong characters (such as Skydive standing next to Swindle when he questions what Galvatron can give them that the Quintessons can’t); characters in the wrong colours (it’s fun to pause the Decepticons descending toward Goo to work out just exactly who is wearing whose colours); or a mixture of the two (such as two Shockwaves appearing out of nowhere side by side to salute Galvatron in what looks like Constructicon green and purple, but with hindsight gives a striking resemblance to Thundercracker’s 1991 Action Master toy).

The connection between Goo and the Junkions mentioned under the last episode is alluded to when Rodimus and Ultra Magnus get to the control room. Because of the way the communication system is hardwired to contact Wreck-Gar, Goo is logically a resource under Junkion control. This moment of conversation between leader and adjutant also begins to round out Magnus’s ‘TV’ character. His line, “As I’ve tried to teach you, undisciplined thinking can make even the simplest task impossible” when referring to the aborted Decepticon attack, demonstrates that he sees himself as a tactician and a mentor – despite showing neither of these traits ably in the film. Ultra Magnus is another character whose full biography suffers from Bob Budianski’s lack of interest in the film, simply being a summary of his actions on screen rather than anything character defining. It is his motto, ‘Consistency is victory’, which is more interesting than anything else, and now that Rodimus is in place as the hot-headed young leader, Dille clearly had plans to expand on this implied fastidiousness to make Magnus the leash to rein him in with.

Having manipulated the bulk of the Decepticons very easily with energon, the Quintessons recognise that Galvatron will need a bigger lure to win him over and so invent the Decepticon Matrix of Leadership. However, their own analysis reveals that they think there is a “seventy-seven-point-nine percent probability” he doubts this actually exists, and a muddier conversation follows which ends with Galvatron agreeing to unite with the Quintessons because he sees value in their intellect, and the Quintessons eager for Galvatron’s forces to eradicate human life (which they find “troublesome and unpredictable” because of the way humans have apparently “tainted” the Autobots). It’s all a little contrived, and shows Dille trying to fudge an awkward plot hole to set up the impending finale, but it does at least provide an explanation for the series as to why the Quintessons hate humans as much as they do Autobots.

Meanwhile, Blurr and Wheelie’s isolated mission brings them ever closer to getting the all-important transformation cog to Earth, a seemingly irrelevant plot thread that will gain payoff in the final episode when Metroplex awakes to battle Trypticon. Their tribulations are never more shown to be a series of artificial barriers than by the bat-like creatures they encounter on Io, which oddly in the previous episode seemed to be much larger walking monsters. Clearly a random afterthought, these creatures (bizarrely named ‘Lightpoles’ based on a reference in the script for Part Five) appear to be organic but can turn into suicidal bombs using the standard transformation noise, presumably to provide yet another hurdle for Blurr by removing Marissa’s ship from the story. Being such a jumble of ad hoc ideas it’s impossible to read anything into the Lightpoles at all, despite the apparent on-screen relationship they have with the Cybertronians through being another transforming life form.

Among these shortcuts and fudges in the writing, what Dille does get right is the big revelation that the Quintessons created the Transformers in the first place. His version of the origin story is completely at odds with (and much more straightforward than) the one spun out slowly through the comics, and is much less mythical - in fact reducing the Transformers to simply being a commercial venture on the part of the Quintessons. Opinion is firmly divided on which origin story is the better, but there is a coldness to the simplicity of Dille’s version which provides an underlying sense of angst for the Transformers – in this story they come face to face with their gods and find them to be uncaring, which leaves many philosophical and soul-searching questions about their place in the universe unanswered. The brevity of the story’s telling though does show what purpose this really serves for Dille – it’s not so much about finally revealing the origin of the Transformers, but is more about establishing the Quintessons as ongoing antagonists for the series. The story is told almost from their point of view, and by coming as a five-minute info-dump is dealt with very economically when something as significant as this deserves a more involved retelling. A good comparison is the way that Optimus’s origin alone was given an entire episode in War Dawn, but here, Megatron’s equivalent is a footnote in a compacted history lesson that takes a third of the time to tell.

It’s a pity because these scenes reveal Dille’s desire to put the pieces together. His initial interest in building a mythology for the Transformers became the seed that David Wise’s second season stories on the subject grew from, shown by a memo Dille sent to prospective writers in February 1985 containing some of his own story suggestions:

“JOURNEY T0 THE CENTER OF CYBERTRON: The Autobots and Decepticons have to fight their way to the center of their own planet through a maze of primitive monsters to try and find the ‘original program’ -- the machine that made all of them. (Typing this has kind of make me like it. I might write this one)”

Ultimately Dille didn’t write it, but the idea became The Key to Vector Sigma, and Wise’s famous anecdote on the computer’s name suggests that Dille may have been the Sunbow contact who came up with it:

“I was unaware I was the first guy to write Vector Sigma; I thought it had been used in prior scripts because Sunbow just sort of handed the concept to me… They said, ‘do a show that introduces these two groups, the Stunticons and Aerialbots, and oh, by the way, there’s this big computer called Vector Sigma. Use that to create them.’ So I said to Bryce [Malek, story editor for Marvel Productions], ‘What’s a Vector Sigma?’ Bryce called Sunbow and asked, ‘What’s a Vector Sigma?’ They said it was the computer that gave the Transformers their personalities.” [Cybertron Chronicle]

Although Vector Sigma isn’t mentioned in the flashback Rodimus witnesses, it makes sense that if the Autobots were to rebel against the cruelty of the Quintessons they would have to be sentient and understand their own rights to do so (subsequently shown in Forever is a Long Time Coming), which is something that The Key To… demonstrated in the way the newly created Aerialbots questioned their need to help humans. As such, Vector Sigma could easily be a core part of the Quintesson production line, perhaps the device that originally allowed them to “endow their products with a simulated intelligence”. Vector Sigma itself also claimed to have existed before Cybertron, and so wasn’t something created by the Autobots. Although there are contradictions, the origin stories hang together well, even to the point that retro-fitting Alpha Trion passing the matrix to Optimus gels neatly with the way he created him from Orion Pax in War Dawn. In that regard, Dille does an excellent job of binding the Matrix’s sudden introduction in the film with the ideas established in the second season, cleverly incorporating the Quintessons in the process.

The fly in the ointment is Megatron, who is shown to be created without Vector Sigma, even though he himself was clear on needing it to imbue his Stunticons with life (The Key to Vector Sigma). Another popular bone of contention with this specific scene is the way it implies the Constructicons (perhaps even eight of them) built him to lead the Decepticons at a time before The Secret of Omega Supreme presented them as Autobots, and also before they were ‘created’ on Earth in Heavy Metal War. There are any number of ways to explain this imaginatively (such as the Constructicons tapping Vector Sigma’s power illicitly for their own creation device, becoming Autobots when they realise the error of their ways and then being forced to become Decepticons again by the Robo-Smasher), but Dille himself takes a simpler approach to excusing inconsistencies:

“Jay [Bacal, Sunbow’s Creative Director] once described our production process as like being on an auto assembly line. Car comes through, no wheels, and we put wheels on. Car two comes through, needs a paint job, and we paint. Car three comes through with no engine, no interior, and we get the engine and the seats in… At one point or the other, things don't get fixed. That's one answer, the other one, the kind that plays well in philosophy classes and might play well here, is that there are ‘multiple truths’." [Cybertron Chronicle]

Either way, it’s noticeable how Dille felt the big questions needed answering, and the setup he creates here for the conflict in the third season’s ongoing narrative is deeper and perhaps better thought out than the original premise which brings the two factions to Earth in the first place (and also Ron Friedman’s contemporary equivalent, Unicron, who gains no explanation for his motives in the film other than being an adversary more significant than the continually ineffective Decepticons). The flashback contains a lot of fine detail packed into a few lines, and concepts such as the gladiatorial combat begun as an entertainment for the Quintessons interestingly have parallels in other fictions that were written around the same time (notably State Games in the 1986 UK Annual). The series would have been much weaker at this point if it had still refused to develop any kind of ongoing continuity, and it is no coincidence that the increasingly cohesive world grew the more Dille had to do with it.

On the subject of life being given to Transformers, this episode’s finale also introduces Trypticon, also without the need for Vector Sigma. However, it’s possible to see his limited intelligence as being akin to that of the Dinobots, also created on Earth, which echoes the way the Ancient Robot in Rodimus’s vision says the Quintessons initially imbued a “simulated intelligence” in their creations so “the machines could manufacture themselves” before they later developed emotional sentience. Perhaps this is more evidence of there being discrete levels of intelligence in Transformers, as explored under the entries for the early Dinobot stories. Trypticon’s creation is another example of Dille skirting a tricky problem without giving clear answers, and given converting an entire city into a Transformer is something the Constructicons could have only done after being refuelled at the end of the previous episode, is accomplished pretty quickly. It does though echo the way Starscream uses Earth vehicles to create bodies for the Combaticons (Starscream’s Brigade), so there’s nothing to say that Trypticon’s personality component wasn’t at some point retrieved from the Decepticon Detention Centre too.

Either way, his destructive appearance at the end of the episode gives Blurr and Wheelie’s quest to bring Metroplex’s transformation cog to Earth much more relevance, and with Galvatron simultaneously leading the attack on Cybertron, the fourth part of Five Faces concludes with an appetising double cliff-hanger that sets up the all action finale. Above all, it is the episode in the chain that has the answers, and while the earlier parts sometimes feel like they are stalling to pad the run time out before reaching this point, when the big reveal finally comes, Dille delivers in spades with the explanation; even if it is sadly compacted into a short five-minute information overload.

[Pinwig]

My word, this episode is packed. Lots to talk about.

3.05 – Five Faces of Darkness – Part 5

Five Faces of Darkness reaches its all action finale with the fifth part. Leaving the slow burn of the middle of the story well behind, the last part is almost cramped trying to fit everything in, including as it does the rapid introduction of Sky Lynx, the Predacons, Tailgate, Swerve, Pipes and Metroplex amid battles played out on three fronts across Io, Cybertron and Earth. Featuring over fifty different characters in just less than twenty minutes of screen time, it’s one of the fastest paced episodes of the entire series and - held back only by AKOM’s less than stellar animation - does a good job of trying to match the movie’s big set pieces for jaw-dropping ambition.

Most importantly from Flint Dille’s point of view, it’s also the conclusion of his reboot and the end of his direct writing of episodes - leaving the series after the movie in a far different position to the one it was in at the end of the second season. Dille’s re-writing of the rulebook becomes more shockingly dramatic here, capped by the destruction series staples such as the Ark and Teletraan-1, and leaves key players Rodimus and Galvatron with motives to drive new stories that go beyond the tried and tested Autobot vs Decepticon stalemate. Part of that is deliberately leaving the plot regarding the Quintesson attempt to recapture Cybertron unresolved, which is left open-ended after Spike foils the plan to deactivate the Transformers. By doing this, Dille’s intent to reboot the series and set up the Quintessons as a third ongoing faction is never more obvious. Rodimus’s line that closes the story – “We Transformers have looked into the face of our creators - and seen the face of an enemy” – is a clear signal that there are now three forces in the series, adding potential complexities to the dynamics between them.

With so many characters featured in the episode, Dille makes things easy for himself by sectioning them off into their own vignettes (much as he has done with the overall plot through the five episodes). One of the most endearing is the way the 1986 Autobot mini-vehicle assortment attempts to protect the Ark from Trypticon. Aside from Seapray, Cosmos, movie-star Wheelie and the ever-missing Hubcap (see, Picking Up the Pieces – Who Survived the Movie?) the whole crew are here, with Pipes taking the lead by coining Optimus Prime’s “Transform and roll out” as they go into battle on the series’ traditional desert stage. This is as close to the old series as Five Faces comes, and as such is instantly familiar. Trypticon’s strength is made evident by the way he bats each of them away and comically stomps Swerve into the ground, injecting a little too much humour into proceedings, but the battle is tinged with sadness as Teletraan-1’s flashing screen is seen briefly before the computer desperately tries and fails to defend the Ark.

Warpath’s “It never ZWOOPI stood a chance! POING!” continues to downplay the sadness, but inescapably this is not only Teletraan-1’s exit from the series, but the Ark’s too. Crushing the significance of the moment, the scene feels rushed, and rather than playing on the emotion, it’s hard not to see Dille using this as a box ticking exercise in his re-arrangement of the writer’s guide. In one short scene not only has he accounted for a presence on screen of most of the pocket-money Autobots, but also demonstrated the awesome power of Trypticon in readiness for the grand finale and replaced the Ark with Autobot City into the bargain. The functional and economical plotting jars, but it’s undeniably clever in the way it slots necessary pieces together.

Meanwhile on Cybertron, Ultra Magnus replays another scene from the film as his “I’ll buy us some time” sacrifice echoes the moment on Junkion when he is dismembered by the Sweeps. In keeping with the increased level of destruction seen in earlier episodes, the fight on Cybertron tries to ape the film with eye-opening and explosive ‘deaths’ for Ramjet and Dirge, who then return without fanfare in later episodes. Even though the cartoon can’t remove toys that are still on sale, as with the ill-fated Sweep in part three it does at least try harder than before to suggest the possibility of fatalities.

Io forms the third battle ground for the episode, and another vignette to introduce new characters. The animal based modes of Sky Lynx and the Predacons make them a natural match in combat, although visually, the result in this episode is less dynamic than imagination allows for. Sky Lynx’s puma and pterodactyl components have equivalents in Divebomb’s eagle and Rampage’s tiger, but in this instance, it’s only the aerial pairing who briefly come face to face. Given the sparsity of animal alt modes in the early G1 years and the fact these are both combiners (of a sort), there is scope for a rivalry between the two, but this is never capitalised on properly. Additionally, Sky Lynx and Razorclaw are almost opposites in the way Sky Lynx’s biography lists him as “constantly moving” and Razorclaw (oddly for a predatory animal) as almost inert - something that could have been used as the basis for an ongoing enmity between the two. Sky Lynx also stands out as being the first Transformer with an animal-themed robot mode to speak with the same level of articulation and intelligence as other robots, necessary because of the haughty nature and commanding rank his biography gives him. However, he only seems to do this when in a combined mode – his individual bird and cat forms communicate instead with guttural cries.

Squeezed into the story, the battle on Io is another way for Dille to introduce new characters, and there’s irony that in a story largely about the creation of the Transformers generally, none of these ones are given a proper origin. In fact, the introduction of the Predacons is confusing to say the least. The Quintessons introduce them by name in a way that suggests they are revealing a new creation of their own, and Blaster’s relaying of this information to Sky Lynx (“Somethin’ called ‘Predacons’ comin ‘atcha”) implies he hasn’t heard of them before, despite the fact they have Earth alt-modes. The way they materialise from balls of fire suggests a kind of symbolic birth, as if this is the Quintesson production line’s delivery service in operation, but rather than remaining allied to the Quintessons (which would have been an original idea), the next time they appear they will have become part of Galvatron’s regular team.

The fireballs at least provide some recognition that the Predacons are new characters, which is more than Sky Lynx gets. His first name check, from Blaster, (“Good ol’ Sky Lynx better get there soon”) makes it sound as if he’s a long-established character, which puts him in line with the explanation given in the end of episode info-dumps that tail many third season episodes that some Autobots returned to Cybertron from the galaxy’s distant reaches once it was under Autobot control again after the film. However, on first airing the viewers wouldn’t have known this, or possibly even the character, and in a rare instance of dialogue appearing in the finished episode that isn’t in the recording script, a sequence was added around the five-minute mark just after he lands on Io to more formally recognise him:

Marissa: Metroplex, this is Faireborn. We’re close to the end here, Blaster.
Blaster: Hold your horn, Faireborn. We’re sending Sky Lynx to break your jinx.
Marissa: What’s ‘Sky Lynx’?
Blaster: He’s hard to describe, but he’ll soon arrive!

The line numbers before and after this moment in the dialogue script (39 and 40) show no break, meaning the sequence wasn’t accidentally edited out of the script, but was added afterwards. Close inspection shows that the accompanying animation shots are either directly reused from other places, or carefully constructed from existing foreground and background elements to patch the gap (for example, Marissa saying “We’re close to the end” is actually her saying “We’re about to join it” from about twenty seconds later, but put over a different background). Most notably, the last two lines play over the previously used establishing shot of Sky Lynx, firmly linking the character with the name. This highlights the way consideration was given at the time to the fact this was a new character, even if the story didn’t go as far as a proper origin. The addition of these four lines means that in the next scene on Io, four are cut to balance the run time - one of which somewhat frustratingly directly links Metroplex to being Autobot City:

Marissa: (Throw) Energy cell’s dead. Face it fellas, we’re about to become past tense.
Wheelie: (Grimly) Then Autobot City shares our fate –
Metroplex, the late and great.
Marissa: Is that - Sky Lynx?

The dialogue script also gives Sky Lynx’s different modes individual names that don’t match the simple ‘dinobird’ and ‘puma’ of his Marvel Universe biography. He is by turns referred to as Skylynx, Skylynx-Pterodactyl, Skylynx-Lynx and his final walking combined mode (called ‘super robot’ in his toy instructions) is referred to as ‘Dinoblast’.

Meanwhile on Earth, the stage is set for the final battle as Trypticon begins to approach Autobot City. Whether intentional or not, this moment allows for a solution to the problem of the relationship between Autobot City and Metroplex. Without the transforming cog, Blaster is still able to perform a “semi-transform”, which puts Metroplex into a battle mode similar to the transformation Autobot City undergoes in the film – even going as far as mimicking the film’s scenes of Transformers running out of the way of enormous moving parts. Both are triggered manually, rather than Metroplex deciding to make the change himself, allowing Autobot City and Metroplex in this instance to be considered the same entity. Dialogue in the episode uses the two names interchangeably, with even Trypticon’s, “Now - crush Autobot City!” at the end of the first act becoming, “Crusssh Metroplex!!!” by the third.

It’s as if Dille is deliberately trying to morph one into the other to patch over the ambiguity, which could have been made clear in the script by saying Autobot City becomes Metroplex through the addition of the transforming cog, just as the Constructicons managed to turn a human city into Trypticon. However, Perceptor stating in the first episode that this is a replacement for the original, “destroyed in the great battle with the Decepticons” conflicts with this, and instead the impression given is that the cog was damaged before Metroplex could transform properly in the film. All of this is reconcilable, but the subtle way in which ‘Autobot City’ becomes ‘Metroplex’ in the script is lost on AKOM, who instead depict Metroplex as a break-away centre piece of Autobot City at the point Blaster begins the battle mode transformation.

Regardless of the spectacle of the climactic battles, the most interesting aspect of this episode is the way Dille expands on Blitzwing’s distrust of the Quintessons from the last episode, putting him into the position of having to go behind Galvatron’s back to explain the truth to the Autobots instead. Blitzwing’s evident anguish at not wanting to betray his leader while recognising his mania is stopping him from seeing the truth is a surprisingly deep, character-driven sub-plot for this particular story, and the ‘will he, won’t he’ question of him defecting to the Autobots is just as exciting as watching Trypticon take on Metroplex.

This Blitzwing is a completely different character to the meat-head football player analogue seen in episodes such as Triple Takeover and is also at odds with the “loud mouthed, belligerent and brash” persona described in his biography. Dille uses Blitzwing to emphasise Galvatron’s blinkered, tyrannical nature, suggesting the idea of dissention in the ranks of the older Decepticons, and while it might have been interesting to build Cyclonus’s character by putting him in this position, using an older character means this particular sub-plot can be returned to at will in future episodes without having to continually have Galvatron’s chief lieutenant worrying about his boss. Soundwave would also have been a good character for this, given his penchant for self-preservation and the option to use the cassettes to eavesdrop on the Quintessons, but Blitzwing’s more mobile alt-mode makes him a more versatile equivalent.

This is Blitzwing’s swansong moment, but the conclusion is curtailed by a few of his final lines being removed from the finished episode. It’s impressive enough that Blitzwing threatens to shoot Galvatron to end the face-off between him and Rodimus, but in the original script after saying, “Sometimes it’s better to be known for one’s enemies”, Blitzwing adds, “Go now, Galvatron. Don’t make me fire”, as if his leader’s fate is his decision. The scene also originally concluded with Rodimus saying, “We really do need all the troops we can get”, to which Blitzwing replies, “I’ll think about it”, showing the events of the episode have changed his initial reluctance to switch sides. This kind of interaction is unprecedented, going beyond the faux treachery of Mirage in Traitor and Starscream’s tantrums to show a permanent change in the status quo. Every time Megatron kicked Starscream out, viewers knew the squabble would be forgotten the following week, but these events leave Blitzwing with a genuine sense of loss at what used to be and a bleak, lonely future without it. Sadly, Blitzwing’s indecision about his allegiance isn’t returned to in the series because the intended follow up in Starscream’s Ghost eventually used Octane in the role of exiled Decepticon instead. Disappointingly, Blitzwing only ever appears in the series again as a stock animation model padding out scene backgrounds.

In comparison, the resolution of the Quintesson plot is nowhere near as interesting. Although it’s comical, it makes sense that they would have built a master ‘off’ switch into their production plant, and Dille further defines Galvatron’s belligerent paranoia by making him the one to push it. The parallels to the movie continue as Spike disables the freeze control (just as Daniel shot the hinge on the vat that saved Bumblebee and the others in the film), but the Quintessons turning tail and running means Rodimus is denied the chance to confront them about the reality of his existence, which is really what his story has been building to with all the interaction in the Matrix. Those questions go unanswered, and although this is deliberate because of the way this new conflict becomes a part of the ongoing series, it’s a shame that of all the showdowns in this final episode, the most important one to the overall plot isn’t serviced properly. Instead, Rodimus concludes the story with another moment echoing the film as he gives a final stirring speech.

Overall, Five Faces of Darkness is a bold attempt to take the world changing events of the movie and slot them into format that will work as an ongoing series. It does this successfully given the way many following episodes expand on ideas presented within these five episodes, and because this is also Flint Dille’s last significant writing contribution to the show (he himself said that after Five Faces his attention was taken by Inhumanoids and Visionaries) it marks the true end of the early phase of the cartoon by tidying up all the loose ends left over from the previous season. Ultimately, whether it was right or wrong to move the series away from the Earth-bound format of the first two seasons is immaterial; the decision was forced by the arrival of the newer ‘sci-fi’ toys and Ron Friedman’s interpretation of them in his original film draft. Going with the Quintessons rather than Unicron as the faction to break up the stalemate between the Autobots and Decepticons on TV was insightful and the right choice, and although it could probably have done with stronger editing and a rethink of some of the early elements to keep it more focussed (such as drawing in the wider universe with the Space Olympics and then forgetting all about it, Galvatron’s fate turning out to be that he ended up in a bath, the destruction without consequence of the human space platform and the interminable adventures of Blurr and Wheelie), it stands as the key turning point for the cartoon and holds a vitally important position in its evolution.

[Pinwig]

Onwards with an experimental episode from one of the series' established writers that doesn't quite hit the mark it's trying to. 

3.06 – The Killing Jar

The considerable appeal of both The Gambler and Starscream’s Brigade put Michael Charles Hill in the position of being one of the show’s more lauded writers at the end of the second season. Talking about The Gambler, he said that he favoured taking characters out of their usual environment because he wasn’t “steeped” in the history of the show and could avoid continuity problems that way. As a result, the story provided a refreshing perspective that started to put the Transformers into a wider universe, with its Star Wars styled plot about bounty hunters and seedy intergalactic gambling. For The Killing Jar he again decided to ignore the standard plot formula, perhaps writing the story early enough in the development of the third season that the stage that would be set by Five Faces hadn’t yet been fully dressed. Indeed, the episodes immediately following this one either focus on individual characters (Chaos) or are written by new writers being heavily guided by Dille (Forever is a Long Time Coming and Starscream’s Ghost). As a steady hand, it seems with The Killing Jar that Hill could get on unaided with a story that wouldn’t require in depth knowledge of everything Dille was doing. As such, it’s very tightly focussed – emphasised by the fact it directly follows the very broad canvas Dille painted with Five Faces. While viewers might have been expecting to see Rodimus and Galvatron battling again, as they would Optimus and Megatron week-in, week-out, The Killing Jar uses the traits of a select handful of characters to drive a plot that looks inwardly at exploring personality instead of outwardly at the wider universe.

Hill said of the story that it was “essentially an exercise in doing a ‘bottle’ show with limited characters and ‘sets’, coupled with a scientific experiment and a ‘morality play’”. It’s also the first of two he wrote with Joey Kurihara Piedra, a process about which the Cybertron Chronicle asked him in 2014:

“Joey was my live-action script writing partner at that time and I offered him an opportunity to start his own animation writing career. Together, we developed numerous premises. For the ones that were approved... we would then work on the outlines together. Once we got the go-ahead to script, I would write the first draft. Then together we would polish up before submission. Then I would do the rewrite based on notes from the story editor and/or Hasbro.”

Despite its simple premise, the episode provides plenty of moments worthy of discussion and contains much that expands on the scenario established in Five Faces, albeit perhaps unintentionally in places. One of the main elements is the introduction of the Quintesson scientist, who is visually different to the judges that gave Five Face of Darkness its name. He is the first of several new Quintesson characters to appear in the third season, nicely expanding the remnants of the world of Quintessa and boldly ignoring the premise that the series is just about selling toys, but despite the fact he has one of the film’s alligator styled Quintesson guards, he sadly has no dialogue with the judges, making it hard to further explore the Quintesson hierarchy or society on this episode alone. His lack of additional faces doesn’t say anything about him, other than that his character model is one that would have been less intensive to draw for the quick turnover of the TV series, and also wouldn’t need the constant chatter between the five different personalities (something that would have been overkill in this already dialogue heavy episode).

The scientist’s observations come in the form of a rolling commentary, which is more him thinking aloud than a meaningful discussion with his almost silent bodyguard, but many lines expand on the idea that the Transformers are Quintesson products. The viewer is reminded of this right at the start of the episode; when observing Ultra Magnus, the scientist calls him an “excellent specimen” and adds that “we designed them well”. This is further developed when he predicts Magnus’s response to being attacked by the fake Rodimus: “I contributed to the Autobot’s design. They always react according to their individual programming. This Ultra Magnus is a soldier first and foremost!” Interestingly, the dialogue script places the apostrophe as a singular possessive, suggesting that the scientist is talking specifically about having contributed to Ultra Magnus’s design, and when he refers to him as “this” Ultra Magnus, it could imply that there is a base ‘Magnus’ model from which “this” one was created. However, as ‘they’, rather than ‘he’ is used as the pronoun referring to Autobots in the second sentence, it seems likely that the position of the apostrophe is a typo, and the scientist is talking about having contributed to the design of the Autobots in general (which also says something about the lifespan of the Quintessons, making them a handful of near-immortal ancients, rather than a thriving culture).

The statement also touches on the question of the sentience of the Transformers themselves, brought up by Five Faces. By correctly anticipating Magnus’s responses, and saying that Autobots always react “according to their individual programming”, Hill downplays Dille’s idea that the Autobots shrugged off their programming and developed full sentience when rebelling against the Quintessons because the scientist can still predict the way the Transformers will behave. When picking up Cyclonus, the scientist expands on this by saying “this Cyclonus is very similar in programing to Ultra Magnus” and that “this Decepticon and the Autobot are two of a kind” as if he is able to categorise them. It would be interesting to think that hidden within the way Transformers act, there is still an element of pre-programmed response – something that would have made a great theme for other episodes to explore if it came into conflict with their higher consciousness.

Another error in the script frustratingly clouds a further important line from the scientist. After picking up Wreck-Gar, the script (incorrectly attributing the line to Cyclonus) reads: “Listen, Autobot, this Junkion should have reacted as I predicted”, which makes no sense in context and sounds on screen much more like “As an Autobot, this Junkion should have reacted as I predicted”. As the available dialogue script for this episode contains no additional unused lines and has several errors where lines are assigned to the wrong character, it appears it is a transcript rather than a script, and the second version of the line above is the correct one (the script is dated 30th September 1986, the day after the episode was first broadcast, lending credence to the idea that it originated after, rather than before the episode was recorded). If that’s the case it adds to the idea suggested in Five Faces of Darkness - Part 3 that the Junkions are Quintesson designed Autobot offshoots made specifically for salvage and repair.

Cyclonus’s capture contains another of the series’ more famous mistakes, which is confirmed by the dialogue script. The disguise the Quintessons choose for their ship when approaching Chaar is clearly Broadside’s jet mode. Whereas the use of this animation model as an Autobot shuttle during Five Faces seemed to be a genuine mistake, or an animator taking a quick short cut rather than designing something new, in this case the voice that says, “Cyclonus! Galvatron wants to talk to you. Climb aboard” is attributed to “Broadside” in the script. Perhaps this slipped past the script editors because Broadside was an unknown at that point, and indeed his reference in the cast list for the episode calls him “Broadswipe”, which might suggest his character hadn’t been fully fleshed out at that point. When asked about the mistake, Hill simply said that “the simplest and best answer is that we screwed up”.

The inclusion of Marissa, completing the quartet of prisoners, makes sense in that the Quintesson collects one of each of the main factions featured in the series. Her capture allows for another of the production team’s in jokes (which Hill claims were approved by Hasbro), in that the holographic lure that brings her onto the disguised Quintesson ship is her father - an aged Flint from GI Joe. As mentioned under Five Faces, Flint Dille’s intent was that Marissa was the daughter of Flint and Lady Jaye, and as Hill was co-producer of the season of GI Joe in production at the same time as this season of the Transformers, it seems this was another opportunity for the two production offices to fuse their universes together. Although the recording script doesn’t go as far as making the connection concrete, with Marissa’s father simply being called “Civilian” (with the inverted commas), the connection is made clear in the episode’s cast list, which labels the part “CIVILIAN (60 year old FLINT)”.

Marissa’s presence ultimately detracts from the interaction between Ultra Magnus and Cyclonus because she becomes the factor that inspires them to work together, rather than them working it out for themselves. If the intention is to show that humans are the arbiters of Autobot and Decepticon conflict, it doesn’t really work because of the way she comes across more as a frustrated mother scalding disruptive children, and rather than the story pushing into the individual psychologies of the Transformers and allowing them to reach a truce on their own terms, Marissa effectively forces it on them. This story should really be about how the two chief lieutenants discover their similarities, and Marissa is too easy a key to use to unlock that. Hill himself noted this:

“I can't say that I was all that fond of using human characters as integral elements of a story... simply due to their limited capabilities by comparison. While human characters were good visually for giving the Transformers scale… they could never really convincingly affect the outcome of robots at war with each other. Our audience wanted to see the Transformers ‘duking it out’ – with the Autobots walking away victorious at the end of each episode rather than having a human character solve / resolve the conflict.”

It’s a shame then that lines such as, “STOP IT! ALL OF YOU! STOP FIGHTING! If we don't do something about this, we're all losers!” come across as exactly that – an unconvincing tirade from a human shaming giant robots into co-operating.

This is where the episode falters. There are only four characters in the story bar the Quintessons, and its ‘bottle’ nature allows huge scope for character exploration. However, that kind of introspection is at odds with the fast-paced action needed for a twenty minute children’s cartoon, so what chance there is for in-depth characterisation is skimmed over in the need for things to keep moving. Frustratingly, there are hints that tie together the various plot threads, such as this exchange:

Ultra Magnus: We wouldn't be in this situation at all
Cyclonus: – if you had not captured us!
Ultra Magnus: Cyclonus, I can finish my own thoughts! I don't need you to do it for me!
Cyclonus: Maybe the thought was not yours to begin with, Ultra Magnus!

Which harks back to the Scientist’s observation that both robots are “very similar in programming”, and the possible dawning of recognition of this on Cyclonus’s part. Both aspire to the same goal in that they each want to capture the Quintesson ship rather than simply escape, and lock horns on the matter before Marissa stops them fighting. They also acknowledge each other’s stature and have similar moral codes, something that is pointed out several times to be independent of ‘good and evil’. Cyclonus’s samurai style respect for Magnus (“It has been too long since I had an opponent that was worthy of my full attention”) is later shown in the way he saves him because he believes warriors of their calibre “should meet their end in battle”. This is then reflected by Magnus’s decision to respectfully let Cyclonus go at the end of the episode (“we will go our separate ways – but the next time we meet, it will be as enemies”).

Sadly, this is as far as the respect between the two is explored, and the viewer’s attention is diverted from the subject by the too convenient ‘we all need to work together’ ending, including the scientist. The heavy-handed explanation of a black hole is almost too obvious, and reminiscent of other oblique ‘educational moments’ in the series such as Starscream’s account of how the Earth would shatter if drilled incorrectly in The Core. This is then unintentionally made funny by the use of the ‘negative universe’ on the other side, which may be scientific nonsense, but is a great conceptual idea and opens the door to the whole ‘shattered glass’ universe years before it was even thought of. Here though, it is simply used here as decoration for the climax and is wasted in the rush to finish the episode. Had this story been built around Cyclonus and Magnus having opposing personalities, reversed by the negative universe and observed by the scientist, it might have given it more of a sense of purpose, but Hill said of this moment that the negative universe was “simply a nod to some of the wacky stories that used to appear in 1960s comic books”. It’s a shame that even the opportunity to transpose Magnus into his Diaclone colours was wasted.

With Hill’s first two episodes, divorcing his ideas from the standard conflict paid dividends. The Killing Jar is no less ambitious and has much to explore within it, but is ultimately less successful in seeking a path beyond the norm. It’s helped by the fact that at this point, there isn’t really a ‘norm’ anyway, but as morality plays go, The Killing Jar loses its way at the end of the first act and doesn’t manage to provide a resolution that satisfies all the plot threads – particularly why the Quintesson scientist is conducting his experiment in the first place. After the previous five episodes, the implication is that he is looking further into the motives and behaviour of his subjects – that much is indicated by the initial tests he puts Ultra Magnus and the others through – but to what end is never made clear and is eventually lost in the confusing business with the negative universe and the attempts to escape the black hole. What it truly wanted to be, an exploration of morals and what it truly means to be a Transformer, may have been of intense interest to dedicated fans of the series, but would probably have been too dry for the pre-teen audience looking to unwind with some cartoon action after a day at school. In that regard, it goes as far as it can into the psychology of the characters, but remains an unfulfilled promise based on the original premise.

[The Huff]

Keep these coming Pinwig! I love reading these.

[Pinwig]

I'm enjoying writing them, although the tone and length has changed so much now that the third season writeups don't really go with the first and most of the second season, so I've a big job at the end of this expanding a lot of the original ones. Eventually we should have a review for each episode which incorporates all available background resources. I'm also still plugging away on a big article on the background of the series itself, which will be a month's worth of entries alone.

[blueshift]

I know people keep saying it, but you should seriously turn it into a book!

[Pinwig]

I am certainly going to do something with it all, but it's a long way from being good enough yet. I really want to be able to start again with the hindsight of having been through it all once; make it all more uniform and cohesive. It's just the time it all takes.

[Pinwig]

3.07 – Chaos

As previously explored under the entry for Cosmic Rust, Marvel’s production coordinator for the Transformers, Paul Davids, also wrote several episodes. Heavily involved in the day-to-day making of the series, his position afforded him a unique perspective on the way the characters and the series itself developed, which allowed him not only to identify interesting areas to explore that weren’t being covered by others, but also to write characters with the confidence and authority of someone who really understood them.

As such, Cosmic Rust stands as one of the better second season episodes, and Chaos follows in its footsteps as another example of a fan favourite story that not only entertains, but adds to the mythos of the Transformers’ universe. Focussed on exploring the character of Kup, it weaves together several different plot threads that combine into a satisfying whole – using the security chief’s penchant for telling tales of his youth to create the backstory for one set in the present. Davids said of this episode that it was a more complex plot than was usual for the series, but that using Kup’s history was a useful way to individualise his character.

Beginning with another reprise of an idea from the film, something used frequently by Flint Dille in Five Faces, Kup regales his younger friends with a story of his past life. Told through the episode in several flashback chapters, this not only adds to his character, but slowly fills in the background to the character of Chaos – connecting this sub-plot to Galvatron’s in the process. It almost feels as though this is the only reason Grimlock is used in this story – one of the more memorable moments of light relief in the film is the Dinobots’ adulation of Kup’s war stories, so Grimlock’s presence here helps remind the viewer of the respect others have for him. Another deliberate film connection is that the story is about an Ick-Yak, reused from the similar scene in the film but seen for the first time. Shrikebats also appear in this episode (although they’re only referred to as such in the script). It’s notable that the characters with Kup in this episode are all juvenile in nature to deliberately contrast with his age, whether that’s shown in Blurr’s excited teenage inexperience, or the child-like personalities of Wheelie and Grimlock. These are the characters who will listen to Kup rather than brush him off, which helps to make him the respected focal character for the story. Notably, this is a story in which Kup knows everything, emphasising his position of power, and the other characters constantly ask questions to get him to reveal what’s going on. This is most obvious when the team investigate Goo, the dialogue for which is entirely about Kup being pensive and the others trying to prize out of him why he’s worried. This alters Kup’s character slightly from the moaning old codger of the film none of the ‘important’ characters would listen to.

As with the first episode of Five Faces and the film, Grimlock remains mostly as a dinosaur for the story because his position as comedy side-kick works better visually with him in this mode. When asked, Davids noted that was indeed a deliberate change from his earlier appearances, where the T-Rex was kept as his armoured attack mode:

“Grimlock became so identified with his dinosaur mode, that's where the real fun was with the character. With all the Dinobots, we preferred to show them as dinosaurs. Some of the other characters were equally interesting in their vehicle modes, but for the Dinobots, the dinosaur mode was really ‘the star’.” [Cybertron Chronicle]

It seems a little odd that Kup doesn’t inform anyone else of his interest in the crashed EDC platform before leaving Cybertron. If he is the planet’s security chief, leaving his post seems a little rash, but it lends to the idea that he is more an adventurous trouble-shooter than he is a commander, much in the vein of popular TV detectives such as Kojak. His line, “This could be just the kind of galaxy-bustin’ case I’ve been wantin’ to sink my sensors into” shows not only how he is itching to add more stories to his repertoire, but also has an innate need to see justice prevail. This is also echoed later when he decides to confront Chaos alone to atone for the fact he was forced to desert the imprisoned slaves on his previous visit to Dread. It’s also noteworthy that in his flashback he is alone – perhaps implying that back in the golden days of Cybertron he was something of a lone justice-seeker. That said, when seeing the Death Crystals in the present, Kup remarks, “I haven't seen any of these for a hundred thousand years”, which is far too casual a number to use on Davids’ part and inadvertently places Kup’s tale in the relatively recent past – millions of years after Optimus Prime left Cybertron.

Another oddity is how quiet Cybertron still is – the establishing scene feels much like similar story openings in the Ark in earlier episodes, where there only ever seemed to be a handful of Autobots present. In that instance it made sense – a small number of Autobots stranded on a planet far from home may not always be sitting about in their makeshift base, but in this case it leaves the newly restored Cybertron feeling as barren as it did under Shockwave’s regime. However, given the huge number of different locations and background characters in this story, it’s hardly surprising that budget and time constraints prevented Cybertron from feeling more inhabited.

Another connection to the past at this point is the strangely silent computer, flashing up graphics to inform Kup of the incoming communication from Goo with a gap in the dialogue long enough to suggest a missing line. While the dialogue script doesn’t concur, with no removed lines apparent between Grimlock finishing and Wreck-Gar speaking from Goo, the cast list of speaking parts for the episode includes a reference to ‘Teletraan-II’, which appears between Blurr and Wreck-Gar – in sequence the last and next new Autobot characters to speak. TFWiki notes it was around this time that Casey Kasem, Teletraan’s voice, left the series abruptly (see Thief in the Night), and that his only season three recording is heard in this episode (when ‘Imprisoned Robot #2’ says, “We've got to get back to our home planet!” after the younger Kup is sent to the mine) – suggesting that Casem had recorded more subsequently removed dialogue for this episode, and that one line slipped through by accident (incidentally, the same cast list also reveals that ‘Chaos’ was originally called ‘Mayhem’).

In this new, broader universe, once again the driving force behind the story isn’t the need for the Autobots to stop a Decepticon plot from the very start. Kup’s detective work on finding who was responsible for destroying the EDC station eventually draws him to Dread, but because Galvatron doesn’t know about Kup’s past association with Chaos, he is surprised by their sudden appearance. The way the past and present is neatly woven together is a strength of the writing, as is the way the opening scene doesn’t immediately betray the Decepticon intent. Indeed, Galvatron couldn’t have come up with his plan to destroy Cybertron until Blast Off discovers the weapon.

That initial scene of the Combaticon dealing with a Skuxxoid (which for continuity’s sake would be nice if it were the same scheming miscreant who featured in Five Faces of Darkness) is a very Swindle-like moment, making it seem possible that Blast Off’s companion was originally his arms dealing team mate instead of Runamuck – a character introduced for the first time in this story without explanation, or his partner. To add to this suggestion, Davids himself explained the sudden appearance of new characters in stories:

“After The Transformers - The Movie, the marching orders for writers were very clear: emphasize the new toys. [They] were coming out at an accelerated rate. At that phase, the merchandising motivation became stronger and more specific. Story editors looked over existing premises that had been submitted and asked writers to come up with ways to weave new toy groups into their pre-existing ideas.” [Cybertron Chronicle]

In addition, Bruticus is mentioned in the original cast list for this episode as having a speaking part, so it’s not impossible to think that the Combaticons were originally intended for the roles given to the Predacons. It seems odd that Astrotrain acts as Galvatron’s chief lieutenant for the story, making Cyclonus and Scourge noticeable by their absence, but the mixture of new and old in the Decepticon ranks gives a pleasing feeling of integration.

While the opening demonstrates the power of the Death Crystals and foreshadows Galvatron’s interest in them, it presents an interesting continuity problem for the more fastidious viewer. The ‘Goo’ on which Blast Off’s deal with the Skuxxoid takes place is later shown to be number 8739 by Teletraan-II, which is dangerously close to the Goo 8739-B that Galvatron comprehensively destroys in the third part of Five Faces. Blurr’s ability to turn the goo off immediately after the arrival of the Autobots suggests this is somewhere they are familiar with, and the fact that Blast Off calls the area in space a “Decepticon litter void” would make sense if it was the floating debris of the Goo Galvatron previously destroyed, now under his control. It’s clear that they are one and the same place, but the ‘B’ gives a loophole that means what Galvatron blew up could have been an offshoot, or moon, of the actual Goo 8739. Being present in a ‘litter void’, it also makes sense that the EDC space platform destroyed at the start of the episode is already a floating hulk – perhaps remnants of the one destroyed near Pluto in the second episode of Five Faces. Shooting up tin cans in the back-yard sounds fitting for the Skuxxoid’s “yuks”, although Kup does take the matter seriously when he finds out about it.

The fact that the first thing Galvatron wants to do with a weapon of such awesome power is destroy Cybertron is a beautiful conceit playing off his madness. It’s worth remembering that at this point the Decepticons have been vanquished from their home world, and Galvatron himself is a construct of Unicron driven mad by the plasma pools of Thrull. This was something Davids considered:

“The Decepticons were incredibly destructive. I think the Autobots were always more attached to Cybertron than the Decepticons were, so by destroying Cybertron, Galvatron was punishing his enemies more than his allies, in his demented electronic mind.” [Cybertron Chronicle]

Galvatron has little personal association with the planet, so it makes a useful contrast that where Megatron’s primary objective was always to re-energise his homeworld, Galvatron is ready to destroy it at the first opportunity just to frustrate the Autobots. His mania is demonstrated by the way he relishes Astrotrain’s suggestion that “when Cybertron is destroyed by this cannon – you'll be more famous in history than Unicron”, suggesting this Decepticon leader’s goal is recognition and glory at the expense of anything, rather than tactically establishing a new empire.

In such a tightly plotted story, it’s a shame the eventual conclusion leaves a few holes. First is why Chaos hadn’t wondered where all his slaves had gone before Kup arrived, and second that although Kup uses Galvatron’s weapon to destroy Chaos, giving his flashback story closure, the weapon itself isn’t accounted for – and nor is Galvatron. While the story explains that the Death Crystals grow on Chaos, the mining operation clearly shows that they are also found abundantly in the rock strata of Dread, and so presumably there is still a super-powerful weapon sitting close enough to Cybertron to destroy it.

Visually, Chaos is a beautifully drawn episode and benefits from some of Toei’s best animation, bettering even the depth of shadow and gleaming chromed finishes seen in The Killing Jar. It features consistently well drawn character models (significantly better than AKOM’s efforts at this point) and a diverse range of landscapes and incidental characters, both organic and robotic in nature. At times the background detail is remarkable – such as the shot of Kup’s team in Sky Lynx’s cockpit. Davids himself explained that this was partly due to his unique position working inside Marvel’s offices, giving him more direct contact with the artists producing the storyboards and designs that would be used by Toei to animate the episode:

“Because I was on-the-job every day as Production Coordinator, I was able to sort of collaborate with the art team to give special contributions to the stories that I wrote. It was especially true of Chaos, where the artists and I would go out to lunch and actually talk about how I visualized the planet, the mines, the monster, the new weapons, etc. They would show me the designs as they were creating them and ask for my input. That was a very special opportunity – one that other writers, who were simply freelancing for the show but had no direct contact with the production staff, did not have.” [Cybertron Chronicle]

There is no doubt the end result reflects this special relationship, down to small but pleasing details such as the slightly different and more colourful younger version of Kup seen in the flashback sequences, the diverse range of imprisoned robots and Chaos himself – whose Death Crystal infused form was perhaps inspired by the subterranean monster figures being drawn for Flint Dille’s Inhumanoids series at the time (see also, Dweller in the Depths).

Chaos is, without doubt, one of the third season’s most triumphal episodes. Paul Davids takes the time honoured basic plot of the Decepticons mining crystals for power and spins it in such a fashion that it’s completely unrecognisable. It takes one of the film’s less exposed characters and gives him new dimensions, transforming him from being a miserly old curmudgeon to an inter-galactic justice seeker, and in doing so spreads the story across a variety of backdrops and locations ranging from Cybertron to Goo, to the new planet Dread. Among all the detective work there is still scope for some exciting battles, and a rematch for Sky Lynx and the Predacons after their previous tussle in the final episode of Five Faces. With this, Davids demonstrates he knows exactly how to make a Transformers story work, and proves that Cosmic Rust wasn’t a one off.

[Pinwig]

3.08 – Dark Awakening

Antoni Zalewski’s second and last Transformers story has a lot in common with his first, Auto Berserk, in that they’re both character driven pieces that use fear as a source of character exploration and development – something perhaps unusual in a children’s cartoon. In his previous story, Red Alert’s paranoia was the driving force behind the plot, and in this one he explores both Rodimus’s feelings of anxiety and inferiority compared to Optimus Prime, and also Optimus’s own fear of failing the people in his care. For both characters these emotions are frequently implied by the series, but never exposed in the way Zalewski chooses to bring them to the fore in Dark Awakening, making it a story which is as much about the ‘awakening’ of the two characters’ ‘dark’ subconscious feelings as it is about the Quintessons cruelly using Optimus to trick the Autobots. One of the reasons it works so well is that Zalewski uses the real Optimus as an outsider in his own camp rather than a facsimile (ala A Prime Problem), and what ultimately saves the day is the strength of his personality instead of an imposter slipping up. When looked at in that way, the episode scores highly as a fitting tribute to the great Autobot leader because it really is him piloting the ship into the Quintesson trap, and as such is almost as emotional an ending for the invested viewer as his exit in the film.

While Zalewski’s fingerprints are all over the feel of the story, it also fits seamlessly into Flint Dille’s expanded post-movie universe – almost too well for an episode sitting so early in the production order written by a freelancer. As such, it seems possible that Zalewski expanded a pitch that had already been suggested by Sunbow’s production team – as in the second season where Dille provided a dozen ideas for prospective writers to run with. Indeed, one of Dille’s own memories of Dark Awakening is that co-script editor Steve Gerber wrote it – suggesting the initial concept was put to Zalewski based on the way he handled Red Alert the previous year.

Dille has noted in interviews that Dark Awakening was already well into production by the time the movie reached cinemas, and that the unexpectedly emotional reaction to Prime’s death (which included a well-publicised complaint to Hasbro after a child locked himself in his bedroom) caused Sunbow slight concern that they were about to kill him a second time. Never-the-less, the episode aired as intended in October 1986, but was subsequently repeated the following spring with a new Victor Carolli voice-over at the end replacing Rodimus’s final line “So long, Prime” (now on the Kid Rhino DVD release version, but not the newer Shout Factory one) implying that Prime would return – which he then did a day after the repeat in the season closing two-parter, The Return of Optimus Prime.

Regardless of its origin, the writer and story are a perfect match, and in keeping with the new direction for the series it features Galvatron’s forces persecuting Autobots in a grand space battle as well as the apprehension surrounding the return of Optimus. The cast focusses entirely on the new movie characters, replacing the older Decepticons seen in the last episode with Galvatron’s standard retinue of Cyclonus, Scourge and the Sweeps. Oddly, the Sunbow cast list of speaking parts puts Arcee in the ‘humans and aliens’ category instead of with the Autobots, but it’s clear the story is structured to give all the core movie cast something to say, even if in Wheelie’s case it’s barely noticeable.

It’s also evident that the Transformers are used more than ever as humanoid ‘action series’ characters rather than multi-moded transforming robots. The opening is about two warring factions fighting in space ships with laser beams and torpedo attacks, highly reminiscent of the Star Wars style of space opera, and there is more transformation in the advert bumpers between acts than there is in the episode itself. This episode demonstrates strongly that the series has become a cartoon selling Transformers on the strength of their characters and interactions, rather than pushing the toy line’s unique gimmick.

The opening does conflict with the end of Five Faces, given that Galvatron has reformed his uneasy alliance with the Quintessons after threatening to rip the tentacles from the “five face slime of the nebula” in the earlier story. However, it isn’t beyond the bounds of credibility to think that the Quintessons could manipulate the insane Decepticon leader a second time by playing to his ego, especially as Galvatron wouldn’t question his own superiority and ability to control them.

With AKOM back on art duties it’s only to be expected that animation errors would abound, but the standard is better than Five Faces, even if the colouring is flatter than the previous two Toei episodes. There remains a question about what difference there was between the animation models and references supplied to the two companies – but it’s not surprising to find Galvatron’s ship, crushed by Unicron in the film, back in commission here after the number of reused movie models that were seen in AKOM’s Five Faces. This kind of continuity is great, and having been repaired, Galvatron’s ship now sits at the head of the Decepticon fleet as it chases the Autobots’ Ark-like shuttle. Another movie homage in the scripting, which feels like it has the hand of Flint Dille in it, is the way the Autobots escape Galvatron by making him think he has destroyed their ship – in the film by separating the front section and here by launching an escape pod at the point the ship explodes. In both cases the crews are almost the same set of characters – again showing how the series constantly sought to emulate the film.

After the Autobots escape, the episode does a good job of instilling a sense of reverence in the Autobot tomb. Its huge rectangular shape is reminiscent of the giant monolith from 2001: A Space Odyssey, giving the feeling of Rodimus and co walking among giants of the past in its soundless corridors. Ironically, as shown, the tomb is far too big for the contents it houses, but it’s impossible not to feel a chill as Daniel reads off the names of past heroes such as Ironhide and Ratchet, despite the fact they had only been off screen for two months. There is a definite feeling of paying deference to the ancient past in these scenes, with Rodimus’s reference to Optimus having been “dead for years” adding to that, although it doesn’t make a lot of sense in terms of continuity.

The idea of a mausoleum being fired into space draws on several funeral practices of old, notably putting deceased sailors overboard sewn into hammocks and the ancient Egyptian idea that funeral barges would convey people of importance physically to their final resting place and from there metaphysically on their journey across the sky. The veil at the entrance refers to the pagan idea of there being a barrier between the physical and spiritual worlds, with the deceased referred to as having ‘crossed the veil’. There is also the possibility that the tomb was deliberately set to drift until being drawn into the gravity of a sun, given its proximity to the one Optimus steers towards. Although archaeological proof has long dispelled the myth that Vikings set burning funeral boats adrift on water, it adds to the fusion of religious ideas that almost suggest the Autobots believe in an afterlife.

Despite the episode being headlined by the return of Optimus, the most interesting aspect of it is the way Hot Rod is developed, helping his bumpy transition from reckless teenager to respected leader. In the film, the hot-headed and youthful Hot Rod seems an odd choice for promotion to Autobot commander, and like the transformation of Megatron to Galvatron, there is more than a little of Hot Rod left in Rodimus Prime. His lack of interest in the opening of the space games at the start of Five Faces, coupled with lines such as “Why’d I have to be the chosen one?” show that Hot Rod is still there, and that presumably advice from his advisor, Ultra Magnus, coupled with insight from the Matrix is what enables him to lead and learn. Both new leaders are flawed: Galvatron through his insanity and Rodimus through his lack of experience, which makes them far more open to character development than their respective forebears.

Rodimus does show a wider understanding of others, and an empathy in places – such as his reassurance of Daniel in this story that nothing in the tomb can harm them. He does see a bigger picture, but doesn’t rank himself as the leader the others think he is. He calls Optimus “sir” twice in the episode, the only character who does, and is obviously elated when he is able to give the mantle of leadership back. It’s made clear that it is only the Matrix that ‘holds’ Hot Rod in Rodimus’s form, something apparently unique to him in terms of Transformer lore, but really a simple visual method of showing what is almost an Incredible Hulk style transformation between his two personalities. His line, “Alright! Hot Rod is back. Let’s party!!!” clearly shows his relief at being able to return to his old self.

This is important because it forms the set up for his eventual acceptance of the responsibility he is so eager to shrug off. The final battle in this episode deliberately pits old against new – Hot Rod alone being concerned with finding and stopping Optimus. When he does, the ‘sir’ of the first act is replaced with “Optimus. Front and center” and the initially uncertain declaration that he is “taking command”. In doing so he finally becomes the new leader he is intended to be without the need for the Matrix, symbolically ascending to equal Optimus. He also begins to make judgements in the story that show him as leader – notably requesting a rendezvous to rethink the attack on the Quintesson base while the other Autobots follow Prime without question. It’s probably an animation error, but when receiving the Matrix from Optimus at the end of the story, there is no transformation – he remains as is – possibly suggesting this time that Hot Rod has accepted the mantle of leadership fully and doesn’t need bolstering by the Matrix. This is echoed in the way Hot Rod begins to act and sound like Rodimus through the episode, and his final determination that, “I don't know if I'll ever be the leader that you were – but for sure I'm gonna try”.

Optimus’s state in the story is confusing because of badly worded lines in the flashback that explain what happened to him. The implication appears to be that the Quintessons have resurrected him in a zombie state to control his actions with their programming, which explains why he attacks Hot Rod and then lies to the others, but what the Quintessons say in the flashback comes across as the opposite. The fragmented lines in the sequence read:

QUINTESSON#2: And some lingering remnants of his memory and personality -
QUINTESSON#3: But without our circuit implants he would be utterly mindless. An ordinary machine -
QUINTESSON#1: A robotic zombie.

Which appears to be dialogue designed to explain why Optimus, who died in the film, is suddenly alive again. Specifically, without Quintesson implants he would be mindless, despite remnants of his sentience still lingering. The fact the Quintessons seem to believe he is a mindless zombie in the story suggests the ‘without’ from Quintesson#3 should read ‘with’, which makes more sense, and sets up the idea that the “lingering remnants” of Prime’s personality stand a chance of fighting back against the Quintesson programming controlling his body, eventually helped by the Matrix.

More importantly, the episode is an opportunity for Prime to correct his earlier misjudgement and give the Matrix to the right person, creating a proper hand over between leaders. His heroic death in the film doesn’t need an encore, which is why the focus here is on Hot Rod, and in fact although he sacrifices his life to save the others, the reasoning behind it is convoluted and much less valiant than the “Megatron must be stopped, no matter the cost” of the film. At the point Optimus pilots the ship into the trap it’s clear he knows it is a trap, rather than the Quintesson base his reprogramming made him think it was. His lines to Hot Rod, “If you lose – Autobots destroyed” and “Monsters! They made me a weapon to destroy the very ones I loved in life” demonstrate this. By triggering the trap, he is drawing the Quintesson fire to allow the other Autobots to escape, but it does beg the question of why the Quintessons are so worried about him setting it off when they know it’s just a trap and not their actual base. It would make more sense, and carry more pathos, if Prime hadn’t fully overcome the programming and had sacrificed his life thinking he was destroying the Quintessons.

Despite this flaw, as was the case with Auto Berserk, Dark Awakening is tightly plotted and holds together well as a story with a purpose. The Quintesson plan holds everything together very neatly – the fact that they know where the tomb is means they can play Galvatron from the outset and get him to shipwreck the Autobots within its vicinity, so it’s no coincidence that they are then forced to land there and encounter the reprogrammed Optimus. Even the fact that Optimus would be unlikely to know who the Quintessons are (unless he does from his experiences with the Matrix but chose to keep the knowledge to himself) is explicable as part of the mission he was programmed to complete. It’s a good character piece that importantly allows Hot Rod to come to terms with what being Rodimus actually means, accepting the leadership of the Autobots with more clarity and vision than he had before. Bringing Prime back to do that is a clever idea, and as such, it does an excellent job of progressing the ongoing narrative. Above all, it begins to give Rodimus Prime something of the character he lacked in the Matrix sequences of Five Faces of Darkness, making him for the first time feel like a worthy Autobot leader.

[Pinwig]

3.09 – Forever is a Long Time Coming

Among the writers new to the Transformers in the third season was Gerry Conway and his then wife, Carla. Far from being an apprentice though, Conway was already renowned for over a decade of comics writing that included the 1973 run on The Amazing Spider-Man that saw Gwen Stacey killed. At the time of writing Forever is a Long Time Coming he had also just come to the end of an eight-year stint at DC Comics writing Justice League of America. However, prior to working on the Transformers (and simultaneously GI Joe), Conway’s only screenwriting credits were as co-writer with Roy Thomas on fantasy films Fire and Ice (1983) and Conan the Destroyer (1984), so although his contribution to Sunbow’s output is small, it is significant in that it comes at the beginning of a second and even more extensive career in broadcast media that continues to this day. One that under his IMDB entry lists association with over sixty different films, video games and TV series.

Perhaps the fact that other comics luminaries such as Steve Gerber and Marv Wolfman (who Conway took over from as writer on Daredevil in 1976) had transitioned from comics to working on cartoons at Sunbow helped Conway to get a foot in the door of television writing himself. It seems likely that someone new to the series wouldn’t have been able to pitch the idea for Forever without guidance because it relies on events that happen in Five Faces of Darkness, which hadn’t been broadcast when Forever was written. In fact, when you look beyond the core plot idea that makes the story work, there isn’t a lot left, and touches such as including the Aerialbots so they can save A3 just to reference War Dawn (Slingshot: “What – that was the guy who created Optimus Prime?”) makes it feel, as with other episodes written around this time like Dark Awakening and Starscream’s Ghost, that Flint Dille was specifically outlining episode synopses for freelance writers to maintain a strong sense of continuity.

This episode builds on one of the more tantalising revelations in Five Faces – that having created the Transformers as a line of consumer and military products, the Quintessons gradually lost control of them during revolts that took place many years before the Autobot/Decepticon war. It reuses the idea of time travel from War Dawn to visit the past and expands on the vision Rodimus receives in Five Faces – Part 4, building on the few lines that suggest the revolts on Cybertron started as a result of the Quintessons abusing their creations and using them for entertainment through cruel gladiatorial combat. Further connections to earlier stories are made by establishing the origin of the Guardian robots, which have been a mainstay of the series since the introduction of Omega Supreme, and also Alpha Trion – unifying the direction the pre-movie origin stories were going with Flint Dille’s post-movie revisions. In that regard, Forever is a Long Time Coming is as pivotal an episode for series historians as War Dawn and The Search for Alpha Trion were.

Emphasising the fact that the Quintessons are now integral to the series, the episode doesn’t feature the Decepticons at all – and also uses the opportunity to refresh the regular cast by resting regularly seen movie characters such as Ultra Magnus, Springer and Arcee to bring back some of the film’s more prominently featured second season characters. Perceptor frequently appears when episodes need a pseudo-scientific explanation, and although Blaster almost attained A-list status in the film, his presence here is more about promoting his cassettes, given he should really be on Earth in his new position commanding Autobot City. Ramhorn and Rewind make their series debuts after the cameo they gained in the film, but more awkwardly than they will in Madman’s Paradise. Perceptor’s line, “Rodimus insisted I take you for protection. Absurd, I know” could almost be read as a dig by the writers at the way the cassettes are wedged into the story, similar to the way that Runamuck appeared for no reason at all with Blast Off in Chaos. It’s also worth noting that Ramhorn can speak and articulate thoughts when in ‘robot’ mode, which is new compared to the way the Decepticon beast cassettes have been portrayed until this point. This may be an oversight – during Ramhorn’s next appearance both he and Steeljaw will be reduced to making guttural animal noises ala Laserbeak and Ravage while Rewind is still able to speak (as with Rumble). It’s a shame this inconsistency conflicts with previous theories on the nature of the intelligence of the animal cassettes, making it seem more a choice to act like an animal than a restriction, but could also be another indication of characters being switched during scripting to force the inclusion of new ones. The fact that Ramhorn takes on a Guardian robot in the story, confusing the animators to the point he is drawn at enormous proportions, also might hint at his part originally being someone else.

Another big inconsistency often pointed out in this episode is the fact that the Autobots appear to be able to fly, when this is given as a definite no-no in any version of the series bible past the original More Than Meets The Eye pilot story. It’s possibly excusable in that the characters here are travelling through the vacuum of space and therefore aren’t counteracting the effects of gravity to stay in the ‘air’, but it does contradict recent episodes such as Five Faces – Part 3, where the Autobots are flung through space after Quintessa explodes and can’t control the direction they are travelling. The fact Rodimus can’t control his flight in that instance, but can here, does create a problem that isn’t easily explained beyond being a product of scripting from writers unfamiliar with the series.

Oddly, the more obvious question of how time travel is possible is less of a bug-bear, given David Wise had already established in War Dawn that Shockwave could create a ‘Kronosphere’ intended to allow Megatron to travel into the past. Donald Glut also set a precedent in Dinobot Island for time corridors, as did Douglas Booth in A Decepticon Raider at King Arthur’s Court, both drawing on early science fiction literature as a source. Because of this, it isn’t beyond the bounds of acceptability that the Quintesson scientist (named Inquirata in the script[1]) could create a time window, or harness the power of a ‘chronal’ breach to make one. Certainly, the staging on the asteroid suggests that the time window isn’t much different to the warp gate that was used in Five Faces to move Galvatron about quickly. There is the question of whether the time window moves objects in space as well as time, given the asteroid is clearly not near Cybertron in the present, but the claw can reach through the window to it in the past. However, it’s entirely likely that Cybertron was in a different place in the past given how much it moves around in the series, and may well have occupied the position where the asteroid now is.

Inquirata’s desire to go back eleven million years is also nicely consistent with the creation of Optimus Prime nine million years in the past in War Dawn. Both episodes may conflict with other references to Cybertron history, such as the ‘dawn of time’ business with the lost tribe (See Thirteenth What? under Cosmic Rust), but small touches like that and other similarities between the episodes make it obvious that the Conways were at least given the script for War Dawn, if not the episode itself, to use as a springboard.

Visually, the evolution of the robot forms across the different episodes has a consistency too. When in the distant past in this story, the robots have a distinctly humanoid form – appearing to be dressed in the kind of faux medieval tunic and hood to point out this is a more primitive era. Beta and the others sport bows as weaponry, and their position as rebel underdogs almost gives a Robin Hood type vibe. Stylistically, it’s possible to see an evolution in War Dawn, where the Transformers of nine million years ago still look like dressed human figures, but in more contemporary clothing. Then with the advent of war and the need for more protection, the Transformers of the modern era are far bulkier and better armoured. Unsurprisingly, it is the female forms that stay closest to looking like dressed humans throughout, although there is a definite evolution through Beta’s primitive tunic, Aerial’s fashionable getup (War Dawn) and Elita-1’s more protective wrestling uniform in The Search For Alpha Trion. The overly pronounced breasts on the distant past female forms are perhaps a mistake, especially as Arcee at this point had defined a more robust female shape, but having Beta in a commanding role in the past does at least follow the trend set by Elita-1 in the present and expands on female Transformers being an integral part of life on Cybertron. It’s also interesting (although there are massive inconsistencies from shot to shot) that the robots of eleven million years ago are much smaller than their modern equivalents.

All of which brings us to the time paradox that drives this episode – that the Quintesson attempt in the present to prevent the uprising against them in the past becomes a factor in the revolt happening in the first place. The flashback in Five Faces - Part 4 explains that there were two uprisings, the first unsuccessful, so it seems likely the events in this episode detail the second. Anything that fills gaps in the history of the ongoing story is a pause and rewind moment for the dedicated fan, and this episode is again a sign of how Dille was intent at this point on going much further than the movie had into the history of the characters. More than ever it’s possible to see the conflict between Ron Friedman’s invention, Unicron, and the way Dille developed other aspects of the film script once he became involved with it, which then fed into Five Faces. Unicron doesn’t actually fit into this universe very well at all, being an overly-powerful antagonist with a singular purpose that doesn’t have anywhere near the depth the Quintessons are developed to have. Unicron works for the purpose he was needed for – an awe inspiring one-hit threat for the movie, whereas Dille was clever to pursue the Quintessons as a more versatile foe for the ongoing series. Unicron’s diminished return in the Armada/Energon/Cybertron series shows how hard it is to make such a big figure a weekly threat.

Another example of the series becoming more cohesive at this point is how the Guardian robots are used as the Quintessons’ muscle. Throughout the second season, whenever drone types were necessary for Cybertron stories, they were largely reinvented each time until the Guardians were defined by The Secret of Omega Supreme and then reused in War Dawn. Here, their origin as Quintesson body-guards is established, having the side effect that perhaps Omega Supreme himself harbours a dark past. It’s a small point, but it shows again how under Sunbow’s direct editorship, the series was much more ‘joined up’ in its thinking than it had been under Bryce Malek and Dick Robbins when at Marvel Productions.

Part of this origin tale is also the origin of Alpha Trion, A3 being a nicely generic name for a product who becomes self-aware and then makes the name his own when becoming the leader of the rebellion. More than ever, his older form feels like an Obi-Wan Kenobi figure – someone who wields immense power and plays a significant role in the past, but stays in the background and isn’t one of the Matrix holders (he doesn’t feature among the faces of Autobot leaders in the Five Faces flashback) - eventually giving his life (The Key to Vector Sigma) that others may triumph. Here he becomes the father of the Autobots by reclaiming the Autobot symbol from the Quintessons – a symbol of oppression turned into one of freedom and named the ‘Autobrand’ for the first time (it’s worth noting how the Autobot logo is displayed more prominently than usual on all the characters in this episode).

The only disappointment of this visit to the past, certainly compared to War Dawn, is the way the ancient Cybertron looks exactly the same as the asteroid in the present, which is probably a failing on AKOM’s part as animators more than an actual intention. If anything, it looks like the dead Cybertron of the first and second season, but is unique in that it is clearly shown to be a barren, rocky world with the “Hive City” Beta mentions built on the surface. There is no doubt it is Cybertron as this is mentioned as such at least twice by Beta and Rewind when discussing the proposition of attacking the Quintessons. The Key to Vector Sigma showed the power of the titular key – a device for ‘metalising’ organic worlds – and Vector Sigma itself claimed to have existed before Cybertron, so it’s possible this is evidence of Cybertron originally being an organic world which was converted by the Quintessons, and at this point eleven million years ago that process was still only part complete.

While this level of understanding again indicates the Conways would have been writing to a detailed outline, the inconsistencies in the story (such as Ramhorn being able to speak and the Autobots flying) provide an opportunity to see writers not steeped in the history of the series creating their own take on it. Another example is the way the Conways paint the Quintessons in a much more militaristic light than they have been so far. Ramhorn mentions Quintesson ‘warships’ coming to defend the asteroid, and Inquirata refers to the Quintesson in charge of the ship as ‘commander’, whereas the titles for the various types previously have all had a courtroom association (in the case of this one, ‘prosecutor’). The commander also refers to his “Sharkticon troops”, formalising the sharkticons as an army. This gives a definite Star Wars feel to the climactic space battle, with the Quintesson stood on the bridge of his ship acting much like the captain of an Imperial Star Destroyer. Dialogue during the final battle such as, “Inform the other ships. Full scale assault on that asteroid!” is reminiscent of lines such as Admiral Ackbar’s “concentrate all firepower on that Super Star Destroyer” (Return of the Jedi, 1983), and Rodimus exclaiming “Quintesson warships coming in off the elliptic! Aerialbots! Form Superion! The rest of you – form a battle line!” carries a distinct war movie vibe. Suddenly, Transformer battles feel more like strategic combat than a bunch of robots shooting aimlessly at each other. Even poor Pipes inexplicably becomes a stand in field medic when there is nothing in his biography to suggest skills in that area at all.

When you combine this new perspective from the Conways with the support of established lore, Forever is a Long Time Coming presents itself as an important episode – as significant as more widely recognised ones such as Dark Awakening. At this point, viewers who had invested in the series over the previous two years were being rewarded for their loyalty with stories that went beyond the simple Autobot/Decepticon battle into building the universe they came from – to the point that this episode features no Decepticon plot at all. Even driving factors such as selling toys are almost side-lined; for an episode that introduces two new ones properly for the first time in Ramhorn and Rewind, the focus is squarely on Beta and A3. Because of this, it’s easier to overlook the obvious flaws such as the flying Autobots, and animation errors such as the constantly changing heights of characters, and simply enjoy the episode for what it adds to the series.


[1] Opinion on whether this Quintesson is the same one that appeared in The Killing Jar is divided, with the consensus seeming to be that they are different because the one in The Killing Jar wasn’t named and Quintessons share body types. However, there is no concrete evidence for this, and in the spirit of Sunbow making a definite effort at this point to create an ongoing continuity (the five-faced Quintessons who appear from episode to episode are certainly the same ones) it is far more pleasing to think that this is the same character, and that the earlier scripts just didn’t provide a name.

[Pinwig]

We're entering a period here where doing this in production order means continuity sometimes doesn't make sense, but then the actual broadcast order also has problems. I'm following the production order because it's easier to see how the third season is shaped - there are definite pockets of episodes that go together in the way they were made.

This is a bumper entry with a bonus piece attached. Next week will probably be a Sunbow Monday because it's likely I'll be without an internet connection over the weekend.


3.10 – Starscream’s Ghost

Looking at the lists of writers to have worked on the Transformers, it’s noticeable that Megeen McLaughlin is only the second woman to gain sole credit for writing an episode – the show’s seventy-fifth at that. According to IMDB it’s also her first job as a TV writer, beginning a sporadic career in cartoons that would encompass twelve different series across seventeen years. Before turning to writing, she had been a production assistant at animation company Ruby/Spears on several shows, including Mister T, for which Transformers script editor Flint Dille wrote seven episodes. Therefore, it seems likely that Dille was instrumental in helping McLaughlin into screen writing through their prior connection – something that also seemed to be the case with Forever is a Long Time Coming writer Gerry Conway and his previous association with fellow ex-Marvel writers Steve Gerber and Marv Wolfman.

As was the case there, the complex nature of the established character relationships and settings in Starscream’s Ghost makes it probable that at least part of it originated with Dille rather than McLaughlin herself, it being a union of the intriguing one-line pitch that Starscream comes back to haunt Galvatron and the more involved sub-plot based on events in other episodes involving Octane. In addition, the episode contains many signposts that indicate a strong involvement from Dille in the writing. Like the other early season three stories it maintains strong links to Five Faces of Darkness, and shows the hallmarks of the way Dille managed Hasbro’s requirements for toy promotion by giving a fringe character a moment in the limelight before ticking him off the requirements list. At the start, the relationship between Junkion and Cybertron is taken as assumed knowledge, and no reason is given for why Octane would be ferrying parts between the two. Equally, Galvatron hiring a Skuxxoid to track Octane down is a call back to the reptilian bounty hunter’s previous use by the Quintessons in Five Faces.

At this point, the universe that Dille created is capable of being self-explanatory for regular viewers, but would have been embryonic enough for new writers to need help simply because Five Faces hadn’t aired when they were writing. What’s important though is that the new blood approach provided by writers such as Conway and McLaughlin provides an imaginative contrast to the more routine ‘by the numbers’ writing of established names such as Michael Charles Hill on The Killing Jar, which was simple enough only to need a brief knowledge of the new characters to work.

What this means is that it’s hard to know how much of the finished script for Starscream’s Ghost is McLaughlin’s and how much is the script editors’. It’s often noted that it seems to have started out as a Blitzwing story, continuing his sub-plot from the end of Five Faces (with Galvatron holding a grudge against the traitorous Triple Changer because of his part in foiling the Quintesson plot), but that Octane was switched into the role to promote his toy. It’s certainly true that at this point almost a third of the way through the season, five of the new 1986 toys were yet to feature (Sandstorm, Broadside, Octane, Ratbat and Runabout) and so this episode seems a prime candidate for being one where an existing story idea was reworked to fit a new character – something that Dille has commented on as happening frequently in the rush to show off new toys.

This is a pity because not only was Blitzwing’s indecision at the end of Five Faces one of the best things about the story, and was unique in the series in the way it showed a character genuinely questioning his beliefs (Skyfire’s position in Fire in the Sky is similar, but was based on trickery rather than a genuine shift in perspective), but the speed at which script-editing took place meant the change introduced a tangle of continuity problems that weren’t properly unknotted, marring the episode severely (see Octane’s Origins – Continuity in Starscream’s Ghost below).

However, those problems aside, the episode is a great example of how a new writer can put a different spin on the established series format. Gerry Conway’s very ‘space opera’ battle at the end of Forever is a Long Time Coming showed this, but with Starscream’s Ghost, McLaughlin uses the first act to do something the series rarely does in showing robots going about their daily routine. For regular viewers, this almost feels like a ‘behind the scenes’ moment with the Transformers on down time and not involved in the usual good vs evil struggle. Octane is an independent freelancer here, working for the Autobots to transport spare parts, and his opening line, “Hey, don’t make this load too heavy. Last time I almost sprung a cog trying to get back to Cybertron” shows that he isn’t particularly happy about the situation he’s found himself in. Mirroring the fact he turns into a fuel tanker in one of his alt-modes, he maintains the grizzly persona of a stereotypical long-distance trucker when hauling freight across the space highways. This is echoed by the way his in-flight entertainment is somewhat risqué, and while the image of Arcee’s character model deliberately redrawn with obvious breasts comes completely out of left field, it does at least fit with Octane’s lonely position and the embittered “I’d probably be a jerk too if I was made of junk” attitude he displays.

This does perhaps show if there was a switch from Blitzwing to Octane that McLaughlin wasn’t familiar with the soul-searching do-gooder of Five Faces. Even the bluster of the original Blitzwing from stories such as Triple Takeover doesn’t quite match Octane, who is far more calculating and shrewd. In that regard, Octane makes for a unique character and when Sandstorm refers to him as an “older model” there is a hint of the way the Autobots perceive Kup in his gentle ribbing, but Octane deliberately lacks the old timer’s softer paternal side. Following the initial exchange between the pair, the episode takes time to show the range of features both Octane and Sandstorm have – made obvious because in this more character driven third season the scope for Transformers to actually use their alt-modes as part of a story is far more limited (seen here in the way Octane is shown as a trucker piloting a ship, rather than using his aeroplane alt-mode to ferry the Junkion spare parts himself). In quick succession both vehicle modes for each character are shown as they race each other, and Sandstorm’s “Eat my dust” catchphrase (not actually his true motto but taken from the first line of his Budianski bio) is mentioned twice. What appears to be a misinterpretation by the animation house producing the episode means that once in helicopter mode, Sandstorm’s ability to use his rotors to whip up debilitating dust storms becomes a toxic looking cloud emanating from his exhaust instead.

Another unique aspect of McLaughlin’s writing is the way she further explores the alien world surrounding the Transformers hinted at by the Space Olympics in Five Faces. Octane is rescued from his exploding ship not by Autobots, but by a random selection of five different aliens, and then when he and Sandstorm have to refuel, the truck stop they end up in is populated by all manner of alien figures, as well as humanoids (who unusually for off-Earth characters are drawn to the correct scale as Octane and Sandstorm walk past them). There is also a bar fight and a sultry waitress (“Here’s your enegron, tall, dark and metallic…”) to complete the impression of a low-key saloon, and the broken conversation between the cloaked humans as they leave contains tongue in cheek innuendo in a similar vein to that of Octane’s reading material (“Oh, you mean without a paddle?”).

As the two Transformers converse and Octane finally reveals why Galvatron wants to kill him, the Skuxxoid is used to inject light relief in an almost Looney Toons way as he repeatedly fails to kill his completely oblivious target. Hand grenades and dynamite maintain the allusion to Road Runner-esque escapades, possibly harking back to the more childish productions McLaughlin would have worked on at Ruby/Spears. The fact he eventually gives up and starts physically assaulting Octane in desperation is genuinely funny, and it’s notable that again in this scene the scale between robot and biological forms is maintained by the reptilian Skuxxoid being drawn as small enough to stand on Octane’s shoulder.

These scenes and the way the Skuxxoid’s repeated failures allow time for Octane and Sandstorm to simply talk in what is effectively a roadside café are the highlight of the episode, simply because they are so different to the usual formula for the series. Once the pair reach Cybertron and the hunt for Octane is renewed, matters take a more usual path.

Unlike Optimus Prime’s use in Dark Awakening, Starscream’s return in this episode is far from being a curtain call. He was still part of the available post-movie toy line in 1986 and as such needed a screen appearance that wouldn’t disrupt the newly established hierarchy of characters in the series, or counter his emphatic destruction in the film. Dark Awakening dealt with how to bring Hot Rod back for the same reason, but by appearing as a ‘ghost’, Starscream raises all manner of questions regarding Transformers and the afterlife as well as becoming a resource to draw on again (Ghost in the Machine).

Whereas the Autobots sent an enormous mausoleum ship into space to house their dead (Dark Awakening), the Decepticons instead found time between the Battle of Autobot City and being kicked off Cybertron after Unicron’s destruction to erect memorials to fallen soldiers in a – presumably previously built – underground tomb (characters who, in the film, they didn’t seem to care less about when ejecting them from Astrotrain). The fact Starscream’s memorial is simply his feet is a nicely humorous touch, but there is the question of why his essence remains alive in the tomb when none of the others do. His line, “Help me get revenge against Galvatron, who put me in this somewhat insubstantial condition” uses the popular conception of ghosts having ‘unfinished business’ as the reason, but his ethereal presence, which frightens Octane into spontaneously transforming (potentially a left over reference to Blitzwing’s biography, which says he can get stuck between modes when his circuits are “scrambled”), is somewhat at odds with the way episodes such as Starscream’s Brigade showed Transformer ‘consciousness’ as something that can be kept on a physical storage medium. In time, the Beast Wars episode Bad Spark (1998) will explain Starscream’s continued existence as a result of his ‘spark’ (or soul) being indestructible through mutation, but here his ability to possess other characters is more demonic in feel, with his glowing red eyes being more akin to a traditional evil spirit.

The fact that Starscream doesn’t become a part of the plot until around the fourteen-minute mark leaves just six and a half in the episode (shortened by the ‘Secret Files of Teletraan-II’ addendum) to conclude his plot as well as Octane’s. This means everything suddenly becomes very compacted, and the involvement of the Autobots in the story is brief enough that Rodimus Prime seems almost surprised when Galvatron is dropped in his lap.

It’s a pity the story uses Rodimus for its resolution when a more exciting conclusion would be Starscream taking on Galvatron. It does fit Starscream’s cowardly nature that he sets up Galvatron to be dealt with by Rodimus instead, but that in itself is anti-climactic because it’s the first proper rematch between the two leaders since the film – squashed into the last few minutes of an episode that has otherwise had nothing to do with that particular enmity. Each gains a couple of kicks at the other, notably copying moves from the fight in the film, which makes Galvatron’s exhaustion seem ridiculous. There is also no explanation given as to how one moment he is at the mercy of the assembled Autobots and the next back in his throne room on Chaar, or for why when he finally has Octane in front of him – the character he has spent the last twenty minutes trying to have killed – he just walks away and leaves him. There is also the strangeness of Octane and Starscream’s dialogue being mixed up at the start of the last scene – the line “So you think Galvatron’s nothing but scrap iron now?” voiced as Starscream but actually Octane talking, and the reply, “Yeah, we’ve seen the last of that sucker” being worded the way Octane speaks and voiced as him, but logically being a reply from Starscream. It’s possible that this is the sequence Dille talked about “inadvertently wrecking” (see Octane’s Origins).

Perhaps this hasty editing came about to shorten the episode by seventy-five seconds to fit the ‘Secret Files of Teletraan-II’ addendum on the end, but it leaves it feeling unbalanced in the way the leisurely first two thirds set up Sandstorm and Octane’s relationship and then do nothing with it in favour of wedging Starscream in. It’s a very disjointed episode with little resolved, beyond Starscream’s last-second possession of a Sweep setting up his return a few episodes later in Ghost in the Machine. The fact that Dille seems to have spent time rewriting parts of the story means it’s unclear how McLaughlin originally intended it to end, and if ever her own original drafts of the script surface it would make a fascinating exercise to compare them to the finished version. As it is, Starscream’s Ghost is a mess of ideas that don’t really fulfil on any level, except for the endearing early scenes of Octane going about his daily routine and chewing the “high static” cud with Sandstorm.


Octane’s Origins – Continuity in Starscream’s Ghost

The apparent switch of Octane for Blitzwing in Starscream’s Ghost created frustrating continuity errors that, while not as obvious or problematic as something like the multiple Constructicon origin stories, is irritating enough to warrant exploring.

For a start, Galvatron’s demand that, “I want you to seek the traitor, Octane. Stalk and destroy him! I hate liars and double dealers” would fit his desire for revenge on Blitzwing perfectly, but in context reads like a straightforward reference to the fact that Octane is working for the Autobots. Later in the episode, Octane reveals to Sandstorm that, “Galvatron can’t afford to let me live”, which seems an odd claim for a salvage operator, but would make more sense if it referred to the way Blitzwing one-upped the Decepticon leader, potentially tarnishing his reputation, at the end of Five Faces.

Eventually, Octane himself gives the reason why Galvatron wants him destroyed:

“I interfered with Galvatron's orders. I swiped Trypticon and tried to become powerful enough to become the new leader of the Decepticons. He said I'd never be welcome back in the ranks of the Decepticons. Galvatron vowed to get even.”

This is clearly a reference to Thief in the Night, but as that episode aired after this one, the events haven’t yet happened. Even if the episodes had been switched in the running order, Octane’s actions in Thief in the Night don’t match what he claims here, not having shown any aspiration to lead the Decepticons, and in that story Galvatron already believes Octane to be a traitor, as if that episode should follow this one instead. There is also the small point that Galvatron says, “You will never be welcome in the ranks of the Decepticons again!” to Blitzwing in Five Faces, echoing what Octane says here, but he doesn’t say anything at all to Octane at the end of Thief in the Night.

It’s an awkward problem that paradoxically means both this episode and Thief need to be watched before the other for either to make sense. Stronger editing could easily have solved the problem, as well as the additional glitch that both episodes have been adapted to include Sandstorm, forgetting that he has a proper introduction in Fight or Flee later in the season. It’s also noticeable that Starscream’s Ghost and Thief in the Night are Octane’s only two proper episodes (with a background appearance in The Ultimate Weapon), and that those two and Fight or Flee are the only appearances for Sandstorm – again suggesting both characters were wedged into a few stories and ticked off the list because they weren’t part of the core movie team.

Had time allowed, these issues could obviously have been resolved by showing Fight or Flee first, giving Octane leadership ambition in Thief in the Night and ensuring Galvatron is seen to banish him so his existence as an independent salvage operator under Autobot protection in Starscream’s Ghost makes sense, but, as it stands, the problems remain an example of how fraught the editing process was at the time. Marvel’s Production Co-ordinator, Paul Davids, has talked in interviews about how rushed the process of getting an episode finished was – sometimes with master tapes being delivered to TV stations for broadcast only a few days before they were due to air. For Starscream’s Ghost, Flint Dille also remembers causing problems himself:

“Editing was an imperfect process. I believe that most of the time I made the scripts better. Sometimes, I just made them different, in my image, but not necessarily better. I only have one that I'll admit to inadvertently wrecking, and that was Meg McLaughlin's. She had a great bit in it, but I was impatient (I tended to edit instinctually as I went along – trying to see the story through the eyes of the viewer) and made a mess of the sequence. By the time she pointed out what a hash I'd made of it, it was too late to fix.” [Cybertron Chronicle]

Which specific sequence that is (Dille remembers it being an action scene) isn’t clear, but it again highlights how this episode had more than its fair share of problems brought about through last minute writing changes.

There is also the possibility that Sandstorm replaced Springer in this episode because all of Sandstorm’s lines are ascribed to Springer in the dialogue script. However, it is noticeable that the available dialogue script for this episode is not the actor’s recording version but a transcript of the broadcast episode because it contains a number of misheard lines (some crackers, such as Galvatron telling the Skuxxoid to “stock” Octane instead of “stalk” him, Cyclonus calling Octane a “puckered” computer instead of “pocket” and Galvatron describing Starscream as “lucifer” instead of “usurper”); incorrect names (‘Thundercranker’ being a comical example); and a multitude of other mistakes and differences to the usual dialogue script format. More conclusively, the pre-recording Sunbow cast list for this episode lists Sandstorm and not Springer.

[Pinwig]

Apologies for the missing installment last week; I got back off the trip and totally forgot. However, this should make up for it as it's two week's worth of writing anyway. I wasn't initially going to delve into the controversies surrounding Thief in the Night, but eventually decided it was unavoidable in terms of appraising the episode. So, here's the biggest entry yet.

3.11 – Thief in the Night

Continuing the early season three trend of picking up on plot threads left by Five Face of Darkness, Paul Davids’ third Transformers script resolves the question of what happened to Trypticon after he was unceremoniously dumped in the sea by Metroplex at the end of Flint Dille’s season opener. From his position as Marvel’s production co-ordinator for the series, Davids showed an intuitive understanding of how to write compelling stories with his first two scripts, Cosmic Rust and Chaos, but Thief in the Night surprisingly falls some way short of the bar set by his previous efforts.

The first problem is that the foundation on which the story is built isn’t as gripping or suitable as Davids seems to think it was. He has talked in interviews about how initial ideas from writers had to get past the script editors at Sunbow before even becoming a treatment, but the difference between this episode and his others is obvious even when he explains the idea himself:

“In one paragraph they [Sunbow] could see a crystal clear idea: An infectious disease dangerous to metallic robots is spreading among Autobots and Decepticons, Megatron is rusting away, and Perceptor comes up with a cure. My other ideas that were accepted were equally easy to grasp: Grimlock becomes a genius for a short period and then loses his new intelligence (inspired by the film Charly), and that became Grimlock’s New Brain. And then there was the idea that great monuments throughout the world are being stolen by Decepticons.”

It’s not hard to see which of those ideas doesn’t quite fit the tone of the series, and in that context, Thief in the Night is onto a loser before it even starts. The concept that the Decepticons would want to steal national monuments doesn’t make much sense and strays too far into the ‘Dick Dastardly’ category of villainy. When that on screen becomes Trypticon running off with the Eiffel Tower, any semblance of credibility the Decepticons’ most fearsome weapon should have evaporates instantly. This initial theft pitch is further developed in the episode’s original synopsis, which again plays on the comedy aspect of the story:

“Ever since his defeat by Autobot City, Trypticon has been hiding out in the sinister republic of Carbomya, protected by that nation’s sovereign borders and sympathetic dictator, Abdul Fakkadi. When Fort Knox vanishes, earth authorities are puzzled. When the Taj Mahal is held for ransom, the Autobots are downright suspicious. When the Kremlin is found, everyone is pretty much certain that Trypticon is responsible… but can they prove it?”

Of note, the synopsis eschews any reference to the more interesting elements of the episode, such as Octane, again suggesting his involvement in the story was a later addition (see Starscream’s Ghost). It’s also curious that Trypticon was defeated by ‘Autobot City’ rather than Metroplex – another example of the confusion over the two names.

The second problem with the episode the way the story is contrived to make that initial elevator pitch work. Davids has said that there were “marching orders” for the story to include Metroplex, and so a rematch with Trypticon and the option for the two giant characters to move the monuments seems like a logical fit – with potential for considerable visual spectacle – but the result is an awkward and nonsensical story that is further hampered by AKOM’s inability to give the two city-formers any sense of scale.

A children’s cartoon is also an odd medium through which to channel political satire, but the reason behind Octane and Trypticon’s desire to steal monuments is revealed to be them wanting to trade the buildings with a greedy Middle-Eastern dictator for oil, from which they can make the particularly rich form of energon that is helping Trypticon recover after his battering by Metroplex. This sees the return of the character of Abdul Fakkadi and the fictitious North African country of Carbombya, and all the racial stereotypes previously looked at under the entries for Aerial Assault, and to a lesser degree, the General Pinochet analogue in B.O.T.

The somewhat heavy-handed way in which this episode dealt with the Middle-Eastern stereotype would have repercussions for the series because it caused the abrupt departure of voice artiste Casey Kasem, who felt the unbalanced portrayal of Arabs in the story was more racism than satire. This necessitated the sudden reinvention of Teletraan-I as the vocally very different Teletraan-II, conveniently explained by the way the Ark had been destroyed by Trypticon in Five Faces (See also, Chaos). Davids remembers that as the script for the episode had already been passed by Sunbow when this happened, it was Marvel’s animation director Nelson Shin who gave the instruction to change the name and recast the part (given to the ubiquitous Frank Welker, on hand for the episode voicing Galvatron). For a more in-depth examination of this subject, and the way Thief in the Night satirised the Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi, see Satire or Racism: Muammar Gaddafi, Casey Kasem and Thief in the Night below.

Marred by the controversy surrounding its content and the awkward plot premise about monument theft, Thief in the Night struggles to get out of the starting blocks and by its mid-point becomes faintly ridiculous in the way it attempts to steer the episode toward a conclusion. The idea that the Autobots should be interested in what happened to a significant threat like Trypticon after the battle with Metroplex is a good one, but it does jar that the previously Cybertron based post-movie Autobot leadership are suddenly on Earth as if they’ve always been there. Davids here is echoing the typical Ark based setup of earlier seasons without consideration for the fact that the status quo has changed. Galvatron hiding Trypticon on Dinobot Island to recuperate also feels a little awkward, especially as Trailbreaker appeared to set a forcefield around it to guard it, but in reality this reference was Davids offering a deliberate salute to the earlier story simply because Douglas Booth’s two-parter was one of his favourites.

It isn’t just the shift in setting from space to Earth that makes the story feel much more second season than third. Having been associated with the Transformers since its early stages, Davids is an example of a pre-movie writer adapting to the third season style (only seven of the twenty-seven third season writers had contributed to the earlier seasons) and many of the hallmarks of the older style show through. One example is how in the largely character driven third season, alt-modes are seen less often and are rarely a functional part of the plot, but here there is much more selling of the toys as transforming robots - notably Broadside, whose debut doesn’t even see him assume his robot form. Equally, Seaspray (in his only third season appearance) assists with the water-born operation, necessitating the use of his hovercraft mode.

Another example is how Galvatron becomes interchangeable with Megatron in the way he acts, much less rash and manic, and despite his plasma bath on Thrull, wanting the super-energon to become “stronger than ever” – returning the series to its roots about the struggle for energon. He even ends the Decepticons’ involvement in the episode with a very Megatron-esque “Retreat, Decepticons! We can’t hold out any longer!” – a big backward step for a character that was being deliberately written to avoid that routine. The tone isn’t helped either by the strangely overt use of background music from the earliest days of the cartoon – something that was also obvious in Starscream’s Ghost. Tracks that haven’t appeared in the series for a long time return with a vengeance here, which is off-putting because some are uniquely bound to key events in those early first season episodes.

Aside from the retro feel to the story, and the silliness of super-sized Transformers stealing national monuments, the story doesn’t help itself by using some tremendously daft explanations to keep the plot moving, such as Grimlock sensing “dinosaur transform static” at the scene of the Fort Knox theft, and then leaping to the conclusion that this might mean his own Dinobots were responsible. Not only does this reinforce the notion of Grimlock now being an independent operator (as he has been in this season), suspicious even of his own team for comedic purposes, but ignores the fact that later in the episode worldwide news reports are used to show how the thefts of these monuments couldn’t possibly go unnoticed. This then leads to Grimlock standing in judgement over his brothers while Six Gun and Scamper get their only dialogue in the series – sadly lines as ridiculous as “We’re gathered here, as you know, to figure out if any of you Dinobots was involved in stealin’ Fort Knox an’ the Taj Mahal.” The scene could almost be lifted straight from a Monty Python sketch, and when Sky Lynx’s assertion that he shouldn’t be under investigation because he isn’t a Dinobot is countered by Six Gun saying, “You got dinosaur electrons in your circuits”, there is no feasible way to make any sense of what’s going on.

The humour in the episode is also played out in the George and Lenny (Of Mice and Men, John Steinbeck) style relationship between the renegade Octane and his bumbling giant sidekick, Trypticon. The story is really about how Octane (who biographically speaking is the Decepticons’ refueller, suggesting he has an expert knowledge of fuel production) has discovered that Carbombyan oil can be used to create a particularly rich form of energon, necessitating the monument thefts to pay Fakkadi for it. Aside from the fact a phenomenal amount of oil is needed to produce relatively small quantities of this energon^[1], perhaps because it is a condensed form, this leads Perceptor to identify that it is specifically a “Decepticon formula”, revealing that not all energon is the same. It’s interesting to think that the Autobots might run on ‘gasoline’ and the Decepticons a ‘diesel’ equivalent; something that the Quintessons may have done originally to make better use of fuels available to them, or to differentiate the military and domestic arms of their production. Just as humans can produce high performance fuels, Octane’s super-energon suggests Transformers can do the same – but with the added effect of making them stronger.

Sticking with Octane, the story is a partner piece to Starscream’s Ghost – the two episodes being his only notable appearances in the season – and as discussed under that episode’s entry, Octane’s ‘theft’ of Trypticon here is awkwardly used to provide the reason why Galvatron is pursuing him in that episode (see Octane’s Origins – Continuity in Starscream’s Ghost). As previously noted, this doesn’t gel well and it feels like Galvatron’s two lines “Soon we will bring Trypticon back to the fold and punish that renegade Octane” and “You’re a traitor, Octane” were hurriedly inserted to connect the episodes, forgetting the fact that later in the story Galvatron asks Octane to use his persuasive skills on Fakkadi and then fights side by side quite happily with him in the final battle.

However, Octane’s character is written consistently by both Megeen McLaughlin and Davids as an opportunist freelancer, so regardless of whether this or Starscream’s Ghost were originally intended to feature Blitzwing, the change happened early enough that Octane could evolve as a character in his own right, rather than just taking Blitzwing’s lines. In both cases Octane doesn’t act or speak like any former iteration of Blitzwing, so although the confusion is interesting from the point of view of looking at the history of the series, it’s a much more worthwhile exercise to ignore all that and look at Octane as he is – a unique and independent character with ties to both Decepticon and Autobot factions. It’s just a shame that, like Blitzwing’s interesting set up, it all leads nowhere as after this episode he is totally ignored.

All of this brings us to the inevitable conclusion that Thief in the Night is not one of the better examples of the Transformers’ third season. The combination of a silly story and questionable content makes for an embarrassing and at times uncomfortable watch. The big showdown between Metroplex and Trypticon is a damp squib, over before it begins, and is resolved in exactly the same way as their previous encounter with the former throwing the latter into the sea. There is a good showing of characters from both sides, with the Aerialbots again appearing to act as Rodimus Prime’s personal guard (as they did in Starscream’s Ghost) among a total head count of thirty-three, but as with the title fight, the two forces coming together is over before it gets going and is almost irrelevant to the rest of the story. The episode’s title ‘Thief in the Night’ refers to the unexpected return of the saviour (“the day of the Lord will come like a thief in the night”, 1 Thessalonians 5:2), but there’s really nothing that can be done to save this episode.


^[1] A thousand barrels to make one energon cube seems a number picked arbitrarily to make it sound impressive without any thought to its practicality – like Ultra Magnus claiming to be 200,000 kilometres from Goo in Five Faces Part 3. Putting that in real terms, one barrel of crude oil can produce 19 gallons of petrol (gasoline) and a further 12 gallons of diesel, meaning that the one thousand barrels needed for a single energon cube equates to 31,000 gallons of motoring fuel, or full tanks for around two thousand average domestic cars. The fun with numbers continues when it’s considered that Trypticon is said to need fifty energon cubes an hour, or enough oil to completely fuel 100,000 cars. Based on an average petrol tank size of 16 gallons, running Trypticon for 24 hours would equate to full tanks for 2.35 million cars.



Satire or Racism: Muammar Gaddafi, Casey Kasem and Thief in the Night

The character of Abdul Fakkadi is a thinly veiled satire of Muammar Gaddafi, the Libyan leader who in 1986 was a focus of American concern. Gaddafi had overthrown the Libyan monarchy in 1969 through a coup d’état and installed himself as head of state, forming the Great Socialist People's Libyan Arab Jamahiriya in 1977. Under his governance, the country had risen in power on the world stage and allegedly spent a proportion of its income from oil on sponsoring paramilitary organisations and terrorist groups around the world. Ronald Regan’s presidency was concerned about the possibility of Libya becoming a nuclear power, and suspicion that the country had been involved in the bombing of a Berlin nightclub popular with American soldiers on April 5th 1986 led to a retaliatory airstrike ten days later which was intended to kill Gaddafi.

As such, Gaddafi was the subject of cynicism and satire in the American media at the time and the ‘Socialist Democratic Federated Republic of Carbombya’ speaks for itself, as does the ‘King of Kings and President for Life’ title that Fakkadi gives himself. The character is unlikely to have been writer Paul Davids’ sole creation though, having also featured in the first episode of Flint Dille’s Five Faces of Darkness, where Fakkadi appears to be harbouring Decepticons scattered by the events of the film. Davids himself is clear on how Fakkadi was intended as a satire, not just of Gaddafi himself, but also of the oil situation in the 1970s:

“The main point about Thief in the Night was that my story editor (Flint Dille) and I were emphasizing satire about the situation in the Middle East. Look at the name of the country: Carbombya (Car Bomb Ya). There was an element of satire of some of the terrorism prevalent in the Middle East and thoughts about OPEC nations that essentially held the West 'hostage' during the Jimmy Carter years over oil.”

This is shown in the episode in the way that Fakkadi is intent on demanding the entirety of America’s gold reserve for the oil Trypticon needs. Perhaps unintentionally, Trypticon and his excessive need for oil could also be symbolic of America itself – a lumbering consumerist giant, bullying other countries into servicing its own needs.

These attempts at satire can further be seen at the start of the episode in the way the cruise ship is used to establish Carbombya. The captain talks about it as if it’s an attraction on a sight-seeing tour, with the passengers’ conversation echoing western suspicions of Middle-Eastern countries and reflecting the real tension in the Mediterranean in 1986:

Passenger 1: Isn’t it dangerous to cruise near here?
Passenger 2: Yeah, sometimes innocent ships get attacked.
Captain: There’s no danger, I assure you. As long as we stay beyond the three mile limit, no one will harm us.

Libya had long claimed ownership of the Gulf of Sidra, the body of water in the Mediterranean Sea off its coast, and in 1973 Gaddafi had asserted that his country should have exclusive fishing rights in the gulf, extending 62 miles from its shore. The edge of this area was dubbed the ‘Line of Death’, but was disputed by America, who claimed under international law they were within their rights to practise naval operations anywhere up to twelve miles from the Libyan coast. Friction caused by this led to two Libyan fighter planes attacking and being shot down by American equivalents in 1981.

Then, after America claimed Libya had been involved in terrorist attacks in Rome and Vienna in 1985, Gaddafi increased the presence of surface to air missile defences on Libya’s coast (seen in Fakkadi’s claim that he “will install radar guided rocket defenses” to replace Trypticon) and a further skirmish between the two forces occurred in the gulf in March 1986 in which thirty-five Libyans were killed and two ships sunk. This incident, and the retaliatory nightclub bombing that happened the following month, would have brought tensions to a head at the time Davids was writing Thief in the Night.

It’s understandable then that the satire might carry a bitter edge, particularly in a time when the line between criticism and racism was less well defined than it is these days. To a modern perspective, the approach to satirising Arabs (rather than Gaddafi specifically) goes beyond the thoughtless casual racism discussed under episodes such as Aerial Assault. ‘Carbombya’, more overtly named here from the ‘Karbomia’ it was in the script for Five Faces, wouldn’t even have been particularly funny at the time, given the rising number of deaths from Libyan backed terrorist activities in the mid-80s (In the UK, the Lockerbie bombing in 1988 came from the same source). It’s hard to imagine anti-terror messages being used light-heartedly in children’s cartoons these days, but historical context is an important factor, as is the belligerence of 1980s America. In truth, this resentment of an aggressive foreign power is no different to something like the anti-Nazi propaganda of the second world war – human nature means that expressing a fear of the unknown often comes out in an aggressive manner.

However, it isn’t surprising that openly insulting moments in this episode, such as the sign outside Carbombya City saying the population is “4000 people and 10000 camels” or Fakkadi’s remorseful response to Rodimus when he is chastised at the end of the episode: “Oh, you have my word of honor, Rodimus – In fact, I swear to you on the grave of my mother's camel – and my uncle's goat, and even my sister's donkeys – and did I say my brother's sheep, and my nephew's roosters? Such fine roosters you never did see” caused upset to voice artist Casey Kasem, who was of Lebanese descent. Far from recognising Kasem’s complaint though, rather surprisingly the production team instead chose to see the incident as a ‘star’ name being difficult, as Paul Davids explained when defending his story:

“This did create some controversy, because one of our top voice actors was of Arab descent (as well as being a famous radio personality), and he felt that we were offering 'caricatures' that weren't constructive, and he objected. It was the first time I had heard that kind of criticism with one of my projects, and I began to realize, as a writer, the importance of being attentive and sensitive to portrayals of specific groups. However, Nelson Shin vigorously defended us in that controversy and refused to 'demand' changes in the script, which he took with the sense of humor that was intended. Nelson did not want a voice actor to be able to dictate the content of one of our script – even if the voice actor in question DOES have a star on Hollywood Boulevard!”

Casem’s principle concern was the lack of balance – the Arab characters in the story were entirely negative, and where in Aerial Assault Prince Jumal helped to avoid that problem, both Five Faces Part 1 and Thief don’t contain positive Arab characters in their Carbombyan scenes. Fakkadi’s appearance in Five Faces is brief, but even there the tone is uneasy with his cohorts sniggering behind him as he gives his word of honour that he isn’t hiding Dirge and Ramjet, as if anybody would be a fool to trust an Arab. His exasperated claim that he can’t debate with “irrational fanaticism” when Blaster lands is also clearly a tongue in cheek reference to Gaddafi and his actions.

Several years later, Casem wrote about this in an article he wrote for The Link, an American magazine dedicated to Middle Eastern understanding (and usefully uncovered by TFWiki). In it he talked about the consequences of stereotyping and possible solutions – advocating the writing of letters to media producers to help educate them. Of Thief in the Night specifically he said in the article:

“A few years ago I was doing one of the voices in the TV cartoon series, ‘Transformers’. One week, the script featured an evil character named Adbul, King of Carbombya. He was like all the other cartoon Arabs. I asked the director, ‘Are there any good Arabs in this script for balance?’ We looked. There was one other – but he was no different than Abdul. So, I told the show’s director that, in good conscience, I couldn’t be a part of that show. And I wrote a letter to the President and Chief Executive Officer of Marvel Productions, Margaret Ann Loesch.

Here is her reply in part: ‘Dear Casey, I received your letter regarding the negative stereotyping that has been occurring on television in the portrayal of Arabs and Arab-Americans. I share your concerns. Your letter has been distributed to our writing staff and our voice directors in the hopes that they can be more sensitive to this issue and therefore more responsive to the problem.’” [The Link, Vol 23, No 5, December 1990]

[The Huff]

I do agree with this episode always seeming 'odd' as it just didn't seem to be set in the 'future' at all and would have fitted much better in season two, with those seasons characters easily filling the roles. (Bruticus instead of Trypticon perhaps with Starscream taking Octain's place. (Instead of Metroplex - Defensor).
As always, interesting stuff to read in this thread!

[Pinwig]

3.12 – Surprise Party

Surprise Party is the only Transformers episode written by Steve Mitchell and Barbara Petty, a writing partnership which seems only to have existed to provide a handful of episodes for Sunbow cartoons in the mid-eighties. Having contributed two scripts to GI Joe’s first full season in the autumn of 1985 (An Eye for an Eye and Funhouse), the pair returned a year later to provide another Joe story (The Rotten Egg) and Surprise Party for Transformers. These second two episodes were eventually broadcast just two days apart in October 1986, and Petty gained further exposure a week later when her four part My Little Pony story, Bright Lights, also aired. Beyond this, the duo would only work together again on a Jem episode the following year, and a further Joe story for the 1990s DIC series.

Mitchell is perhaps best known for his connection with low budget horror/fantasy director Jim Wynorski, and for writing the film Chopping Mall in particular, which was released in March 1986, seven months before Surprise Party aired. Despite the film’s pedigree as a B-Movie slasher about a group of teenagers trapped overnight in a shopping centre, it bears a curious connection to Surprise Party in that the core conceit revolves around three ‘Killbot’ security robots trying to rid the mall of the teenage intruders. This happens through a variety of mutilations, electrocutions and an exploding head in what is an R-rated horror, but Transformers fans less forgiving of Daniel’s nature may ponder what could have been, had the Autobot records asteroid’s three sentrybots actually got hold of him.

Petty, whose screen writing credits extend only as far as her work for Sunbow, also has connections to Wynorski, having worked as a script consultant on some of his 90s sexploitation films, but these days has returned to her roots writing paperback thrillers.

All of which provides an unlikely background for what is an innocuous Transformers episode with a very ‘young’ feel. The fact the writers were jobbing freelancers is evident in the way the story detaches itself from the ongoing continuity and focusses instead on the movie’s two most minor core characters. As with many episodes in the third season, it appears some wrangling on the part of the script editor was necessary to seat the story’s original synopsis more firmly in the Transformers world, reading simply: “Wheelie and Daniel risk capture to give their friend Ultra Magnus a surprise birthday party”. This by itself would have made for a terribly dull and childish story and it’s noticeable that the most interesting aspect of the episode, the Decepticon attempt to sabotage the peace conference, is entirely missing. The outline does show how the series at this point is still prioritising the promotion of the movie’s core cast, so in terms of toys this is really Wheelie’s moment in the limelight. He is the most minor of the new film Transformers, so Daniel is really the only character to whom he could have any kind of superiority – making a few decisions in this episode and using minor abilities to try and make him stand out. This reuses the relationship that Bumblebee had with Spike in the first season – the pairing of Cybertronian with human giving the Transformer the opportunity to protect and inform his sidekick; a ‘big brother’ type dynamic that is potentially the only way to put Wheelie in a position where he can demonstrate himself to be a worthwhile purchase. Where Bumblebee’s naivety and clumsiness made him endearing however, Wheelie’s inane rhyming doesn’t have the same effect.

The opening of the episode seems to be confused as to whether it takes place on Cybertron or somewhere else, hinting at a possible change during script editing. The establishing shots of Daniel looking for the others appear to be on Cybertron and this is clearly the intention, but some awkward dialogue and misunderstood inflection make it unclear. Daniel’s early line, “You’ve been so busy getting ready for the first peace conference on Cybertron” implies they are somewhere else in this first scene because the emphasis in delivery is on ‘Cybertron’ and not the peace conference, and when Spike is evaluating the smashed shuttle he says, “The peace conference starts tomorrow on Cybertron. We need it to get the Earth delegates there”, which reads as though he is using ‘there’ to refer to Cybertron and not the conference. The awkwardness of the ‘on Cybertron’ additions to both lines feels like ham-fisted editing intended to clarify the conference’s location, but have the knock-on effect of making it seem as though the characters are preparing somewhere else. In addition, when the Combaticons are chased off by the Autobots across a rocky landscape similar to all the other alien locations used in the third season (particularly Chaar), but not usually associated with the metallic surface of Cybertron, it comes as a shock when Daniel and Wheelie seem to be within walking distance of the conference centre. It’s possibly worth noting that the planet surface as shown here by Toei is similar to AKOM’s rendition of ancient Cybertron in Forever is a Long Time Coming, suggesting that the change is deliberate if it wasn’t intended originally to be somewhere else. However, when Daniel talks about “Cybertron Central Records”, the pause voice actor David Mendenhall puts between the first two words implies there was a full stop originally in the script between ‘Cybertron’ and ‘central’. Had the line been delivered without the gap, giving the building the title of ‘Cybertron Central Records’, the speed with which they get there would make more sense.

The peace conference itself is also something of an oddity. Spike worries only about getting the Earth delegates to it, rather than any other race (it’s not as if they need help: in this 2006, humans are shown to be more than capable of casual spaceflight) and when Wheelie and Daniel are outside the centre it appears Cybertron is flooded with similarly suited human characters already. The conference also only has Earth attendees, looking much more like a United Nations summit than an intergalactic assembly that reflects the kind of faces seen at the Space Olympics in Five Faces – and those who will be at the next conference in Madman’s Paradise. In fact, the only reason to think that Cybertron isn’t just being used as a neutral location for a purely Earth attended conference comes in Galvatron’s line that “the Autobots seek to make peace throughout our galaxy”. These perhaps are small points, but they do add to the notion that the whole conference plot was layered on top of Mitchell and Petty’s original party idea to flesh out the story.

Which is a shame because it’s far more interesting than the party plot. Galvatron’s fleeting appearance at the start of this episode – stood watching banks of screens monitoring Autobot activity – recalls similar covert observations the Autobots were making at the start of the movie. This is furthered when Cyclonus observes that the garbage scow Wheelie and Daniel steal is “no longer on its usual co-ordinates”, suggesting that the Decepticons are cataloguing the Autobots’ operations (incidentally, the garbage scow arriving and delivering its load is a nice link to Octane’s role in Starscream’s Ghost, furthering the idea that Junkion has now become a source of raw material for restoring Cybertron). Both Galvatron and Rodimus have very few lines in the story, making them seem distant and important leader figures, and it’s the much more sinister and deep-voiced Cyclonus who leads the Decepticon interest because of his comparable status to Ultra Magnus.

Cyclonus being the chief antagonist with his army of sweeps (noticeably lacking Scourge) allows the rivalry between he and Ultra Magnus from The Killing Jar to resurface, although this sadly isn’t explicitly touched on. Magnus gets almost as much promotion as Wheelie, albeit through the admiration the others have for him, although his oft quoted soundbite, “Forget about me. The shuttle has priority. The peace conference depends on it”, encapsulates his character in a nutshell. He also gets ample opportunity to display his missile firing ability in the fight scenes, which in this episode are particularly good. Surprise Party is attributed to Toei by TFWiki, but the style is sketchier than their usual work – particularly in the battles. Transformers get holes blown in them, bits fly off when punches land, explosions pock mark everything and the figure animation is much more dynamic than usual. It makes for fights that lean closer to a more anime style, and moments such as Cyclonus taking out one of Ultra Magnus’s missiles with his oxidating laser are thrilling in comparison to the usual pew-pew laser fire.

The idea of the Decepticons running interference and terrorist-like operations from the shadows to undermine the Autobots is an interesting one, and the way the Combaticons turn up to strike at the shuttles in guerrilla fashion before fleeing adds to the feeling of desperation on their part. They aren’t a force that can take the Autobots head on in this episode, instead looking for ways to chip away at their power base instead. Building this up to crashing the asteroid into the conference makes for a perilous and fitting finale to this particular sub-plot, but unfortunately it takes a back seat to the less interesting antics of Wheelie and Daniel.

It isn’t even that interesting a concept that Transformers should have birthdays, given they clearly hadn’t thought about the idea before Daniel brought it up; these characters are millions of years old, so the idea would probably be irrelevant to them. Magnus was identified by the Quintesson scientist in The Killing Jar as a model he’d had a hand in designing, which is interesting because if the asteroid does harbour his creation date, its records must extend as far back as the days of Quintesson control. This is a much more intriguing idea to form a story around, but sadly the conclusion of the plot means the entirety of the archive is destroyed to save Cybertron. What secrets it may have contained remain unrevealed.

The idea of records and the asteroid itself is an almost 1970s approach to the problem of storing physical data. Written in the days when commercial computer hard drives were still in their infancy, the ‘Hall of Records’ on Cybertron and the asteroid show racks of books and papers as the way in which data is kept, with the sole computer acting as an index to point to the physical location of information. The idea that during an unspecified war the Autobots sent this information off-world to protect it is great, but makes its inevitable demise seem even more callous at the end of the episode. Adding to the popular misconception of libraries being somewhere children are frowned at and shushed is the fastidious droid in the records hall, called the ‘Custodiobot’ in the dialogue script. He is another example of a semi-sentient robot performing a menial task, demonstrated by his lack of legs. Ironically, in other fictions Optimus Prime starts out in this role as Orion Pax the librarian, but in this case the Custodiobot is given the typical character of a straight-laced official with no time for the ‘younger generation’. It is interesting to ponder whether he goes home after work, or is simply switched off with the lights at the end of the day, and if he has an alt-mode he turns into a mobile library. It’s nice though to think that whereas under Shockwave’s control this class of drone was usually cannon fodder or prison guards, the Autobots can provide the ‘working class’ with more of a variety of tasks.

The episode’s weakest point is the journey to the asteroid, which from the plot synopsis was probably originally intended to be the core part. Ignoring the problem that a series of unlikely coincidences means Wheelie and Daniel manage to find somewhere lost for millions of years almost entirely by accident (even if the Custodiobot did reveal the “last known location” of the asteroid), the flying worm-like creatures that attack them enroute are far too like the Lightpoles Wheelie faced with Blurr during the near identical sequence of padding in Five Faces. In both cases the assailants destroy the ship they arrive in, and in both cases it’s Sky Lynx who saves them.

It makes sense that it’s Ultra Magnus who saves the intrepid explorers from Cyclonus, and it makes a nicely climactic end to the episode. Again, the divide between the two sub-plots is evident in the way that Magnus effectively saves Cybertron to end the peace conference sabotage story line, but is then given an arbitrary birthday with much celebration to resolve the more banal creation date plot. Surprise Party is an episode that has a lot of interesting concepts – the records asteroid and the terrorist-like activities of the Decepticons being genuinely strong points that could each sell an episode by themselves, but the overriding birthday plot that binds it all together is forgettable and perhaps indicative of how hard it is to come up with a good storyline that could be driven either by Daniel or Wheelie (see also, Madman’s Paradise). They are both characters who don’t really add anything to the series, and beyond being a necessary spotlight episode to promote Wheelie, Surprise Party ultimately doesn’t bring anything to the table.

[Pinwig]

At a rate of an episode a week, we should have been doing Rebirth Part 3 today. Things haven't quite worked out like that though, but we aren't *too* far off. There are twenty episodes left after this, so we should finish now sometime in November. But I'll have enough supplemental material finished off during the summer holiday to take us to the end of the year. 


3.13 Madman’s Paradise

Madman’s Paradise is very similar to the previous episode, Surprise Party, in that it works as an independent mid-season filler story based on a pitch that doesn’t rely on the ongoing continuity to work. As before, the episode’s synopsis focusses on this original idea and doesn’t include the elements that will eventually tie it more firmly into the Transformers’ universe (in this case the ambassadors on Cybertron or the identity of the aggressor), suggesting those were a later editorial addition:

“Grimlock and Daniel are accidentally transported into a dimension of wizards and warriors, where magic rules and science in unknown. Ultra Magnus, Carly and Blaster come to the rescue – but will they be in time?”

While these third season synopses are more like publicity blurbs than they are outlines for the stories (unlike the more in-depth ones for the first two seasons), this premise also avoids mentioning the mechanics used to explain how the ‘transport’ happens, and plays up the idea that science and magic have swapped roles within the alternate dimension – an important point because in the final story this boundary is blurred with the explanation that Mara-Al-Utha was banished because he was practising magic. As a result, making the story’s antagonist a Quintesson starts to look like a way to fit what is essentially a square peg of an idea into a round Transformers cartoon-shaped hole. Bringing magic into the series without a scientific explanation is a large step to make, done here it seems without really thinking about the consequences.

The familiar feel of the script editor needing to reshape and amend an idea to fit the series is also evident in that the writer, Craig Rand, sits firmly among the group of near unknowns writing for the third season. This is his only Transformers episode, and apart from contributing one script to the Sunbow produced Potato Head Kids (which incidentally aired in the same month as Madman’s Paradise), his only other writing credit is for the B-Movie Mad Max rip-off ‘Land of Doom’, also released in 1986. It doesn’t take much to see the similarities here to Surprise Party writer Steve Mitchell, who had an almost identical pedigree, and again makes it look like the Transformers at this point had become a channel through which Flint Dille and others were offering chances for budding writers to get a foothold in the television industry. Rand though, it seems, didn’t go much further than this.

It’s also possible that the inspiration for this story came from Dille rather than Rand, who at the time had been working with Gary Gygax, creator of Dungeons and Dragons, on various roleplaying related projects including a series of Fighting Fantasy style adventure gamebooks (the Sagard the Barbarian series, published by Pocket Books between September 1985 and January 1986). Dille has said the fact he was doing this with Gygax meant he could “come up with character classes all day”, which had the knock-on effect of being used to define some character personalities in Transformers.

Considering the way Dille planned, the random assortment of characters thrown together in this story makes it feel like one of his box ticking exercises, much in the way he compartmentalised groups in Five Faces (such as putting all the minibots together to defend the Ark). Blaster, Perceptor and Grimlock – the three most prominent individual characters left over from the pre-movie era – are all wheeled out to ensure they get some screen time, and Ultra Magnus and Daniel feature strongly again in the second of three consecutive stories involving both of them (in production order with Surprise Party and The Nightmare Planet). In Daniel’s case, these are the only third season stories that use him to any extent, making it feel almost as though Dille had a wall chart that slotted all the characters into sequences of feature episodes, ensuring each of the core cast had at least three stories (which the production bible for the second season reveals was exactly what happened with the 1985 toys). In this regard, Madman’s Paradise begins to feel like a collection of leftovers that didn’t fit anywhere else, bunged into a harmless filler story with Ultra Magnus to babysit them.

Grimlock is given a bigger part than he has had previously this season, and is again used to symbolise the entirety of the Dinobots, even though the other four were still on toy shelves. He is played for laughs even more than before and is every bit the bumbling fool – the butt of all the jokes – and his stupidity replaces Wheelie’s inexperience (Surprise Party) as the method by which Daniel is made a more dominant character. The fact he begins the episode as a waiter, complete with bow tie and apron, deliberately draws the viewer’s attention to this – enforcing the notion of him being derided as the ‘lesser’ class of robot the Dinobots started out as in the first season. The difference now though is that whereas the Dinobots displayed limited intelligence and were kept out of the way before (literally in their cupboard), this was because of their aggressive, loose-cannon military strength. Keeping Grimlock out of the way now is about making sure he doesn’t break something through clumsiness. This is evident in the way Rodimus reacts to the news that Daniel has gone off with him: “Don’t panic. [to Carly] Stay ‘til we know what’s going on. Then we’ll panic”. There is an assumption that Grimlock will cause trouble that will need dealing with. Grimlock’s lines reinforce this alteration to his character, and in the first act alone he displays a variety of traits for comedic effect: vanity (“Not monster. Handsome, like me Grimlock”), ignorance (“Not Cybertron, California maybe?”), and fear (“Me Grimlock feel surrounded!”). He also enjoys a childish ride on a slide and performs a traditional pratfall when immobilised by the centaur-like Treants. While traits such as vanity and ignorance have been part of Grimlock’s character before, particularly in the way he saw himself as superior to Optimus (Desertion of the Dinobots), the comical slant put on them in the third season removes the threat and strength the character used to have, reducing him to being a ‘Jar Jar Binks’ class of idiot.

Another addition to the story not mentioned by the synopsis is the inclusion of Blaster’s cassettes, which sees them operate as a cohesive team for the first time. Aside from his cameo in the film, this is Steeljaw’s first proper appearance, and he gains an introductory line from Blaster, “My man Steeljaw can sniff out any trail, if it’s hot or if it’s not!” to point this out. Eject, however, does not, and despite being shown ejecting from Blaster along with Steeljaw and Ramhorn appears in only two more shots in the episode, coming and going from group scenes and having no lines. In the first season this would be called an animation error, but as with Buzzsaw and Frenzy and their likenesses to Laserbeak and Rumble, Eject’s resemblance to Rewind means he will play second fiddle to his brother and only ever appear randomly in the background or by accident. It’s ironic that in the fleeting appearance he does get in the film, it’s Frenzy, his Decepticon counterpart in anonymity, that he fights.

After Ramhorn’s verbose contributions during Forever is a Long Time Coming, the beast cassettes are back to being unable to speak in this episode, but despite this there remains a feeling of camaraderie between the Autobot cassettes and a sense of support and unity. They come across as a special operations squad led by Blaster, in contrast to the way Soundwave’s cassettes were either used as tools, or in Rumble’s case increasingly as a separate servant more attached to Megatron. The question of why Rewind was favoured over Eject is answered by looking at their biographies – both have characteristics in keeping with cassette tape use – but Eject being a sports fanatic/commentator is far harder to make use of in a story than Rewind’s trait as a trivia expert with infinite storage capacity. Rewind (knowledge), Ramhorn (strength) and Steeljaw (guile) make a formidable trio, and Madman’s Paradise is scripted to show this off in the way Steeljaw tracks Daniel first to the dimension disc and then to the Golden One’s cave, how Rewind decodes the hieroglyphs to establish what the disc is, and then the way Ramhorn wreaks more destruction than any of the other Autobots during the battle at the castle before he frees the Golden One. In this episode, the Autobot cassettes are the most versatile and effective characters; they’re the only ones who use their abilities or transformations for a purpose – topped off by team leader Blaster’s cassette deck amplification saving the day at the end.

The idea of the Transformers assisting in a rebellion on a technologically primitive world isn’t a bad one – The God Gambit showed how sufficiently advanced technology can appear to be magic and the potential consequences of the misuse of it, but in this story Rewind’s comment establishes that Mara is banished because he was “convicted of practicing sorcery”, instead of pretending his science is magic to the denizens of Menonia once he got there. This though is only one of the problems created by trying to find a way to make the alternate dimension idea work.

For a start, the ambassador idea is recycled from the previous story, just with aliens instead of humans. In both cases the prospect of a universal peace extending the continuity from the end of the film is used as a device to occupy the cast before the complication that starts the story is introduced, completely ignoring its own potential. Then there is the question of how to get from Cybertron to Menonia, which leads Daniel literally down a rabbit hole of Carrollian proportions. Past stories have made time travel commonplace enough, but even the risible A Decepticon Raider In King Arthur’s Court stopped short of explicitly stating magic is real in this universe. The script throws this onto the Quintessons as a way of excusing its existence, removing it slightly from the Transformers themselves, but far from adding to their mystery, it’s simply confusing and unnecessary.

The dimension disc also ignores well established ideas just at the point the series was beginning to get better at being self-referential. Here, the Quintessons cast dangerous criminals through wormholes in space instead of throwing them into the Sharkticon pit, and the disc itself is a spacebridge in all but name, so why not use that much more fitting concept instead? If Shockwave could design one, the Quintessons certainly could, and an ancient spacebridge hidden under Cybertron with hardwired links to forgotten worlds would have done what Stargate did eight years before Roland Emmerich and Dean Devlin got there. Even reusing the time travel window from Forever is a Long Time Coming would have at least joined some continuity dots, but instead the dimension disc is simply an unexplained magic door inserted into the script to solve the plot problem.

Speaking of Stargate, the hieroglyphs Rewind decodes have a distinctly Egyptian look to them, which seems to mean the names of the Quintesson villains thrown through the portal suddenly gain a Middle-Eastern vibe (flavour of the month for bad guys, see Thief in the Night). Al (‘the’) is commonly used in Arabic family names, and both the ‘Badur’ of Al-Badur and ‘Mara’ of Mara-Al-Utha are villages in Iran. However, Mara is also a name associated with demons and death in Buddhism and Hinduism (familiar to Doctor Who fans), and the dragon shown in the hieroglyphs (and eventually the form used by the Golden One) has a distinctly oriental style. All of which serves to show how Rand was at least indiscriminate in the source material he took from to demonstrate the ‘alien’ nature of the Menonian culture. The problem with this concept is that it’s completely at odds with the naming convention the Quintessons have used in scripts so far. Deliberata, Inquirata and the like are far more interesting sounding.

This, the use of magic, the awkwardness of the dimension disc and the ease with which Daniel manages to uncover a corridor Rewind claims has never before been used by an Autobot (incidentally the second time in two episodes he miraculously discovers something lost for a millennia) make the setup for the story too hard to swallow. In this episode’s terms, it’s clumsier than Grimlock.

After this, the episode is largely beyond saving, but there are some nice ideas once the story moves to Menonia, which is where the original synopsis suggests the focus for the story should be rather than trying to explain how the idea works. The fact Mara-Al-Utha’s explanation about the Red Wizard is voiced over a flashback that juxtaposes the truth with his lies creates dramatic irony for the viewer, increasing the tension, and ideas such as the wooden golems are an interesting concept that a Quintesson designer could conceivably have come up with in exile. The world itself is also well fleshed out with a large variety of incidental characters, albeit stock types lifted from D&D, and the landscape references and character models published by Jim Sorenson on his blog (appendix pages that were extra to his Ark books) for the episode show a lot of thought went into creating Menonia.

The rest of the story though is typical of any number of Dungeons and Dragons campaign books of the time; in the establishing shots alone we are shown a barren landscape of decayed trees under a sinister sky and a lone castle stood on a craggy outcrop. Mara has a Hammer Horror laboratory and even a magic seeing mirror. In terms of stereotypes it’s all there, but is sadly lacking any kind of interest. The viewer learns how Mara deposed the Golden One and imprisoned his pupils – but there’s no reason why the viewer should care. Treants, bats and birdmen parade the screen for no reason other than to provide obstacles for the Transformers, and the sizable revolt against the castle at the end begs the question of whether all these different races got on peacefully before Mara upset everything anyway. Who was the Golden One for that matter?

Sadly, without the usual foil of the Decepticons to give the story a default conflict, the viewer is left too detached to fully invest in it – not helped by the fact that Daniel, the least interesting character in the series, is the one imperilled by the plot. The reveal that Mara is a Quintesson is subtly hinted at by the tentacles in early scenes, but even when the Red Wizard is unmasked it’s still hard to care. Forever is a Long Time Coming proved that the series doesn’t have to feature Decepticons to make it work, but in their place the plot complication and the move toward its resolution needs to be something that affects the Autobots, and a Dungeons and Dragons adventure doesn’t.

[Pinwig]

3.14 - Nightmare Planet

As one of the few third season writers already familiar with the series, Beth Bornstein would have been viewed as a steady hand by the busy script editors working with the extensive list of writers new to the series – possibly allowing her more freedom with her writing than before. However, her previous contributions, Child’s Play and The Search for Alpha Trion, are among the weaker second season stories, and these two factors combined may account for some of the problems Nightmare Planet has as a story.

Whereas The Search for Alpha Trion clearly had intervention to bring the tale of Elita-1 and her detachment of female Autobots in line with the developing series back story, Child’s Play derailed from the usual format into standard, stereotypical cartoon tropes without consideration for what made the Transformers unique. There is an argument that this kind of television is simply juvenile entertainment, and that interesting visuals are far more important than logic and continuity when it comes to attracting the target audience, but it’s equally important that cartoons should keep to their own rules. Nightmare Planet doesn’t stray as far from the Transformers’ format as Child’s Play does because it’s based on a sensible, in-continuity premise furthering the scientific explorations of the Quintessons, but the result is another weak episode with far too many unexplained ideas to make it satisfying.

Like other recent stories, it also shows the hallmarks of toys flagged for inclusion being shoehorned into an existing outline. In this case the Predacons feature in a story that doesn’t do anything to promote their unique traits as combiners or hunters, and Razorclaw’s oblique interest in gold is sadly the only line for any of them that even hints at individual characterisation. Headstrong’s damaged leg at the end, the method by which Bornstein separates the two factions to prevent another fight, could be a reference to his Budianski biography – but his frequent “impaired mobility” is a result of bearing problems in his joints rather than battle damage from running into things.

The Autobots fair better in terms of character development, helped by the fact their lines are shared just three ways in the story. Of the three, Ultra Magnus plays second fiddle to both Rodimus Prime and Springer, having had a fair crack of the whip recently.

Rodimus gets to play the calm, collected leader he has been since Dark Awakening, but more importantly it is he who sits with Daniel while the boy has nightmares instead of Spike. This recalls the close relationship the two were shown to have before the Battle of Autobot City in Transformers the Movie – the fishing scene significant enough that when Hot Rod received a Masterpiece toy in 2016, a rod was among the accessories he came with. That Bumblebee/Spike style relationship wasn’t further developed in the film, and Wheelie subsequently became a more recognisable partner for Daniel after Surprise Party because of his similarity to Bumblebee. Here though, Rodimus’ evident affection for Daniel is carefully worked into the plot with lines such as “Next time you have that nightmare, imagine me fighting the giant Galvatron”, showing how Rodimus sees himself as Daniel’s protector. Rodimus also saves Ultra Magnus later in the story, and is set not only on rescuing Springer, but somewhat magnanimously Razorclaw too – a Decepticon who had just led an attack against him. Rodimus is often a background character in the third season (in contrast to Optimus Prime in the first two), but in this episode he is a long way from the whining ‘Why me?’ teenager of Five Faces and is deliberately shown to be a much more rounded and established leader.

As the story progresses and Rodimus begins to realise his situation, the balance between he and Daniel shifts slightly to utilise their bond. Rodimus’ line, “There’s no doubt about it now, someone is helping us” illustrates how Daniel begins to control his dream to help the Autobots, and although the resolution of the story does feature the giant Rodimus Daniel was told to imagine, it’s the real Rodimus saying, “You controlled your dream! That means you won’t have any more nightmares”, that reinforces Daniel is ultimately the saviour rather than Rodimus himself.

Springer meanwhile expands on the characteristics he showed in the film. While the movie characters were defined by the film script and their Marvel biographies an obvious afterthought, in this episode he is every bit the “wise-cracking, easy-going” warrior of Budianski’s wording, which also talks about his courage and “willingness to sacrifice himself for his friends”. The cartoon also used opportunities to further his relationship with Arcee (during Five Faces, and more prominently from Springer’s point of view, Dark Awakening), so it’s no surprise that he gets to be the knight in shining armour here, using a magic lance to fend off an evil dragon from a fairy-tale princess deliberately coloured in the pinks and whites of Arcee’s armour. The princess does resemble Carly because of her hair, and of course is a creation of Daniel’s subconscious, but it’s worth considering that Arcee is portrayed in an equally maternal role, particularly in the movie, which would have been Bornstein’s point of reference for this story. The princess being the key by which the resolution is reached is also significant in that Bornstein takes the opportunity to put a female character in a pivotal position, a rarity for the series, even if Arcee herself sadly isn’t incorporated.

So, in terms of characterisation, Nightmare Planet does service the featured Autobots well. The problem comes from the way the plot for the story isn’t shaped well enough to make sense. The underlying concept – that the Quintessons utilise the unpredictability of humans to combat the logic of robots – is a very good one and deserved further exploration. In Five Faces – Part Four, the Quintessons label humans “troublesome and unpredictable”, which they claim has “tainted” the Autobots, and in The Killing Jar, the Quintesson scientist is confident of predicting the behaviour of Ultra Magnus and Cyclonus because of their underlying programming, leading to Marissa being the unpredictable element who can overlook their enmity and unite them.

In that regard, there is scope for the ‘human factor’ to become a weapon to use against the Transformers, but the way this becomes Daniel’s nightmares made flesh is more than a little left-field in implementation. It immediately creates the problem of whether the Transformers are experiencing physical or mental attacks, and while Bornstein narrowly avoids an awful ‘it was all a dream’ cop out ending, it does beg the question of how the Quintesson machine makes Daniel’s nightmare characters real; after all, Headstrong at least sustains physical damage. The issue is confused by Rodimus saying he thinks they’re “inside Danny’s nightmare” when he begins to work out what’s going on; Magnus claiming, “this world is like someone’s nightmare gone mad”; and Rodimus at the end saying the princess “never existed”. If this is a shared hallucination projected into the minds of the Transformers, we never explicitly see that, but Rodimus and the others jump from running out of the disintegrating nightmare world straight into the Quintesson lab at the end, losing the princess along the way. This confusion is possibly created by the original story synopsis, which isn’t clear about how the idea should work:

“The Quintessons invent a machine which turns a human’s worst nightmare into real images, capable of destroying both the Autobots and Decepticons. When the Transformers suddenly find themselves on a strange ‘Nightmare Planet’ confronted by seemingly indestructible demons, monsters, distorted Transformers and scary fairy-tale characters, Rodimus realises that these are creations from Danny’s recent nightmares. The Autobots must now attempt to save Danny before it is too late… for Danny and them!”

This leaves unanswered what “real images” means, along with how the Transformers “suddenly find themselves” in the nightmare world (and also why Daniel has inexplicably become ‘Danny’). A virtual reality approach, as with the Marvel comic story Afterdeath! (US issue #24) would have made a much cleaner explanation – particularly because the Predacons were initially shown as Quintesson tools in Five Faces – Part Five and could easily have been made to lure the three Autobots into a Quintesson trap before combating them in a virtual experiment.

This would also solve another problem in that there is no given reason why the Predacons are lurking in the shadows on Autobot controlled Cybertron anyway. While the Quintessons appear to be able to come and go at will (the tentacle reaching for Daniel while he sleeps shows they can even gain access to Spike and Carly’s Cybertronian house undetected) they at least have a reason for being there, although how they know Spike is having nightmares they can use is another question. Where the Quintesson laboratory is hidden is less of a concern, given Springer (not Rodimus as shown on screen) intimates in the opening scene that the Autobots are tracking strange electromagnetic pulses in an area they have never been before. Madman’s Paradise also showed there are Quintesson areas on Cybertron that the Autobots have never found.

It’s perhaps noteworthy that the bulk of the nightmare world uses a Dungeons and Dragons type setting again, the reasons for which may be to do with Flint Dille’s interest in the subject (see Madman’s Paradise). However, Dille himself has also said that his involvement with the series diminished quickly after Five Faces was completed, and that when he moved to work on Inhumanoids, Steve Gerber and Marv Wolfman took over as story editors. This episode in particular doesn’t feel like one edited by someone with a strong handle on the series because of the liberties it takes, and as said, may have been left largely to Bornstein as someone who had already written episodes.

Undeniably though, the production must have had some problems because of its exceptionally short running time. While some episodes at this point ran short, either by design to accommodate the ‘Files of Teletraan II’ appendices, or to save money with those extras added as filler, this episode needs two addendums to make it up to the standard 22:48 length. In fact, it only contains seventeen minutes of original animation – and while the plot is lightweight enough to sustain hefty cuts, this implies that the script was either delivered too late to allow the usual time for animation, or that problems during storyboarding meant it needed to be cut. The episode does seem to have been delayed in its broadcast (being the fourteenth into production and the nineteenth aired), but this might have been deliberately to hold it until its October 31st broadcast date because of its appropriately ‘nightmare’ content.

Fortunately, the dialogue script for this episode is one that still retains the line numbers from the version used for recording. It has many small edits, suggesting that extraneous lines were cut to shorten the run time after the dialogue was recorded. It even contains lines which have been moved but still retain their original numbering, something unique in these scripts. This sequence:

QUINTESSON #1: The Transformers are incapable of resisting the demons created by the young human's mind.
QUINTESSON #2: The very unpredictable nature of the humans which has prevented us from understanding and conquering them.
QUINTESSON #1: It will soon provide the destruction of their robotic allies. At last we Quintessons will be victorious.

which begins to explain what the Quintessons are doing, was originally the beginning of the later scene in which they talk about Daniel resisting them, showing that last minute consideration was given to explaining the nightmare world earlier in the story.

The second act is unusually short and runs to under five minutes, and the dialogue script highlights that many edits were made – mostly in the fight sequences. This accounts for why some parts don’t make sense, such as when Tantrum and Rampage are caught by the plant monster. There are evidently three lines missing between these two:

RAMPAGE: Get off! Get away from me!
TANTRUM: I thought you could do it too – guess I gotta show you myself.

which would have explained what Tantrum is talking about. All of this suggests that the script was shortened before animation because it isn’t entire scenes that are absent, just lots of small lines. It’s also true that the look of the episode is inconsistent in a way that is far more noticeable than usual. Much is of Toei’s usual standard, shown by the deep shadows on characters and the chrome flares on edges, but there are also shots which are much more AKOM in flatness, and several of Predaking that almost match the highly anime-styled look of Call of the Primitives. Visually, the episode is oddly jumbled.

Beyond the visuals, there are also changes to the music in this episode too. Whereas recent stories have been accompanied by the jarring return of music from the earliest days of the series, Nightmare Planet features the first use of simplified versions of tracks from Vince Di Cola’s film score. Less dynamic, but entirely recognisable, this change in the audio helps to further the notion that the series is an extension of the film. It may be that this couldn’t be done from the start of the season as the score is usually part of a film’s post production, and therefore may still have been being worked on when the first episodes of the third season were made, but it’s interesting to ponder what kind of difference it would have made to stories much more closely tied to the film, such as Five Faces of Darkness.

In all, Nightmare Planet is another example of a story with potential that got botched along the way. The Quintessons using the irrational nature of the human mind to combat beings built on logic and programming is an interesting one, and has been used by many other series to great effect (notably several of the better Dalek stories in Doctor Who). However, the confusion over what the ‘Planet’ actually is – one minute a real place in which Transformers are physically damaged and the next a dreamscape where characters disappear, means for anyone other than the youngest of viewers it doesn’t make a lot of sense. Dragons, giants, fairy-tale princesses and the like don’t really marry with transforming futuristic robots, especially when there’s no real evaluation of what’s going on, making Nightmare Planet feel close to Bornstein’s earlier Child’s Play in terms of relevance to the core concepts of the show. In that, a story which dealt with children and bullying, and this, a story about how to overcome nightmares, we can see a writer sending positive messages to children. In some regards, this is what cartoons should be about, but whereas morals were the mainstay of cartoons for younger viewers such as Care Bears, or My Little Pony, it feels as though Bornstein didn’t learn from the guidance she was given tailoring The Search for Alpha Trion to the style of the series, and like Child’s Play pitched this story at too young an audience.

[Pinwig]

3.15 – Ghost in the Machine

Having disappointed with The Killing Jar, Michael Charles Hill returns to form with his next third-season script, Ghost in the Machine. The story is a loose continuation of Starscream’s narrative from Megeen McLaughlin’s Starscream’s Ghost, much in the same way that Hill’s second season story The Gambler used the end of Beth Bornstein’s Child’s Play as its start point. Little continues over from the previous story beyond Starscream’s ambition for revenge, and the visual reminder at the start that he is able to possess other Transformer bodies is enough to reintroduce his ghostly form. The episode moves along at a frantic pace, packing in cameo appearances from a large number of predominately second season characters spread across four major locations, giving it the feel of a full-on movie sequel packed into just twenty minutes. Unsurprisingly, it’s the first episode for a while that doesn’t have space for a ‘Files of Teletraan-II’ end-cap and makes use of every carefully written line to progress the story. There is a huge amount of dialogue too; whereas the normal length of a Transformers recording script is around 220-250 lines, Ghost in the Machine extends to 302, not only making it the longest script of the third season but also the densest to follow when watching. Hill has commented in interviews that his scripts were often overlong and needed editing before use, but in this case it seems the compact nature of the story meant less could be removed while keeping it intact.

It’s also Hill’s second and last joint effort with short-lived writing partner Joey Kurihara Piedra. Hill has explained that their union was only ever intended to be temporary, and that there was nothing untoward about Piedra’s absence from his next episode, The Burden Hardest to Bear: “[It was] nothing acrimonious. My agreement with Joey was for just three scripts. I thought that would be enough to help establish himself as a solo writer if he was so inclined. Turned out... he wasn't.” This comment also explains why Piedra’s IMDB entry stops short at just his two Transformers episodes, but it does leave the question of whether Burden was intended to be the third script of the agreement, or if Piedra contributed uncredited to any of Hill’s stories for other series.

Far from being just a vehicle to promote Starscream’s still available toy, the episode also brings the so far underused Scourge to the fore, finally differentiating him from the Sweeps he commands. Hill manages to juggle both ‘star’ characters far better than McLaughlin did with Octane, creating a balanced double act that does as much to showcase Scourge’s position as Galvatron’s fearful underling as it does Starscream’s ambition. Previously, his motivation was simple revenge on Galvatron for ‘killing’ him in the film, but this time more considered use of film lore brings Unicron back as a mechanism by which Starscream can gain a new body to assist his revenge plan. A factor helping to ensure both Starscream and Scourge gain top billing is that in this story both can inhabit the same body at the same time, leading to a power struggle and some schizophrenic conversations between the pair. This is different to before where Starscream’s host character was effectively switched off once they had been taken over. Because of that there is much less of a demonic possession/vengeful ghost feel to this story, with Starscream to all intents acting as his normal self throughout.

Scourge benefits by gaining much more definition than he has had before. While Galvatron’s paranoia causes him to think that Scourge is attacking him in the opening scene, Cyclonus is initially prepared to back his friend up - “Wait, mighty Galvatron! He is not a traitor, he is only malfunctioning” – before conceding that something is more seriously wrong when he himself is shot at. Later, Scourge’s instinct is to return to Chaar once he is free, but when Starscream reminds him if he does he’ll be treated as a traitor, Scourge’s response, “You're right, I've got nowhere to go! Because of you, Galvatron thinks I tried to kill him!” shows him as being dependent on others rather than an individual. Far from wanting to prove himself, he instead decides to remain in hiding and is willing to tag along with Starscream simply because he is out of other options. He stays indecisive for much of the episode until finally concluding that Starscream’s intention to unite Unicron’s head with Cybertron is a step too far – but even then, he runs to tell both the Autobots and Decepticons instead of taking immediate action to stop Starscream himself. It’s a pity that once Unicron is conscious again, more isn’t made of the fact that Scourge was created by him. Their connection is hinted at by Unicron saying “What I have given you I can also take away”, but given Scourge eventually turns on him without consequence, Unicron obviously doesn’t have the hold over him that he did Galvatron in the film.

In bringing other characters into the story, Hill shows that he is well versed in the post-movie universe. The Autobots featured remain consistent with their Five Faces roles and personas, such as Blaster commanding the Earth based Autobots. Interestingly, being written by a second season writer, Blaster also returns to his non-rhyming speech pattern. The transition from Autobot City to Metroplex also continues in this story, with the older, bigger Autobot City nowhere to be seen when Metroplex is shown in his base mode. Blaster is also supported by some of the second season Minibots who were stationed in the Ark in Five Faces, notably Bumblebee who gets his biggest role since then here – an encore that sees him deliberately teamed with Spike for a final time (another sure sign of an episode being written by an old hand). There’s also a nice contrast when Kup in his role as security chief arrives from Cybertron to carry out an inspection and uncovers Blaster’s relaxed attitude to leadership when he accidentally switches on some blaring music. It’s like the older characters are secretly having fun while the newer, more important movie stars are busy being officious and saving the galaxy.

The moment that follows that is one of the more confusing in the story, and appears to have become ambiguous through editing. The explosion that knocks out Metroplex’s security systems could be caused by three things: the loud music overloading something, Starscream trying to possess Kup or a pure coincidence. About this, Hill said, “As I recall... there was an explosion in Metroplex right at the point when Starscream is about to enter Kup's body and they are both thrown off balance”. It would work better if Starscream possessed Kup, forced him to create the explosion and was then knocked out of his body as a result.

The bigger cast (thirty-two Transformers feature in this episode, far more than the recent predominantly small cast stories) could be a deliberate choice on Hill’s part, having included just five in The Killing Jar, but the large number, the Earth setting for this segment and the use of the older characters gives the first act a comfortably familiar feel for long-term viewers. When Spike mentions teaming up with Bumblebee is “just like old times”, the sentiment goes far beyond just the two of them. More than any of the recent tales, this one fits perfectly with the way Dille left everything at the end of Five Faces while maintaining the feel of the previous season.

Unicron finally returns as a tangible character in this story, his survival having been hinted at by the low rumble when Cyclonus accessed his memory in Five Faces - Part One. Rejected by Dille as an antagonist for his series in favour of the Quintessons, this episode is the planet-eater’s one shot at returning to the fray because after this point, despite the twinkle in his eye at the end, he again fades into obscurity and returns only as a plot device in Call of the Primitives and Grimlock’s New Brain. His motive in this story of using Cybertron to form a new body is a logical one, and adds to the feel of this episode being a compacted movie sequel. It foreshadows future ideas of Cybertron itself being a transforming planet, first suggested in the Marvel UK story Legacy of Unicron (#146-151, Jan 1988), and would have made a great extended tale to conclude the third season, bookending it in the same way Five Faces opened it. The episode title, Ghost in the Machine perhaps then applies as much to Unicron as it does Starscream and with more space to breathe would have allowed for Starscream’s labours to play out over a longer period with a more dramatic build up to Unicron’s potential resurrection. Indeed, the Unicron trilogy series of cartoons would do exactly this twenty years later.

The three ‘labours’ are what the episode is built around; they form the core of the original synopsis and Hill mentions them above all else when talking about the story: “the fable-like concept was simply born out of old fairy tale motifs where three tasks were required of the hero (or in our case; the anti-hero) before he/she can achieve their goal. Thus... three separate goals gave us fodder for three acts”. The idea comes from the Greek myth of Heracles (Hercules) having to complete twelve labours to atone for killing his wife and daughter after being driven mad by Hera. In this case Starscream has to first steal Metroplex’s eyes, then Trypticon’s transformation cog and finally unite Unicron’s head with Cybertron – each segment of which could have formed an episode in its own right. Instead, the story unfolds very quickly and the first labour occupies the first half of the episode, rather than the first act, with the third eventually forming part of the climax in the last few minutes. This means the finale unfolds too quickly to be easily understandable at times, such as when the Battlechargers, Thrust and Dirge suddenly appear in Trypticon and smash something to stop Starscream moving Unicron’s head. Obvious plot shortcuts also appear, such as Galvatron’s army suddenly being made weaponless, and thus impotent in the battle, because they were all handily neutralised by Trypticon. The real shame is that the pace means the spectacle of the Autobots trying to stop Starscream from under the surface of Cybertron while the Decepticons do the same from inside Trypticon, something on the scale of the film’s finale, happens so fast it’s over before the viewer can process what’s happening.

That said, Hill manages to fit in the huge cast with aplomb. Whereas extended casts in some episodes, such as the use of the Autobots in Starscream’s Ghost, feel forced and unnecessary, here Hill instead includes the Autobot command team by using them to run a helpful commentary from afar. The dialogue may be clunky and obvious, such as, “The Head of Unicron has drawn the Decepticons into our midst. Trypticon has been sighted leading a squad of them toward Cybertron!” but it serves to bind the story and cover sequences that otherwise wouldn’t have fit the running time. Elsewhere, characters appear in role doing their jobs for the duration they’re necessary to the plot, such as the Autobots on Earth, making the episode feel embedded in the ongoing continuity. Other characters, such as Astrotrain, Dirge and Thrust get minor roles to remind the viewer they’re still in the game, and there’s even space to give a proper introduction to Runamuck (after his cameo in Chaos) and a full debut for Runabout – even if it isn’t explained why previously unseen characters are traipsing about on Chaar as if they’ve always been there.

All of this makes Ghost in the Machine a thoroughly enjoyable episode to watch. It ticks all the necessary boxes and moves at such a pace that any plot holes (such as why Metroplex’s eyes and Trypticon’s cog would be big enough to fit Unicron) are scuffed over so fast they’re hardly noticeable. It also provides an epilogue for Starscream’s character, which is notable as all of the original ‘big four’ characters (Optimus, Megatron, Bumblebee and Starscream) gain unique exits from the cartoon – something afforded only to those four big names. The only question it leaves is of what actually happens to Starscream. Cyclonus notes he is still alive with the line, “Since when do ghosts tumble out of control through space?” which is supported by Hill himself who said, “His wounds were not fatal... if he was ever wounded at all. I think, in the last shot of him, we see that he is still tumbling off into space. For my money... he lived to fight another day”. Hill’s conclusion is neat in that it puts Starscream out of the way, but in a position from which he could be brought back if another writer had the desire to. However, that eventually didn’t happen until eleven years later when the Beast Wars episode Possession (1997) brought Starscream’s once again bodiless spark to prehistoric Earth to continue his story.

[Pinwig]

Still getting caught up with myself after a very busy end of term.

edit: proofread that in a rush last night. This version is a bit smoother.

3.16 – Webworld

Webworld brings another two new names to the writing team for the third season. As with Gerry Conway (see Forever is a Long Time Coming), Len Wein was a prior colleague of newly installed Sunbow script editor Marv Wolfman, but the connection between the two went back all the way to their teenage years. Having contributed to various comic fanzines in the 1960s, the pair started a writing career together at DC Comics in 1968 and Wolfman regards Wein as his “oldest and dearest” childhood friend. By the mid-eighties, Wein had written for hundreds of different titles for both Marvel and DC, among the most noteworthy issues being Giant Size X-Men #1 (1975), which relaunched the famous mutant team with now iconic characters such as Nightcrawler, Storm, Colossus and Wolverine – all created by Wein. His comics history is littered with connections to people who eventually worked for Sunbow: in 1976 he co-wrote Iron Man with Transformers Production Supervisor Roger Slifer; took over writing The Incredible Hulk, The Amazing Spider-Man and Fantastic Four from Conway at various points in the 70s; and was himself succeeded on Spider-Man and FF by Wolfman. As with Conway, Wein used Transformers as a first step in television writing and today is associated with over seventy series (either as writer or character creator) and has also contributed scripts to Beast Wars, Beast Machines and the 2015 incarnation of Robots in Disguise.

Diane Duane meanwhile is these days a well-established fantasy and science-fiction writer, noted particularly for her Star Trek novels, but at the time of the Transformers was still in the early part of her career. She had written the first two Young Wizards children’s novels (So You Want to be a Wizard, 1983 and Deep Wizardry, 1985) – a series which is now on its eleventh volume – and had worked on several Hanna-Barbera cartoons including Scooby-Doo and The Biskitts. Like Surprise Party writer Barbara Petty, she also wrote for My Little Pony at the time she was writing for Transformers, and additionally worked on The Glo Friends (a lesser known Hasbro/Sunbow property that also aired in 1986). While she and Wein share no other writing credits, their Twitter activity shows they remain friends, and it’s no surprise that being the more experienced television writer at the time, Duane took the upper hand in writing Webworld. Commenting on the episode and her partnership with Wein on her blog in 2014 she said, “I got him into writing that episode. It was, if I remember correctly, his very first animation, and I was delighted to give him a leg up.”

The result is a technobabble-filled attempt to instil some proper science fiction into the Transformers, with a satirical look at psychology on the side. Its highbrow nature is indicated by the synopsis alone, which is twice the size of others around it just to get the basic plot across. While some may equate to, ‘Wheelie and Daniel try to throw a surprise party for Ultra Magnus!’, Webworld’s finds itself having to explain “hospice worlds”, “plasma-altered circuitry” and “information-eating creatures” among other things. While on the surface this looks like something more in-depth than the series is used to, it’s mostly superficial when examined in any detail, but the basic premise of exploring Galvatron’s plasma-affected psyche is a strong, in-continuity idea.

The wordy nature of the synopsis is also reflected by the script, which contains large quantities of spurious jargon on a level that at least makes the writing sound more intelligent than the “dinosaur transform static” type science viewers were used to. Instead, gems such as “embrittlement of the metaprocessing circuitry” leading to “the brink of perceptual crash” recognised through a “malignant plasmoneural tic” make everything seem very proper, even if there’s little real underlying scientific theory.

The dialogue script for the episode indicates that a fair amount of editing took place in the early scenes to get all this in. As with other episodes at this point, lines may either have been cut to fit the ‘Files of Teletraan-II’ piece on the end, or as a cost cutting exercise to reduce the amount of animation needed (necessitating the creation of the Teletraan addendums to fill the running time). Among the many instances of jumps in the line numbering, one stands out right at the start of the episode where Cyclonus says, “With the Isidrite to repair our weaponry, we'll do just that”, which seems awkwardly to refer to itself, but probably instead refers to something said in three now missing lines before it. It would be nice to think the Decepticon mission to find the Isidrite is a deliberate continuity link to the previous episode, Ghost in the Machine, in which Galvatron’s forces were disabled by the Starscream possessed Trypticon, and that the missing lines referred to that – perhaps removed to make the episode more self-contained. Regardless, the Decepticons needing to repair their weaponry makes no sense as seconds later they attack the Autobots with perfectly functional guns.

Toei depict Galvatron’s mania here by flashing his temples, as opposed to the sparkles round his forehead of the AKOM animated episodes. When talking about what he will do when back to full power, his lines increase in intensity of delivery – demonstrating his insanity – but it’s notable that he now views Earth as important an enemy as the Autobots: “And then crush the Autobots to scrap. (OBSESSED) – crush the Earth and its puny humanity – crush anyone! anything! – that dares to oppose us!” This continues the shift in his perspective introduced in Thief in the Night, away from the destruction of Cybertron and the Autobots in the early season three episodes and back towards Megatron’s Earth based goals.

This scene also gives Ratbat his television debut, the last figure in the 1986 toy range to appear on screen. His ability to sniff out fuel, mentioned in his biography, is used here to have him locate the Isidrite instead, and seems an awkward fit for his vampiric personality – perhaps suggesting that like many other new characters he was swapped into the script late on, replacing Laserbeak. This would also explain Laserbeak’s somewhat random appearance later in the episode when he is uncharacteristically concerned enough by Galvatron’s madness to form part of the deputation that confronts Cyclonus about him. That short scene is Laserbeak’s last appearance, and would make slightly more sense if it had been him being bossed around in the opening scene.

Being an animal robot, Ratbat doesn’t speak, and like the other beast cassettes uses instinct above anything else. This means that more than any of the other cassettes, this Ratbat is very different to his comic counterpart – the Cybertronian fuel auditor who would make his first American appearance in issue #27, two months after Webworld aired.

Ratbat’s presence also means the reappearance of Soundwave, whose turn it is for a clutch of toy promoting appearances (four in the next six episodes). Of those, only Carnage in C-Minor gives him any part in the plot. The rest, like here, use him purely as a mechanism by which the new cassettes can appear, and even his one line in this story (his first since the one he had in Five Faces – Part Two), is missing its voice modulation. However, it’s nice to see one of the few remaining 1984 characters back on the screen; at this point with Optimus and Starscream dispatched, Soundwave, his cassettes, Bumblebee and Jazz (fleetingly) are all that is left of the enormous cast from the original pilot mini-series. Soundwave’s appearance here also provides an opportunity to compare him to Cyclonus – both being softly-spoken, calm, loyal and extremely powerful right-hand men to their respective leaders, but also more rational and intelligent than those they serve, making them better tactical planners. So many similarities make each seem less like a coincidence.

The Isidrite Macguffin that kick-starts the plot shouldn’t really be treated as anything more than it is, but the fact that Galvatron is specifically searching for it, and Ultra Magnus claims to need it “as much as they do”, makes it sound such an essential weapon maintenance commodity it’s surprising it hasn’t been mentioned before. Its purpose is to set up a fight between the Autobots and Decepticons, which in the broadcast version downplays the original synopsis’ intention to have Galvatron actually turn on his own troops, rather than simply get frustrated by them:

“In the midst of a battle with the Autobots, Galvatron loses his temper and turns his fury against his own troops. The Autobots score a decisive victory, and dissension brews among the Decepticons as to whether Galvatron is really fit to lead them.”

The deputation led by Motormaster would be more powerful if it were the older characters that had been damaged by Galvatron, instead of the inconsequential Sweeps. There have been rumblings among the disenchanted second season Decepticons right back to Five Faces, particularly about being used as cannon fodder (something Cyclonus also mentioned as being their only value in Five Faces – Part Two). This idea was previously used in the first and second season to grow dissent among the Dinobots because of their maltreatment by the Autobots, and a full-on rebellion against Galvatron would have made an excellent Decepticon focussed story, particularly to look at how Cyclonus would react.

The fact that Cyclonus believes the Quintessons are genuinely trying to help with their suggestion of taking Galvatron to Torkulon shows the relationship between the two parties from Five Faces still exists, and that the Quintessons are still in the shadows trying to find ways to chip away at the Transformers, knowing that Torkulon could rid them of Galvatron. If Galvatron’s flashing temples weren’t enough, the Torkuli assessing him also guesses his condition is the result of “some sort of plasma accident”, making the connection to the plasma baths of Thrull explicit. Whether the Torkuli drain the minds of all their patients to feed their planet (suggesting they’re inherently evil), or if they only seek to do this to Galvatron when they realise the threat he poses (suggesting it’s more of a protective measure taken against dangerous patients), is unclear – but the former is suggested by the original synopsis:

“Cyclonus takes Galvatron to a “hospice world” recommended by the Quintessons, where Galvatron's plasma altered circuitry can be treated and his stability restored. But the cure may be worse than the disease. The creatures of Webworld eat information, i.e. the contents of Galvatron’s electronic intelligence – and if the treatment works, Galvatron will undergo his most profound transformation of all – from berserker to vegetable.”

The finished script also suggests that patients needing permanent care pay in “consciousness units” rather than currency, suggesting a slow decline into insanity as they lose their independent thought while trapped in the webbed prisons.

In contrast to this dark approach, several popular real-world therapies are attempted on Galvatron before he is subjected to the Alya, all with deliberately humorous undertones that depict him as a helpless case:

Therapist: Yes, tell me about the Autobots.
Galvatron: I hate the Autobots! I hate Cyclonus! And I’m not fond of you either!

After a word association game that shows him to be single-mindedly set on destruction, and then failing to talk about his problems with a therapist, the Torkuli try “psycho-motor reintegration”, or art therapy on Galvatron, which results in him making a gun, and then “exo-drama”, or role-play, in which he tries to kill everybody. Whether this is the writers poking fun at psychotherapy in general, or proving the point that Galvatron is beyond help, it begins to put a different spin on the psychobabble that initially makes the episode seem straight-laced. There are also tongue-in-cheek references to other popular therapeutic theories, such as the three-headed “I have no head” creature being a reference to Douglas Harding’s respected book on mindfulness, On Having No Head (1961).

The Torkuli’s final suggestion is effectively a lobotomy, but the Alya eating away Galvatron’s “damaged intelligence” has another real-world analogue in the way maggots can be used in flesh wounds to eat away dead tissue. In this case though, the episode needs to build to some kind of climax and so the complication that Galvatron’s sentience may be completely consumed by this process is used to provide an element of peril.

Ultimately this leads to a weak and somewhat confused end to the episode. Galvatron of course triumphs and survives: having ‘connected’ with Torkulon he learns the location of its central core, which he then destroys to take revenge for the way he has been treated. The problem with this is that the Torkuli effectively become the bad guys through using him to feed their planet, which means the real antagonists, the Quintessons, are completely forgotten. This provides a climax of no real interest – the audience doesn’t care enough about the short-lived Torkuli to be concerned by them being undone, and the fact that Galvatron simply leaves isn’t any kind of ending. When Cyclonus prevents Galvatron from inflicting more damage on the planet, his line, “Haven't we more pressing concerns, mighty one – the Autobots for instance?” suggests a final showdown with Ultra Magnus over the completely forgotten Isidrite, but instead the episode just ends with all of the sub-plots unresolved.

The final sequence does suggest that Galvatron has at least partially been changed by the process he undergoes. The dialogue script states that after connecting with the core, the delivery of his lines should be done “not raising his voice”, and he is uncharacteristically calm when destroying the planet. His observation that the ruined world is “beauty – devastation wrought with precision and care” is chilling in the measure of its delivery, suggesting not so much a more rational Galvatron, but one who gains satisfaction and inner calm in the meticulousness of his destruction of others. That is the leader Cyclonus has been trying to find through the episode and one who could justifiably lead the Decepticons to greatness. It’s an unsettling moment hidden in the banality of the episode’s end.

Like Starscream’s Ghost and Madman’s Paradise, Webworld is another example of where replacing the usual Autobot/Decepticon conflict with a one-shot alternative doesn’t really work. Mara-Al-Utha was detached enough from the rest of the Quintessons that his downfall felt inconsequential, and here the Torkuli fail to use Galvatron to feed their planet to an equally ambivalent audience. With the Earth based stories in the second season, the viewer had a vested interest in the outcome, but in the third season’s space based adventures, the audience is sometimes left adrift without an identification figure and thus a reason to be involved. The closest this episode gets is Galvatron’s doting servant Cyclonus, who clearly laments the decline of his leader and through blind loyalty panics at the prospect of the Decepticons without him (“No! without Galvatron to lead us the Decepticons are finished!”). He doesn’t recognise that in trying to put Galvatron back on his throne, he shows far better leadership qualities than his superior, and his angst over risking Galvatron’s wrath by going behind his back to try and restore him is worthy of further exploration. Ironically, this makes Cyclonus more interesting than the episode’s intended focal character, and the tantalising prospect of examining Galvatron’s psyche is reduced to simple comedy vignettes. The chance to explore his consciousness (“the meta-processor contains his mind”) is ignored, as is the potential of the Torkuli knowing Galavtron has “already been changed”, which could have given rise to interesting ideas such as using the Alya to eat away Galvatron’s consciousness to temporarily restore Megatron. Because of ignored opportunities like that, Webworld not only misses the mark in terms of its unresolved plots, but also in that it doesn’t manage to fulfil the brief it starts out with.

[Pinwig]

3.17 – Carnage in C-Minor

During 1986, Buzz Dixon occupied a script-editing role on GI Joe similar to that of Flint Dille on Transformers. Both men had written five-part stories to start off the new seasons (Transformers’ third and GI Joe’s second) and were integral members of Sunbow’s staff. Both have talked in interviews about how at times, turning ideas into finished cartoons was an ‘all hands to the pumps’ affair spread across the different offices, leading to a crossover of writing talent between the series. In fact, Dille would write more second season GI Joe stories than he would Transformers. He devised the story for the Joe episode Grey Hairs and Growing Pains, which was broadcast on the same day as Carnage in C-Minor – both being the seventeenth stories into production for their respective series and perhaps suggesting a deliberate swap on his and Dixon’s part for a change of scene.

Dixon had previously had great success with his second season story The God Gambit, the Astrotrain focussed episode which struck a chord with fans for its unusual use of religion. Carnage in C-Minor is equally noted, but for opposite reasons. TFWiki observes that it’s regarded by many as the worst episode in the entire series, but unlike usual co-contender, B.O.T., the reasons are more down to the basic concept and atrocious animation than poor script-writing.

There are many similarities between Carnage and The God Gambit in the way they are structured. In both cases, Transformers become involved in a dispute on an alien world. In the case of the earlier episode, Talaria’s rebellion against the high priest Jero becomes the backdrop for Astrotrain’s bid for godhood, and in Carnage another defiant teenage girl, Allegra, again rebels against dictatorial male authority and becomes the plot device that Galvatron needs to complete his harmonic weapon. In picking character names with musical themes, Dixon mixes musical tempos with voice types: Allegra, from Allegro, being a tempo noted as fast, quick and bright, and Basso Profundo, from Basso Profondo, being the bass vocal type with lowest range. Zebop Skandana’s odd name comes from the band Santana, and it’s driving force Carlos Santana, whose eleventh album is called Zebop! (1981).

The worlds from both stories, Titan and Eurythma, also adopt a similar approach to their appearance. Where The God Gambit fed off Mayan influences painted with vivid alien colours to suit the story’s theme of worship and sacrifice, Carnage does the same but with more Renaissance styled fashions as a way of symbolising classical and choral music.

Musically speaking, this doesn’t quite match the title of the episode. Where Basso Profundo’s ornate cloak and jewelled tunic suggest fashions of the 15th-16th Century, akin to popular images of someone like Henry VIII, the c-minor scale of the episode’s title didn’t gain popular use until the late Baroque and early Classical periods (17th-18th Century). These days the scale is often associated musically with the theme of heroic struggle, largely because of Beethoven’s fondness for using it in symphonies to suggest turbulent or stormy moods – most recognisably the famous ‘da-da-da daaaaah’ of his Fifth Symphony (first performed 1808).

Therefore, whether by accident or design, Dixon’s choice of c-minor for the episode title not only matches the struggle of the heroic Autobots against the evil Decepticons, but also Allegra’s ‘disharmony’ with Basso. Although it isn’t clear, it appears the reason why she leaves the city at the beginning of the episode is because of Basso’s use of musical harmony as a weapon, even though he uses it to defend Eurythma from the approaching comet. In narrative terms, she needs to be introduced and got out of the way so the Autobots and Decepticons can race to find her, but in constructing that part of the plot the backstory is wedged in without proper explanation. In addition, why she, Basso and the bizarrely named Zebop Skandana share the power of the destructive harmony isn’t explained either, but then that kind of missing detail is a minor concern in an episode full of problems.

There is clearly a musical strain missing when Allegra is first shown in her retreat, meaning Galvatron appears to be impressed by her waving her arms around instead of actually playing the organ she is in front of, but this scene also highlights a deeper inconsistency in the script. It seems the intention was to have Blaster and Soundwave translate the musical voices of the Eurythmans so other characters could understand them, but this is never made explicitly clear and is forgotten enough times to be confusing. It’s almost as if the script editor hadn’t realised Dixon’s intent, and in editing scenes, inadvertently allowed Ultra Magnus and Galvatron to reply to the Eurythmans directly.

This means Carnage in C-Minor is less of a spotlight episode for Soundwave and Blaster’s sonic skills than it seems was intended. Blaster’s capabilities aren’t used beyond the on/off translations, and while Soundwave can record and combine the three parts of the harmony, he basically becomes a weapon for Galvatron. Both Soundwave and Blaster note several times that the chords induce a feeling of ecstasy in them, in Soundwave’s case breaking his usually stoic and distant persona with uncharacteristic lines such as “That was heaven! The purest, most vibrant, most perfect harmony I’ve ever heard!” This doesn’t go anywhere though, and is even downplayed at points as there are several lines missing in the dialogue script after Soundwave receives the first harmony from Allegra, just before Galvatron inexplicably says “Never mind that!”. As such, the impact the cassette deck Transformers could have on the story is minimised, and the possibilities of a civilisation based on music are reduced simply to the harmonic weapon. Sadly, Blaster’s observation that “it's their art, their commerce, their philosophy” isn’t explored, and later in the episode the use of harmonics to resurrect Zebop simply becomes an awkward plot mechanic. That moment should be more interesting because it’s the only instance in the series of a significant character being ‘killed’ as collateral damage around the feet of giant fighting robots, but the weak resolution dissolves any sense of drama. Similarly, the moment Galvatron decides he will deliberately make Allegra suffer is made more sinister by his realisation that she is unconscious and therefore won’t feel the pain he wants to inflict on her, but even that’s just a way to prevent him from actually carrying out his intentions.

If anything, this is as much Broadside’s moment in the spotlight as it is Soundwave. Sat in the unenviable position of being one of the last Transformers released prior to the movie toys, he almost fell between two stools in being too late to feature in the combiner-heavy end of season two, but also being redundant in the third season narrative because he isn’t a featured film character. Where other toys in this position such as Sandstorm and Octane were awkwardly slotted into earlier stories to promote them, Broadside wasn’t afforded that luxury, and having initially been portrayed as a Decepticon (The Killing Jar) he gains a few further appearances as backup to the main cast – here deliberately showing his aircraft carrier and plane modes. His personality also seems oddly mismatched with any documentation about him. Lines such as, “Do you realise what that did to my paint job?” and “Look at the dents on me! I’ll be in the body shop for a week!” make him sound more like an Autobot car akin to Sunstreaker than the seasick rust bucket of his Budianski biography. He is also drawn to enormous proportions, which is hard to read anything into in an episode where scale is inconsistent from shot to shot, let alone with other episodes, but because he doesn’t appear on any of the Sunbow scale charts, AKOM’s animators may have assumed that being an aircraft carrier he would be one of the larger robots (although Toei also drew him to at least match Skyfire in size). It’s also notable that when drawn by AKOM his head has the more humanised appearance of his Marvel Comics character model, and not the more toy accurate one Toei used for The Burden Hardest to Bear. All of these inconsistencies indicate that Broadside was a late addition to the third season roster, and not being a focal character was largely uncared for by Sunbow.

In contrast, other supporting characters in this episode get much sharper definition in far fewer words. Hotspot has only three lines, but the first, “Outnumbered two to one, just the kind of challenge I like” captures his “likes to be where the action is” biography perfectly. The supporting cast for the story is quite large, with three complete combiners included in the fight scenes. This almost goes unnoticed amid the madness of the episode, and suggests that Dixon had some spectacular intentions at the script stage. On screen it doesn’t translate well, which is purely down to three major faults with the animation: the first is the number of straightforward errors, such as Hotspot standing next to Defensor or the Autobots showing flight ability; the second is the number of shortcuts taken to simplify things, such as Devastator being shot down by one hit from Perceptor; and the third is the extraordinary number of scale problems. There are so many sizing issues in the episode it’s almost as if it’s deliberate, in the way characters are sometimes drawn larger when expressing extreme emotions in manga/anime.

The size problems are too numerous to mention, but oddly in many cases match the ratios of the toys rather than the Sunbow scale chart. For example, Ultra Magnus smashing Hook and Scrapper together is sized about right if the toys were used as reference, as is the moment when Galvatron picks up Soundwave to ask him why he only captured one third of the harmony. The fact this doesn’t stay consistent from shot to shot suggests this isn’t the reason for this conundrum, but it does offer some fascinating glimpses into what the cartoon might have looked like if the toy sizes had been used as the scale reference.

It’s easy to look at the major failings Carnage in C-Minor has and point at it as a terrible example of the Transformers cartoon, but it’s equally important to remember it does have some strengths. The underlying concept is not a bad one, and Buzz Dixon writes dialogue least as well as anyone else on the series at this point. There is the semblance of a Decepticon plot, and even if Galvatron has returned to the idea of flying planetoids into things for dramatic effect (see Surprise Party), he has at least identified that taking out Metroplex is a sensible step before tackling Cybertron. The character voices are annoying, but the destructive power of natural resonance provides a scientifically sound foundation for the weapon, usefully tying it to Soundwave to promote his toy. As a vehicle for him though, it’s hard not to look back at the powerfully sinister figure of David Wise’s Autobop, and wonder what could have been. The animation that lets the episode down is at least a curiosity – so far distant from even AKOM’s poor standard, it’s questionable whether this was one of the few episodes Production Supervisor Paul Davids remembers being made by neither AKOM nor Toei. Carnage in C-Minor gets some things right, but the few problems it has are so big, subjectively it’s hard to see past them.

[Pinwig]

Sunbow Sundays will return after TFN!

[Pinwig]

Here we go then. Hopefully an unbroken run through to the end of the series over the next sixteen weeks. Have to see how busy things get in the Autumn.


3.18 – The Quintesson Journal

Of the writers new to the Transformers in the third season, Richard Merwin was unusual in that he was already experienced in cartoon writing when he came to the series. He had been a staff writer for Ruby/Spears for the three years prior to writing The Quintesson Journal, dating back to the time both Flint Dille and Steve Gerber had worked there. He started initially as a story ‘deviser’ rather than an actual writer – outlining ideas for series such as Rubik, The Amazing Cube and The New Scooby and Scrappy Doo Show (both 1983), before taking a more involved role adapting the pioneering laserdisc game Dragon’s Lair (1984), where he wrote six of the show’s thirteen episodes.

For Sunbow, he worked on GI Joe, Jem and The Inhumanoids as well as writing for Transformers, and as seems common for freelancers at this point, wrote for several series at the same time. While working on The Quintesson Journal he also adapted Flint Dille and David Marconi’s outline for the GI Joe story Grey Hairs and Growing Pains, and wrote GI Joe and the Golden Fleece – all three episodes airing within a few weeks of each other in October/November 1986.

Post Sunbow, Merwin’s substantial career boasts work on twenty-eight separate animated series up to 2002. While it might seem odd he didn’t progress to creatively controlling a series in the way other popular writers such as Flint Dille and David Wise did, he maintained a second career in technical writing throughout, which eventually led him to a position as the principle technical writer for global energy giant Schneider Electrical.

The Quintesson Journal is therefore an example of an experienced children’s writer bringing their style and tone to a subject unfamiliar to them, and follows the pattern of similarly structured stories where the writer’s main idea is underpinned by a sub plot (possibly suggested by an editor) to connect it to the ongoing continuity, such as it is. As with other examples, like Surprise Party and Madman’s Paradise, the rumblings of the Autobot peace process again forms this inter-episode narrative. It’s also missing from the original synopsis, furthering the idea it was added later:

“The Quintesson journal turns up again, this time on a heavily jungled planet with an almost impenetrable methane atmosphere. The Autobots and Decepticons engage in a race against time, the alien elements, and each other to retrieve it – and put the valuable information it contains to use.”

As read, the synopsis suggests the bulk of the story should focus on the Autobots and Decepticons struggling to find the titular journal on the “heavily jungled planet”, but other quest based stories such as The Nightmare Planet and Surprise Party have shown that a single ‘find the MacGuffin’ plot isn’t enough to carry an episode by itself. The idea is used to open the episode, but even when reduced to just taking up the first act feels protracted. Blaster’s team repetitively running through jungle terrain while being attacked by alien tentacles comes across as nothing more than padding, which is made even more obvious when Sky Lynx, who one minute can’t land because of the thick undergrowth, does so as soon as the danger is passed.

The third instance of a peace conference being used as a background plot suggests the script editors were either lazy or intending it to form a loose backbone for the series. There’s an irony in how ‘talking about their problems’ is not something the Autobots ever try with the Decepticons, yet they seem hell bent on presiding over the rest of the galaxy with this approach. In this case though (and possibly due to Merwin’s extensive cartoon experience), the peace plot forms a more integral part of the overall story, making it far more interesting than the previous episodes that included the same idea.

The fact the journal is also a plot device carried over from another episode adds further cohesion to the story. The synopsis makes clear that this is the journal that was discovered in The Big Broadcast of 2006 (which mistakenly aired the day after The Quintesson Journal in November 1986) and is an example of where a story element transferring between episodes works smoothly enough to suggest an ongoing narrative without being bound by it. Examples such as the mess surrounding Octane and Sandstorm’s insertion into Starscream’s Ghost and Thief in the Night demonstrate that a sticking plaster approach to script-editing linked narratives didn’t work, and that a much better way to carry ideas over is to leave them open enough to be picked up and reused without reliance on what has gone before. Michael Charles Hill took this approach when continuing Starscream’s Ghost with Ghost in the Machine, which kept to the simple premise that Starscream wants revenge on Galvatron. In this case, all that is needed to link this episode to The Big Broadcast is the knowledge that the journal contains Quintesson secrets which they want back.

It becomes more obvious at this point that the early episodes were complete enough for newer writers to see, or at least read the scripts for. Merwin’s placement of Outback with Blaster as a sidekick echoes Five Faces – Part One, and is notable because of the minibot’s absence from every other story, as if Merwin was going specifically by Five Faces for his character relationships and references. Similarly, the script makes a point of referring to the battle between Sky Lynx and the Predacons from Five Faces – Part Five, despite the fact they had already encountered each other a second time in Chaos:

RAZORCLAW: Predacons unite!
PREDAKING: Revenge on the Autobot Skylynx
SKYLYNX: One thorough drubbing wasn't enough, Predaking?
PREDAKING: This time, you die!

In other places, continuity slips are picked up – for example in the dialogue script when Outback activates the journal and the Quintesson appears, Ramhorn says “Quintesson!”, which is corrected in the broadcast version to indecipherable growls, again illustrating that him speaking in Forever is a Long Time Coming was a mistake. One final example of Merwin using Five Faces as a reference is the reappearance of warp gates, expanding on their origin by showing they are of Quintesson rather than Transformer design. Additionally, they appear to materialise at will as the Quintesson navigator summons one to escape the Decepticons in the third act.

The journal itself is interesting because of what it contains. Hitting the tree as it lands on the unnamed planet in the ‘Angarrix sector’ activates what Perceptor notes is a “modified Waverly signal on the old Quintesson frequency”. Given this wasn’t a feature it had in The Big Broadcast of 2006, we can assume this signal was faulty and was what led to the Quintessons losing the journal in the first place. As such, the Autobots and Decepticons are alerted to its existence for the first time, and piecemeal through the episode its secrets begin to be revealed.

Being part of a “complete record of our commercial enterprises, technical plans and special projects”, the journal reveals that the Quintessons aren’t the straightforward industrialists Five Faces paints them as being. Far from being legitimate businessmen trying to resolve a problem with unruly sentient products, the Quintessons are revealed to be manufacturers of products designed to make civilisations dependant on them so they can bleed their economies dry. The first example given is of how selling fuel-hungry transport ships to Tyxlara meant the planet drained its own resources to run them, leaving their economy in the hands of the Quintessons. A second more damning example is how they sold manufacturing facilities to Alaxuu deliberately designed to pollute the planet’s atmosphere so they could then sell them replacement vegetation in the form of “plant-o-bots”.

These revelations show, along with the way the Quintessons are manipulating the Xetaxxis/Lanarq war, that far from being an ancient race trying to restore themselves they are still very much in business (and also that Merwin thought making up names with x’s in them made them sound alien). This implies their mission to reconquer Cybertron and subdue the Transformers is only one of many current operations. More intriguing is the question of how the Transformers fitted into this deceit in the past before they rebelled. Five Faces revealed that the Decepticons were initially constructed as military hardware, which is what both Xetaxxis and Lanarq are buying in this episode (albeit millions of years after the Autobot revolt, suggesting the Quintessons didn’t revisit the idea of sentient robots as products after that point). This raises the further question of whether the Transformers were intended to be more than just servants, perhaps installing themselves discreetly on worlds before staging uprisings, creating civil unrest or performing covert operations. This adds nicely to the idea of the burgeoning sentience among the Autobots, perhaps causing them to revolt not just because of the way they were mistreated by the Quintessons, but because they began to realise what they were being used for.

The episode also picks up on the more militaristic aspect of the Quintessons that featured in Gerry and Carla Conway’s Forever is a Long Time Coming. The Quintessons talk about their ship being a ‘transport’, which is very Star Wars in tone, and when Sky Lynx attacks, the conversation echoes the unusual ‘space battle’ dialogue of Forever… with lines such as “Seal the bridge! Alert the shuttles!”

The naval ranking from Forever… is also carried over. In that, the Quintesson ship had a ‘commander’ on the bridge who called the shots and used the Prosecutor character model from the film. In this story, the script calls for several other Quintesson types on top of the usual five-faced variety, namely a ‘navigator’, ‘officer’ and ‘leader’. The navigator uses the Allicon character model, which seems to suit the more junior role, but sadly the officer and leader’s lines are filled in by the other Quintessons. This is the first instance of an Allicon speaking to any degree, suggesting that AKOM may have picked a model at random to suit the sibilant drawl of the voice track rather than going for the Bailiff or Executioner types that would have been more fitting. Regardless, the navigator shows more intelligence even than the bloodthirsty Quintessons themselves, suggesting that escaping the Decepticons using a warp gate would make more sense than wasting an expensive “omega bomb”.

The payoff at the end of the episode unites the two plots nicely, with the Xetaxxans and Lanarqans forming a fragile peace based on the revelations of the journal. It’s a pity that instead of finding out what other secrets the journal contains, which might help the Autobots in their quest for peace or even reveal more about their own past, Ultra Magnus decides to ignore it completely and “lock this thing up on Cybertron” just to tidy up the plot’s major loose end. However, this doesn’t stop the story being one of the third season’s better efforts. Richard Merwin cleverly picks up on existing ideas and relationships from earlier episodes and weaves his own narrative into the ongoing continuity in a way that seems to be rare at this point in the series. He expands on the Quintessons by offering the perspective of a writer working outside Flint Dille’s original brief, and shows the confidence of an experienced cartoon writer in the quality of his script. After nonsense like Carnage in C-Minor and Webworld it’s nice to see the series return to something more in keeping with the third season’s general direction.

[The Huff]

Yay! Sunbow Sundays is back!