Sunbow Sundays

[Pinwig]

3.19 – The Ultimate Weapon

One of the more interesting aspects of looking at the third season of The Transformers is the way its diverse array of writers adapted the series format to their own style. Repeated use of the same names through the first two seasons may have made the pre-movie stories feel uniform in terms of tone, but it also reduced the number of opportunities for originality – so when episodes such as Traitor, Enter the Nightbird and The Master Builder turned up, all written by one off freelancers, they stood out as different and were often better than the routine stories turned in by the regulars. In contrast, the third season’s experimental and open approach to taking on a much higher percentage of new talent allowed for more variety, and while this could be hit and miss (for every Forever is a Long Time Coming there’s a Madman’s Paradise) it undeniably provided perspectives that a small regular writing team wouldn’t allow for.

Earlier examples of this include Gerry and Carla Conway’s space opera approach to Forever is a Long Time Coming, Steve Mitchell and Barbara Petty pitching to the younger end of the audience with Surprise Party and Len Wein and Diane Duane’s pseudo ‘Hard SF’ Webworld. There are more to come in the series yet, but of all the attempts by writers to adapt their own style to suit the series, Arthur Byron Cover’s The Ultimate Weapon is perhaps the oddest to deconstruct. Being a grand battle between good and evil on Earth, it feels like a straightforward return to the format of the second season, but underlying that there are many nuances in the writing that almost shift the episode into its own continuity – much like the Ladybird/Tell-A-Tale books of the 1980s were almost, but not quite, in sync with either the comic or cartoon.

Cover (pronounced to rhyme with ‘rover’ according to IMDB), had already seen five books published by the time he started writing for television, the last of which was the official novelisation of the 1980 Flash Gordon film. Transformers is among his first television writing credits, preceded marginally by two episodes of Marvel Productions’ Defenders of the Earth which were broadcast just before The Ultimate Weapon in the autumn of 1986 (coincidentally the show to which former Transformers story editors Dick Robbins and Bryce Malek moved at the end of season two). Subsequently, he would write for Bionic Six, an MCA cartoon created by Transformers veteran Ron Friedman, and other toy tie-in shows including Starcom: The US Space Force and The Real Ghostbusters, as well as continuing his career writing sci-fi novels.

Cover’s unique approach to the Transformers even stands out just from the episode synopsis, which suggests a character-driven, angst-ridden tale that asks a question so obvious it suddenly becomes a shock it hasn’t been answered before – what happens to a combiner when one of its limbs is missing?

“First Aid quits the Protectobots because, rather than resort to violence, he allowed Metroplex's
transformation cog to be stole. Only Ultra Magnus and a crippled Defensor stand between the advancing menace of the Decepticon City and the total destruction of the hapless Autobot City.”

It’s a battle straight out of the living room that children following the series with their own toys could re-enact, which is a purpose of the series sometimes forgotten in the third season’s drive for world building and movie character promotion. Also, as noted under the entries for the last ten episodes of season two, the one thing the rushed introduction of the combining teams missed was pushing the interchangeability of the limbs, and while this episode doesn’t go that far, it does at least look at a combiner as being the sum of its individual parts rather than being a single entity. This, coupled with the fact that the story is built around character personalities (a common trend in stronger episodes throughout the series), provides a solid foundation that excuses the recycling of the transformation cog plot from Five Faces.

Cover’s background as a science fiction novelist can be seen from the outset. Knowing the series is set twenty years into the future, he provides a near-future backdrop for the story, but moves the setting from the well-established American continent to a nameless European country. Toei’s interpretation of this provides a curiously Floridian coastline, but where the palm trees and skyscrapers stand among German timber-framed houses, and farmland is adorned with solar panels (surprisingly accurate to the reality of the twenty-first century in that regard). This is mixed with stereotypes that appear to be taken from depictions of Second World War French resistance, where beret-wearing, stripy-topped guerrillas with curly moustaches attack the local authority and are shot at by elderly gardeners in Dutch bonnets. On the face of it this seems ludicrous, but the intention is to create a typically disturbed dystopian setting that isn’t the Earth of 1986 – it’s one in which the Autobots are having to assist the Police (strangely, rather than the army) in keeping the peace. Perhaps this is why the Earth peace conference of Surprise Party was taking place on Cybertron.

The story also makes use of the fact Metroplex and Trypticon are mobile cities, referring to them as such in the synopsis and using both as havens or bases that each side can retire to. First Aid taking Blades to Metroplex for repair may seem logical, but when Galvatron and his forces “return to Trypticon” soon after that, it gives the impression that these two factions are established on Earth, rather than temporarily visiting from Cybertron or Chaar, particularly because the Autobots involved in the story aren’t the ones who have been previously set up as being the Earth command led by Blaster. This again shows how Cover keeps his storyline to the toys and their functions. Because of this, Galvatron naturally begins to feel like Megatron again, and although his desire to destroy Metroplex as a stepping stone to conquering the Autobots was established two episodes previously (Carnage in C Minor), his actions in this story are much more like his forebear than his own maniacal ranting. In continuity, it would be nice to think this is due to the change in his character at the end of Webworld, but is more likely to be because Cover sticks closely to the Marvel character biographies, which depict Galvatron as arrogant and emotionless rather than insane.

On that note, the choice of First Aid as a spotlight character is interesting at time when the post-movie toys were the primary focus. By this point the combiners are almost old hat, and indeed as rank and file the once undefeatable Stunticons take quite a battering – just as the Constructicons did when Bruticus was the newest, greatest toy (Starscream’s Brigade). However, it’s true that the Protectobots got short shrift in season two because of their very late addition to the series, losing out on the proper introduction the other three teams were given. The Ultimate Weapon redresses the balance somewhat by focusing on them, even if First Aid and to a lesser extent Hot Spot take the limelight. It’s a shame that the “crippled” Defensor making a last stand against Trypticon is diminished by the use of the Aerialbots to save him, but there seems to be a deliberate attempt to feature all four combining teams with Swindle and Vortex getting significant speaking roles as well.

The ‘old-school’ feel to the story can also be seen in the way the dialogue slips into tech-spec soundbites to introduce characters, but Cover is skilful enough to play off those for extra depth. In this example, First Aid’s core personality is presented in a single line, but with the added tension of questioning whether a conscientious objector will fight for his life if backed far enough into a corner:

SWINDLE: I heard you were a pacifist – but I don't believe there's a Transformer who won't fight for his life.
FIRST AID: I don't believe in fighting. I’m a medic, not a warrior.
SWINDLE: Then you'll die for your beliefs.

Aside from First Aid, the episode also looks at the relationship between Rodimus Prime and Ultra Magnus, and is lifted largely from the early season three episodes where Magnus acts as a mentor to the self-doubting Autobot leader. In that regard, this story would make more sense coming before Dark Awakening, the point at which Rodimus begins to believe in himself, and indeed the business with the transformation cogs is also more in keeping with the Five Faces use of the same plot device. It’s easy to see, like Richard Merwin with The Quintesson Journal, that these mid-season three stories are helped by writers having had access to the earlier ones, picking up on themes presented by them. The irony in Rodimus claiming to have too many responsibilities and Ultra “I can’t deal with that right now” Magnus being the one to reassure him he’s doing a good job won’t escape many fans, but this particular subplot is directly comparable to First Aid’s in that both characters discover strength and confidence through the power of positive thinking. This makes the mind the ultimate weapon of the episode’s title. Conversely, Galvatron’s ‘Ultimate Weapon’ (capitalised in the script) is a hollow, deceptive copy of this concept, being a bluff rather than a positive use of the strength of the mind. It sits as a counterbalance that allows Rodimus to overcome his fears, just as First Aid must overcome his own to realise his true value.

The idea of the mind as the ultimate weapon is derived from Cover’s inspiration for the story – revealed when First Aid begins to think about his situation in the junk yard. It’s curious that a robot unaligned with either faction should be running such an establishment, but again adds to Cover’s unique approach to the series, suggesting a deep integration between robot and human life in the future. Nul-A talks about Wreck-Gar, making the junk yard connection and perhaps explaining that even Earth now has collection sites contributing to the Junkion recycling system. More than that, the name Nul-A is a reference to AE Van Vogt’s Null-A series of books, the third of which had been published a few months before Cover would have written this episode. The novels incorporate ideas taken from Polish philosopher Alfred Korzybski’s theory of General Semantics, most relevantly to this episode that humans shouldn’t make rash, ‘spur of the moment’ decisions but consider their total reaction to situations and all possible outcomes instead, which is what First Aid begins to do while repairing refrigerators. Therefore, when Hot Spot arrives and points out his value to the Autobots, he is more amenable to looking at the bigger picture than he was before. Similarly, Rodimus calling Galvatron’s bluff shows he has considered his situation thoroughly – again using the power of the mind.

While most of Cover’s slant on the series brings a breath of fresh air and a new perspective, there are some oddities that don’t mesh as well. Spike and Daniel’s odd repairman routine is a pleasing homage to Spike and Sparkplug’s deceptions of old, and also the first time the two are seen to work as part of “Team Autobot” instead of being individual focus characters, but the idea that Galvatron employs human workmen to repair Trypticon is too left-field. Initially this seems to be a ruse to trick Vortex, but Cyclonus has no issue with two humans walking about freely inside the Decepticon battle station either. This use of the human characters is very in keeping with the original and now largely ignored ‘robots in disguise’ premise though, with Magnus and Rodimus used as foils to try and get them in.

A curiosity thrown up by the dialogue script for the episode shows that some scenes around the end of the first act were reordered after the dialogue was recorded. The line numbering shows that from the point Swindle steals the transformation cog to when Trypticon picks up the train, all the scenes play in a different order to how they were originally intended. The effect of the change is minimal and was probably done to reposition the first advert break, which may originally have come too early when Swindle exclaims “Metroplex is stuck in city mode, forever!” – a more relevant and exciting cliff-hanger than the apple-picking children being threatened to no consequence in the broadcast version. The changes mean that First Aid explaining he has lost the cog comes after Swindle gives it to Galvatron, originally the other way around, which has the knock-on effect of most of Trypticon’s rampage coming after he is aware Metroplex is disabled instead of before, making it seem more like a consequence of him learning the news rather than just destroying at random. This in itself is another example of Cover’s different approach to the series – Trypticon is shown destroying at will here, shredding warships and destroying a train in a manner that is perfectly in keeping with his character, but with a level of violence not usually depicted on screen. It suddenly makes the Earth feel a much more vulnerable place – somewhere more susceptible to the human fighting of the opening scene, which in itself is perhaps a result of devastation caused by the Decepticons (similar to the warzones depicted in more modern interpretations of the Transformers story, such as the opening scenes of Transformers: The Last Knight).

When Cover’s intentions are looked at closely, The Ultimate Weapon can’t be considered anything other than a success. The comedy of the city-formers gurning as they try to fight with misaligned transformation cogs is complimented by the more thought-provoking plots involving First Aid and Rodimus overcoming their fears. It gives the story a child-friendly moral in teaching the viewer to value their strengths, and offers a different slant on the usual staging for the Transformers’ battles on Earth. On top of that it gives the Protectobots a moment in the spotlight, and also manages to pack in the other three combining teams – even managing to fit in moments for lesser seen characters such as Vortex. Above all though, it’s a story about the toys and their unique roles and abilities, and as such is one that children watching could recreate with their own toybox. The way that Cover manages to do this without turning it into a simple toy advert shows a quality in writing not often seen in the series, and makes The Ultimate Weapon work on multiple levels.

[Pinwig]

Right, this is a biggun because I hit on a few ideas while writing that needed lengthy explanations. I've tried to make the supplementary essay as clear as I can, but it's hard without visuals. This took two weekends to write!


3.20 – The Big Broadcast of 2006

Analysing the Transformers in the order the episodes were produced reveals some interesting patterns, and there’s probably no coincidence that The Big Broadcast of 2006 was written by someone just as experienced in television writing as the author of The Quintesson Journal – the other half of this story. If anything, Michael Reaves was even more renowned for his cartoon writing than Richard Merwin was at the time, and has since gone on to boast an even more extensive TV writing resume than Transformers’ other industry giants, David Wise and Paul Dini. As such, The Big Broadcast and The Quintesson Journal represent a two-part story that seems to have been deliberately left to experienced writers to get on with while those just starting in cartoons could be focussed on more closely (encompassing surrounding episodes Webworld, The Ultimate Weapon and Fight or Flee).

IMDB lists Reaves as having written for over sixty different series between 1975 and 2007, as well as being story editor on seven. Of contemporary relevance to working on the Transformers, he was employed by Sunbow/Marvel as script editor for the entire run of My Little Pony around the same time, writing fourteen episodes too, and elsewhere in 1986 contributed eight scripts to The Centurions (Ruby/Spears) and a handful more for Teen Wolf (Hanna-Barbera) and Ewoks (Lucasfilm). Reaves himself cites The Centurions as a personal favourite from this era because he “never had to do rewrites” for it. [1]

In this regard, it’s surprising that such a busy writer hadn’t come into contact with the Transformers before, especially as his career to that point shared many writing jobs with the aforementioned Wise - season two’s most prolific scribe. The pair are both credited on eight different series through the late seventies and early eighties, including The Biskitts for Hanna-Barbera where they both held the post of story editor. Additionally, Reaves wrote seven episodes of Dungeons and Dragons in 1984, a series script-edited by Steve Gerber just before his move to Sunbow.

Among the profusion of writing credits to Reaves’ name post-Transformers, the most significant are perhaps fifteen episodes of The Real Ghostbusters, nineteen of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (a series co-created and developed by Wise), and latterly a substantial contribution to Batman: The Animated Series.

Taking all this into account, The Big Broadcast of 2006 is nothing more than a footnote on his CV, but rather than benefitting from the experience of a tried and tested writer, it perhaps shows one too busy to pay much attention to the coherency and sense of what was a quick freelance writing job. Its messy, problematic narrative makes it one of the lesser third season stories, and rather than exploring the unique nature of the Junkions in what is their only proper feature episode, ends up managing to say almost nothing about them at all. That said, backtracking through the episode’s documentation shows that many of its problems don’t appear to be of Reaves’ making. The original synopsis makes the idea for the story clearer than the episode itself, and also seems to intend it to have a more humorous tone than the finished episode, riffing off the eccentricities of the Junkions:

“The Quintessons have discovered that the ancient records of their business dealings, lost in space long ago – now resides somewhere in a mountain of scrap on Junkion! The Junkions won't hand it over willingly of course, so the Quintessons resort to trickery to get it back. They fill the airwaves of Junkion with the ravings of a late 20th century TV personality who led a "Crusade for Cleanliness" on earth. It works. Too well. The Junkions are immediately motivated to clean up their world – but the Quintessons have unwittingly created a monster. The Junkions embark on a campaign to cleanse the entire quadrant of all impurities – from baked on grease to improper thought patterns!”

This plays down the subliminal messages and hypnotic control of the broadcast episode and instead focuses on the gullibility of the Junkions and their almost religious love for Earth television. With hindsight, it’s easy to say that the episode should have stuck to this original premise, but it also doesn’t mention how the Autobots or Decepticons will figure in the story – an essential missing ingredient – and their subsequent addition is one of the ways in which the story is taken away from the Junkions because the Autobots become the factor by which the story’s resolution is reached. More importantly though, the addition of the subliminal control plot is directly responsible for the reason this episode falters and becomes near incomprehensible in the first act, which is explored in detail under Subliminal Editing – Making Sense of The Big Broadcast of 2006.

Editing problems aside, the first act boils down to two important lines that determine the Junkions’ behaviour:

2ND QUINTESSON: The Earth programs, reinforced by our subliminals, are teaching the Junkions an intense distrust of all other lifeforms.
3RD QUINTESSON: – and instilling the principles of neatness and organization.

The element of distrust is the core device by which the narrative works, built on in the second act when the Junkions begin to broadcast the Quintesson signal throughout the galaxy, resulting in outbreaks of violence on other worlds. This in itself doesn’t make sense because the Junkions only begin to transmit the signal because they believe it to be a message of caring and sharing after Superion’s attack corrupts it, yet when the same redirected signal reaches ‘Delta Pavonis IV’ and the ‘Green Moon of Antar’, it sets the indigenous populations against each other. However, when the Quintessons realise this, their characters are nicely played in keeping with the way they manipulate the war between Lanarq and Xetaxxis in The Quintesson Journal – momentarily distracted by the possibility of making money from the conflict before deciding that recovering the journal is more important. Incidentally, while the Texan woman shouting, “Stop! Y’All can’t do this!” at the Earth embassy on Cygnus Seven looks like Marissa Faireborn, her accent suggests otherwise and the script simply refers to her as “Young Woman”.

As the episode progresses, another of its problems becomes apparent. Because Wreck-Gar is essentially a support character whose dialogue is clipped from TV shows, it’s hard to give him any definition beyond being the comedy sidekick. So, despite being given the principle role in the story, he remains largely impenetrable, and what dialogue he does have reveals little underlying character. At the end of the episode, his Three Stooges style “I dunno! I was a victim of soicumstance. Yuk yuk yuk!” when asked what happened sums up his oblivious involvement and blank personality perfectly. We never really get to know who Wreck-Gar is.

This means that while The Big Broadcast is his episode, it’s the regulars who are better defined. Rodimus still shows pre-Dark Awakening complacency about leading the Autobots. His, “Don’t suppose I could interest you in a used mantle?” when responding to Ultra Magnus about the burden of leading the Autobots would have been furthered later by a line cut from the episode: “It’s mantle time again…” when he leads his team against Cyclonus’ aerial attack – as if providing a commanding presence is something he has to put on rather than coming naturally. This is one of the last times Rodimus is played in this manner; in subsequent episodes he becomes much more serious and focussed about leading the Autobots.

Cyclonus meanwhile is very definitely in the Webworld mould of weighing his devotion to Galvatron against believing he could do a better job of leading himself (“Summon the Sweeps. The Decepticons cannot afford to miss this opportunity”). He also shows he considers himself equal to Rodimus, with some lines even edited to tone this down. When he encounters the Autobots in the third act, his presumptuous “Take the other Autobot, I want Rodimus Prime” was originally followed by, “A good shot, Prime – and your last!” when he is shot in the leg, which is toned down to the less superior, “A good shot, Rodimus” in the finished version. Both versions show his character in the ascendancy, and it’s significant that he is the only one in the story to work out what is happening to the Junkions and recognise the potential this might have. In fact, Galvatron is shown as a far weaker character in this story - only drawn into it from his position of moody indifference by the Quintesson’s signal to create an artificial and largely irrelevant climax for the narrative.

Outside this, the cast list for the episode has more ‘humans and others’ than it does Autobots or Decepticons because of the number of different characters appearing on other worlds and in the television broadcasts. Because Wreck-Gar is a weak focus character it comes across more as an ensemble episode without particular emphasis on anyone, even featuring the only brief appearance by Omega Supreme in the entire season as a temporary replacement for Sky Lynx’s shuttle and to offer some heavy duty artillery in the fight scene (ironically, this minor appearance is the only time his transformation is shown as being self-contained – his robot form emerging from the rocket without the additional track pieces magically appearing from elsewhere). It seems at some point that Soundwave was to feature more prominently, adding to his recent spate of appearances. He appears in the cast list of speaking parts for the episode, and had dialogue in its comic adaptation (he exclaims “Blast Off! Into shuttle mode! We’re leaving this junkpile!” as the Decepticons retreat – more on this below), all of which goes some way to explaining why he randomly arrives for the battle in Blast Off and then isn’t seen again until leaving with Galvatron at the end. Similarly vague is Wreck-Gar’s female companion, who despite featuring heavily in the opening scene isn’t afforded a name by the cast list or script, both of which simply refer to her as ‘Lady Junkion’. While a few unique character models were created for the Junkions, she reuses the female Lithonian model seen briefly in the opening shots of Transformers: The Movie. In context this could be read to suggest a link between the planets, but more practically suggests Marvel Productions didn’t deem it necessary to create a unique model for her. Other Lithonian models can also be seen on Junkion in background shots.

This episode is unique in that it was later adapted by the Marvel comic, which opted to avoid shifting its narrative forward to 2006 after the movie and consequently (in America) wouldn’t feature any of the film cast until the Headmasters spin off series introduced the Targetmaster versions. Evidently as a filler[2], Ralph Macchio adapted The Big Broadcast for issue #43, which went on sale in April 1988 almost a year and half after the episode was broadcast. The comic art shows enough similarities to the cartoon to suggest it was used for reference, but while the dialogue is taken mostly from Reaves’ script (shamefully uncredited), it appears to be from an earlier version than the final broadcast one. While remaining faithful to the original story, it fleshes out a few areas that were condensed by editing in the cartoon – notably making the first act far more comprehensible by putting it back into its original scene order. Of relevance to this analysis, other differences provide insight into more sections presumably cut or shortened in the TV version.

One example comes at the start of the second act when the Aerialbots attack the Quintesson ship. In the cartoon, Wreck-Gar oddly exclaims “Jeepers, Mr Kent! Where’d they go?”, which seems to imply he can’t see the Autobots because of the explosion. There are three lines cut from the script at this point, which the comic reveals would have been to do with Fireflight using his photon displacer gun to hide the Aerialbots long enough for them to form Superion.

Later in the episode, Galvatron becomes subject to the Quintesson signal without explanation, which makes him seem weak because he is unable to resist where the other Decepticons remain unaffected. The comic adds a scene that shows him watching the Quintesson broadcast in the surface of a bubbling pool on Chaar, which explains how he succumbs. This is completely at odds with his character though, and was justifiably dropped from the cartoon, even if it leaves his submission unexplained.

One subtle change shows how Omega Supreme was given his moment of glory. When Galvatron arrives on Junkion and fires at Rodimus, as televised, Omega slides in the way to deflect the blast, but in the comic, this is where Wreck-Gar’s line “Substantial penalty for early withdrawal” is placed as he blasts a lump of rock to separate the two leaders with rubble instead. The dialogue script for the cartoon shows that this was the original intention because the line’s number shows this is where it originally sat, but was then moved to the later point it actually appears (as the Decepticons turn tail) after it was recorded.

Comparing the comic to the line numbering in the dialogue script highlights other changes too, suggesting that the confrontation between Rodimus and Galvatron would originally have been longer, and that more was made of Blaster’s broadcasts cancelling out the Quintesson one (which is bodged in the cartoon with Blaster appearing to broadcast a Quintesson voice saying, “is your enemy, your enemy” instead of the “easy listening stuff” Rodimus refers to afterwards).

Having material to make these comparisons makes it sound as though this episode suffered a substantial number of problems in editing, but other episodes for which writers’ original scripts are publicly available show these kinds of changes happened routinely before Sunbow’s recording scripts were finalised. Where The Big Broadcast is different is in the amount of editing and rearranging that went on after the dialogue had been recorded, whether that was to remove the act of the broadcasts hypnotising the Junkions (less so the after effects), to shorten the episode, or to refocus some scenes. The result is a story which at times isn’t as easily understood as it should be, but does pack a lot into twenty minutes by adding the Autobot and Decepticon interests. It’s notable that neither faction learns about the canister the Quintessons are trying to recover, and although by this point in the series Ultra Magnus should have a pretty good idea when he says, “I wonder if we'll ever know who broadcast those mysterious programs”, the story sets up The Quintesson Journal very nicely. The problem is that the sequel episode had already been broadcast, and without the logical ‘to be continued…’, The Big Broadcast of 2006 is frustratingly incomplete with a conclusion that doesn’t allow Wreck-Gar any kind of resolution; for a story that should be his spotlight moment in the series, it doesn’t allow him to ‘win’. He is inescapably a comedy sidekick, which leaves him somewhat lacking when made the focal character, which means the regular cast have to be brought in to pick up the pieces. Had The Big Broadcast stuck to its original premise it would have worked far better, but the convoluted path it seems to have taken to reach the screen leaves it a messy and unsatisfying watch.


[1] www.animationartist.com/screenwriters/reavesinterview/reavesinterview.html
[2] Inks also exist for an unused version of The Dweller in the Depths, suggesting the comic commissioned at least two adaptations of cartoon scripts to use in emergencies.


Subliminal Editing – Making Sense of The Big Broadcast of 2006

As with The Ultimate Weapon (curiously two episodes in a row), the dialogue script for The Big Broadcast of 2006 shows that several sequences in the first act were edited and reordered after it had been recorded. Whereas The Ultimate Weapon’s changes were largely inconsequential, in this case the alterations seem to be a deliberate change designed to downplay the idea of the Quintessons using subliminal messages hidden in TV broadcasts to control the Junkions. By doing this, the story’s opening becomes much harder to follow because some dialogue no longer makes sense and other lines have been cut, leaving the viewer to infer what originally would have been spelled out more clearly. Because the dialogue script maintains its original line numbering, it’s possible to put the sequences back into order, and then by comparing this to the Marvel comic adaptation work out roughly what the original intention was.

The line numbering shows that the episode originally began with the Sharkticons finding the lost journal on Junkion and losing it in the scuffle that follows with Wreck-Gar and friends. This is what prompts the Quintessons to observe the Junkions are very territorial and to consider attacking them by “more subtle means”, after which six lines of dialogue have been cut before the Junkions attack Sky Lynx and Astrotrain. Those six lines would presumably have explained the ‘subtle’ means by which the Quintessons would next attack Junkion – i.e. using subliminal messages – and why the Junkions subsequently attack even their friends.

All of this is just about inferable from the finished version, which is confusing in the way the Quintessons observing Wreck-Gar watching television makes them decide the Sharkticons are a ‘subtle’ means of attack, and because the explanation for Wreck-Gar attacking Sky Lynx doesn’t come until well after the event. The comic adaptation reveals that the six cut lines would have been specifically about the Quintessons placing a giant television on Junkion and feeding it with Earth broadcasts hijacked by their subliminal messages, and given the comic dialogue is largely lifted from the cartoon script, may have run something like:

QUINTESSON 1: They like our gift.
QUINTESSON 2: They’ll like our programming even better.
QUINTESSON 1: Direct hyperspace feed from Earth, no reruns.
QUINTESSON 2: And we are sweetening the signal with our own hypnotic commands

The net result of these changes is that the visual explanation for the Quintessons controlling the Junkions and explicit references to hypnotic control are removed from the cartoon, and to cover over the omission of this ‘more subtle’ attack, the entirely unsubtle Sharkticon assault is moved to replace it. The giant television eventually appears in the second act, but isn’t introduced as being sent by the Quintessons.

It’s possible these changes were made to make it clearer that the Quintessons are looking for their lost journal. As broadcast, the first mention of the journal is a Quintesson saying, “recovering the journal will be more difficult than we imagined”, which is marginally more explanatory than the “They’ve found the journal!” it would have been originally, but the removal of key lines explaining how the Quintessons intend to take over the Junkions suggests a deliberate intention to cloud references to the idea of subliminal messages hypnotising people through TV broadcasts.

More evidence that this was the intention follows soon after when Galvatron appears uninterested in Astrotrain’s report, but Cyclonus seems to know telepathically what he was going to say:

ASTROTRAIN: I have something strange to report, Galvatron.
GALVATRON: Fool. Do you think I care?
CYCLONUS: (SMOOTHLY) Mighty one, if the Junkions have turned against the Autobots, perhaps…

As originally numbered, this sequence was intercut with Sky Lynx explaining the same thing to Rodimus (instead of coming after it) and ran as follows:

51 RODIMUS: Skylynx! We lost your transmission earlier. What happened?
52 SKYLYNX: Something very, very odd
53 ASTROTRAIN: I have something strange to report, Galvatron.

54-59 Cut

60 ULTRA MAGNUS: Perhaps the Junkions mistook Skylynx for another Decepticon.
61 RODIMUS: Possible --but not likely. (BEAT, DECISIVELY:) Send the Aerialbots to scope out the situation. (TO SKYLYNX) Ace job, Skylynx.
62 GALVATRON: Fool. Do you think I care?
63 CYCLONUS: (SMOOTHLY) Mighty one, if the Junkions have turned against the Autobots, perhaps…
64 GALVATRON: (CUTS HIM OFF) Perhaps, Cyclonus, I still would not care. (BEAT) Leave me, both of you --while you still can!

From this it appears the intention was to have Sky Lynx and Astrotrain tell their stories using alternating lines, all of which are strangely removed in the edit. This would have better shown the contrasting reactions Rodimus and Galvatron have to the news, but it is again the lines concerning the effects of the subliminal messaging that are removed. In this case the comic adaptation adds “I have just returned from Junkion where that world’s inhabitants seem hypnotised by a huge television screen that is playing films from the planet Earth” to Astrotrain’s report. In this case the edit is quite noticeable in the episode as Galvatron’s response, “Fool. Do you think I care?” is audibly clipped, demonstrating that the changes were made after the dialogue had been recorded but before the finalised soundtrack had been sent to AKOM for animation.

All of this points to the story having been deliberately edited to remove explicit references to subliminal messages in television broadcasts and their potential ‘hypnotising’ effects. This idea wasn’t in the synopsis for the story, which relied more on the Junkion addiction to Earth TV persuading them to “crusade for cleanliness”. The edits made to the script also remove references to the giant Quintesson delivered television set seen in the comic and two references to hypnotic control using it. When the broadcast version of the episode is finally forced to admit that this is how the Quintessons are controlling the Junkions, the line doesn’t refer to hypnotism and is vague enough that it would go over the heads of a younger audience: “The Earth programs, reinforced by our subliminals, are teaching the Junkions an intense distrust of all other lifeforms.”

Therefore, this seems to be the reason for the substantial changes to the first act. As the removed dialogue is quite important in explaining the Quintesson plan, and reordering the scenes needlessly doesn’t shorten the episode, it’s clear that none of these changes were made because the episode was overrunning. Even though most of this episode is driven by the notion of subliminal messages and their potential effects, it would seem that at the last minute the production crew got cold feet about directly showing hypnotism using television broadcasts and tried to remove as many references to it as possible.

[blueshift]

I'll ask again, you are going to put this all in a book right? Feels like it needs a bigger audience!!!

[Pinwig]

I am thinking that now, but I'm aware there's a heck of a lot of guesswork in all this because there are so few facts available. I'm no Jim Sorenson or Chris McFeely, I don't have access to much more than my own suppositions, but when finished this will be in the region of 250 thousand words and several years of work, so it'd be worth putting together in some form. However, as said, there is a long way to go yet. I need to bring up the first forty or so entries to the standard of the later ones and change their tone to match, and I also have ideas for diagrams that would explain a lot of this that need time to prepare. All that will come after I've finished - currently I've got ten episodes and the movie left to write up, so it'll be November before I move on to stage two, and then I can see most of next year being rewriting seasons one and two!

[The Huff]

Big Broadcasts.. has always been one of my favourite episodes and I've never been able to work out exactly why. If I ever fancy some season 3 viewing, this is usually one I pick. I know it doesn't completely make sense and was even more confusing for me when I first see it as it was an even heavier edited version that I video'd on Sky back in 1988 - so many scenes/bits were missing and I didn't realised until I caught it again in the 90's. Of course it still remains confusing and perhaps that's why I've always found it so interesting. Even stranger that it was picked by Marvel for the comic a year later - I would have thought a more straightforward episode would have been picked.

I also love the planet of cartoon dogs in cars that is then attacked by cats in proper sci-fi battleships.

And yes, all this all definitely has to go in a book. So much hard work is put into these each week, that it deserves a wider audience!

[Pinwig]

This is another biggun because it has more background material available than most episodes.

3.21 – Fight or Flee

If such a thing existed, Fight or Flee is a textbook example of how the third season of the Transformers worked. It’s a story based on an idea that extends from the premise established by Flint Dille at the beginning, then developed by writers new to the series who put their own spin on the tone. During the process, the story’s original idea becomes somewhat skewed, leaving a final product that looks like a Transformers episode, but carries the writers’ unique feel and doesn’t quite conform to the norm established by the earlier seasons. In particular, Fight or Flee also completes the trilogy of awkwardness started with Starscream’s Ghost and Thief in the Night by giving Sandstorm a canonical introduction after he’d already appeared in both previous episodes.

There’s no evidence on the internet of Tony Cinciripini and Larry Leahy’s writing partnership existing prior to the Transformers. It seems unlikely Fight or Flee was their first collaboration, but there’s nothing to suggest otherwise and the experience was obviously unappealing enough that they didn’t write for cartoons again. In the years following, the pair worked together on two feature films: firstly as writers and producers of a post-apocalyptic Mad Max copy called The Lawless Land (1988), and secondly as writers of Confessions of a Hitman (1994), which was produced by Cinciripini and directed by Leahy.

Beyond this, Leahy worked on several films including Deep Impact (1998) and Road to Perdition (2002) as script coordinator (a role that involves checking scripts for formatting, spelling and potential legal problems before being filmed, rather than actually writing them). Cinciripini meanwhile went on to write, produce and direct Hell’s Kitchen (1998), notable only for being a six million dollar production that grossed less than ten thousand at the box office, and for being a forgotten footnote in Angelia Jolie’s career just at the point she was beginning her ascension to international stardom.

These future collaborations are worth mentioning because they show the writers’ penchant for action stories and thrillers, and Fight or Flee demonstrates this interest in the way it utilises action film stereotypes and has a heavy focus on battle scenes. It takes an aggressive stance on the fighting between the Autobots and Decepticons, in many ways riffing off the desperate tone of infiltration war films such as The Guns of Navarone and Where Eagles Dare, and includes a ‘blow it all to kingdom come’ type climax typical of the genre as Rodimus recklessly decides to destroy Paradron. This unusually violent tone makes the underlying war feel more urgent and real than usual, and has the refreshing side effect of restoring the Deceptions to a position of equal opposition instead of being the underdogs skulking on Chaar.

This tone comes across from the outset, with Cyclonus and Scourge chasing Air Raid through space before falling foul of a trap laid by the Aerialbots. Silverbolt’s triumphant demand that the Decepticons surrender implies they are actively trying to take them prisoner, but rather than submit, Cyclonus quells Scourge’s fears of capture by fighting back against the odds. Scourge also admits to being “in bad shape”, suggesting he is taking damage. Toei’s superior animation helps bring this scene to life, with laser blasts and explosions ricocheting off the surrounding asteroids and debris.

While this opening is merely a way to get Cyclonus and Scourge into the vortex, there is thought to the realism of the action beyond the usual aimless laser-fire, something not seen since Ultra Magnus took on Cyclonus in Surprise Party. Unusually, the writers’ original script for the episode exists in the public domain (see Fight or What? below) and offers extra insight on their intent. In this scene they refer to characters’ specific weapons (which get lost in translation to the screen), such as Fireflight launching his firefog missiles at the Decepticons that, in the words of the writers, “stick to their fuselages and continue to burn as they spin and dive away”. All of this is important in establishing the war movie vibe and it’s telling that the episode’s original title, Fight or Die, was deemed strong enough to need toning down. Later, when Cyclonus and Scourge wreak havoc at the Acropolis, the writers make a point of having Cyclonus say, “Set your weapons on stun...I want them all in working condition!” to point out their intent is to capture, implying previously it would have been to kill.

Then, once Galvatron is in control, the story utilises further action movie tropes with Rodimus’ rescue mission echoing films such as The Dirty Dozen and even The Magnificent Seven (in fact, probably coincidentally, his away team is made up of seven Autobots plus Sandstorm). This gives rise to some unusual sights, not only the towering Colditz style prison Sandstorm ends up in, suspiciously out of place on a world of pacifists, but also the Decepticons’ additional military arsenal, which includes some heavy-duty rocket artillery. Any opportunity is taken to beef up the characters’ weaponry, a good example being the way Long Haul’s heat seeking missiles are reinterpreted as a shoulder mounted launcher. Even the Autobots’ decoy ship is labelled a ‘destroyer’ in the script. The episode also makes a bold attempt to make the Decepticons look like a powerful army by including as many characters as possible. Cyclonus and Scourge are forgotten once they contact Galvatron, and the Combaticons, Predacons and Constructicons form a substantial Decepticon invasion force with Bruticus oddly becoming Galvatron’s right hand man – a scripting choice that Dille allowed through unchallenged [1].

All of this contrasts beautifully with the peaceful world of Paradron, which is portrayed as a promised land where pacifist Autobot refugees have made a life away from the war. It isn’t just a refugee camp, but a paradise (hence Paradron) only accessible through the vortex that Cyclonus and Scourge stumble across, suggesting a kind of heavenly transference to reach it. The energon fountain and the repeated references to their being ‘enough for everyone’ represents the biblical idea of the land of milk and honey. One of the ‘Files of Teletraan II’ endcaps talks about how Autobots who fled Cybertron during the war began to return after the events of the movie, and were it not for its destruction, Paradron could have become part of a wider union of planets under Autobot rule – an idea utilised frequently in later fictions. It’s a shame more isn’t made of the connection; Sandstorm could have been one of several new toys introduced using the colony. Far from taking the opportunity though, Dille’s notes in the script state that the other Autobots on the planet should be “various different kinds of Generic Looking Peaceful Autobots. They don't have to look like Sandstorm, but he should look like he belongs in their world”, which is interpreted by the animators by giving most of them vague inhuman faces to downplay their significance as characters, similar to the way the generic drones under Shockwave on Cybertron in the second season.

Several figures do stand out from the generics, notably the unnamed ‘Autobot Nurses’ who reuse Arcee’s character model (which perhaps could be interpreted to suggest Arcee herself has a past role she rejected in favour of the more adventurous one she has in the film) and the communications room Autobot, who the script notes should look like a “primitive Blaster”. His demise, embedded in the computer screen, is toned down from the original, more humorous, intention to have him toe punted into the ceiling by Scourge (hence his last line being, “Hey, I'm stuck up here”).

Far from fitting into the local populace as intended, Sandstorm sticks out like a sore thumb, but his youthful exuberance does at least mark him out as the naive idealist among the crotchety old timers. His upbeat nature is consistent with his portrayal in his earlier appearances, suggesting that if his introduction did unwittingly happen twice, both instances drew on the same source for his character – one more wide-eyed than the hot head of his Budianski biography. In contrast to the awkward chase sequence with Octane in Starscream’s Ghost, surplus to the story and wedged in purely to show off his triple-changing ability, this episode works his two alt modes into the narrative – the dune buggy as a method by which he can speed away from the prison and then his helicopter as a way to escape the cliff hanger at the end of the first act. This moment has the feel of an intended reveal, and dialogue cut from the script (Razorclaw: “I don’t get it?”) at the point Sandstorm switches to his helicopter mode suggests the writers thought it would be a surprise to viewers that Sandstorm has two transformations. It’s a clever idea, but lost because of his earlier appearances.

Caught in the crossfire between the two sides, Sandstorm’s innocence is contrasted by a very stern Rodimus Prime, who comes across as a hard-line military leader. The downbeat delivery of his lines is far from the reluctant teenager of earlier episodes, almost to the point of being out of character. He talks about assembling an Autobot ‘strike force’ to infiltrate Paradron, devises the deception to send the empty ship toward the planet, and refers to turning the Paradronians into freedom fighters. He also orchestrates the operation on the ground and organises two teams, unusually leading Ultra Magnus instead of taking advice from him. This again is an example of writers unfamiliar with the status quo putting their own spin on characters, but Rodimus for once is against the odds and needs to be this strong to stop Galvatron turning Paradron into a planetary weapon (this intent isn’t quite made clear in the episode, but see Fight or What? for a discussion of scenes cut from the episode). This culminates in him being forced to destroy the planet, and although this decision is explained more clearly by the original script, in the finished episode it does come across as a shocking and abrupt decision – emphasised by his heartlessly flippant comment to Sandstorm at the end, “No need to get all mushy. Cybertron's a better place anyway. Not so... perfect.”

After a detailed analysis, it’s possible to see how Fight or Flee is intended to be The Transformers in an action movie mould. The plot borrows from war film sources and it’s possible to imagine the spectacle of Paradron turning from a paradise into the grimy weapon foundry and prisoner of war camp it becomes on the big screen with the kind of visuals that made Transformers: The Movie so impressive. It restores an edginess and some grit to the conflict between the Autobots and Decepticons, and makes a point of ignoring the unbalanced nature of the third season by reinstating menace to Galvatron’s threat. The only shame is that as usual he turns tail and flees at the end of the story, thankfully avoiding Megatron’s typical, “Decepticons retreat!” Beyond this it brings another Autobot colony world into the mythos, joining the lost thirteenth legion on Antilla (Cosmic Rust) as another example of how the war on Cybertron caused some Transformers to disperse to escape it. In doing so, it also gives a proper introduction to Sandstorm and although he doesn’t appear in the series again, it provides him with a unique place in the continuity and a back story, something of a rarity among the constant deluge of new faces.


[1] An odd side effect of this is the way Bruticus is favoured as Galvatron’s lieutenant over both Cyclonus and Soundwave in the final act. Soundwave’s inclusion in the episode is doubly odd because he speaks with Shrapnel’s voice. Shrapnel is named in the role in the script and the cast list, meaning a change happened at the storyboarding stage to put Soundwave more logically in place at the communications console with the voice already recorded. In reality, this last minute change would have happened when someone noticed that the Insecticons had been retired by this point, with their last fleeting appearances occurring in Five Faces of Darkness.


Fight or What?

The inclusion of the ‘as recorded’ scripts on the Metrodome DVD releases of the series in the UK provides a goldmine of additional information when looking at it in detail, but in the case of Fight or Flee is especially interesting because the script included is the writers’ original rather than the dialogue only version (therefore including ‘stage directions’ and editor’s notes to help the storyboard team visualise the action). Not only does this reveal that the episode originally went under the more dramatic title of ‘Fight or Die’, but it provides deeper insight into the writers’ thinking and includes footnotes from the script editor – in this case marked as ‘FD’, Flint Dille.

This point alone is interesting, as it demonstrates that far from being (as he claims) “pretty much done” with Transformers after writing Five Faces of Darkness, Dille was still actively involved and editing scripts as late as this twenty-first episode of the season. Except for minor anomalies such as Sandstorm’s reference to the “Fourth Great War” this might also explain why the editing for the episode is more assured than some others, fitting well into the continuity and without the last-minute changes that dogged other episodes (The Big Broadcast of 2006 being a recent example). This perhaps suggests that the problems with some other stories – notably Starscream’s Ghost and Thief in the Night in relation to this one – weren’t anything to do with Dille, which is where the continuity error regarding Sandstorm’s origin crept in. It’s hard to imagine given Dille’s involvement in setting this season up that a blunder so big would have been allowed through if he’d been aware of it. That said, the limited time these episodes had for production has always been offered as an excuse for mistakes. This script matches the four-month ‘concept to completion’ timescale that Dille has mentioned in interviews, it being this final revised script is dated 11th July 1986, a mere three months and four days before the episode aired on October 15th.

The notes Dille makes offer fascinating insights on his perspective. This one, from the fight between Cyclonus and the Aerialbots at the beginning, shows that his own knowledge of the characters isn’t as comprehensive as it could be:

“FIREFLIGHT shoots two missiles of firefog (Story Editor Note: I don't know whether said stuff exists. If so, great. If not, maybe we can invent it or go back to traditional weapons. In any case, let's see something exciting) at Scourge and Cyclonus.”

What’s interesting is the question of who Dille is talking to in these notes, if his revision of the script is intended to be final (as stated in bold letters on the first page). It implies a further level of checking after his involvement, presumably at the storyboarding stage at Marvel Productions.

While this example shows that Cinciripini and Leahy had done some background research on the characters (notably Fireflight’s entry in the second season production bible doesn’t mention his firefog missiles, but they are mentioned on the actual toy’s tech spec), further notes from Dille show differences of opinion over the make-up of Cybertron that have been a persistent problem through the season. While Paradron is said to look like “Cybertron during its fabled golden age” (according to Cyclonus), Dille notes that:

“It appears that the writers were unaware that everything on Cybertron is mechanical. Therefore, they have included references to mountains and valleys and rivers –etc. I have tried to take them out wherever possible, but it is well within the realm of possibility that I have missed passages. Therefore, please correct these inaccuracies when you come to them. I do not believe that any of them influence the plot at all.”

Whether intentionally or not, this note went unheeded because Paradron is shown to have a natural surface with extensive metal construction placed on it (notably when Sandstorm escapes the prison), which is much more fitting for a world colonised by Autobot refugees, and is more in keeping with the way Cybertron is portrayed in its past and present in this season (see Forever is a Long Time Coming among other examples).

As well as offering an insight on the editing process, the script reveals two sequences cut from the finished episode that expand on Galavtron’s intentions for Paradron. Twice already this season he has tried to attach engines to planetoids to use them as weapons: firstly to fly the Autobot records asteroid into Cybertron in Surprise Party, and then another in Carnage in C Minor to attack Metroplex. In this case his ambitions stretch even further as the cut scenes have him forcing Paradron’s scientists to construct giant ion thrusters that will push Paradron towards Cybertron so he can use a super-weapon on it (which appears to be the one Brawl and Headstrong use to destroy the decoy ship). The thrusters were included in the description of the shots showing the Paradronian Autobots being used as slaves:

“The planet has been stripped of nearly all its lights and colors. The buildings have been stripped to skeleton form. The roof of the acropolis has been ripped off. Thousands of pipes that suck energon from the spring below burst through the open ceiling and distribute the precious fuel to hundreds of newly constructed battle installations around the planet. Autobot slaves feverishly turning their home planet into a planetary war machine under the guidance of the Decepticon warriors. Maybe some good assembly line scenes. Statues melted and turned into missiles etc. Two huge ion thrusters capable of moving the entire planet at incredible speeds rise above the doomed capital.”

After Galvatron looks down on his new empire demanding his “Autobot slaves” work for him, originally a scientist would have reported that “With these thrustors, the entire planet will be able to move”, but one engine then fails to work when Galvatron tests them:

GALVATRON: You fools!?
SCIENTIST: There are so many computations and complications, I must have made a wrong one somewhere. You do not know what it is to be a scientist.
GALVATRON: Nor do I want to! I do not bore you with the problems or ruling Galaxies? Please extend the same courtesy to me. I want results, not excuses.

The scene ends with the line, “The electrical stuff on his head sizzles”, in reference to the crackling used to denote the mania caused by the plasma baths in Five Faces. Later in the episode, just after Rodimus puts his plan into action on Paradron, this sequence is continued as the scientist reports to Galvatron that the thrusters are now working. His response to this is to turn his attention to the weaponry the Paradronians have been building, demonstrating its immense power and the threat it poses to Cybertron:

GALVATRON: Focus the energon beams on the moon...we need a little target practice before we make our final move on Cybertron.
SCIENTIST: (proudly) Yes sir!

Dille notes that “If this script has to be cut for length, I wouldn't mind losing all of the tower stuff”, which is noteworthy because with this plot thread cut, the episode underruns enough for a ‘Files of Teletraan II’ endcap to be added. Perhaps this is evidence of these endcaps being deliberately added to reduce animation costs instead of just filling gaps in underrunning episodes. This sequence, showing Galvatron’s intent to turn Paradron into a Deathstar style weapon, goes some way toward explaining why Rodimus so rashly decides to destroy the planet once he knows the locals can evacuate. This is added to by the episode’s original synopsis:

“Eons ago, Autobot refugees fled Cybertron and built an exact copy of the great mechanical planet in its golden age. Now, the Decepticons have discovered it and overrun it. The Autobots must rescue the refugees and destroy the planet before it can become the ultimate Decepticon fortress.”

It changes the reason for destroying Paradron from being an impulsive need to confiscate Galvatron’s new toy to being a measure Rodimus takes to defend his home world. It adds a ‘race against time’ element and the synopsis implies the mission should have been to destroy Paradron from the outset to stop it attacking Cybertron. This is an example of how the writers’ original intent can get skewed in the execution of the episode, and it’s the removal of the scenes that demonstrate Galvatron turning Paradron into a weapon, rather than just a new base, that make Rodimus’ decision to destroy it seem more surprising than it was originally intended to be.

[Pinwig]

3.22 – The Dweller in the Depths

Of all the writers working on The Transformers in the third season, Paul Dini is perhaps the most accomplished in terms of his wider career in animation. Known and celebrated these days predominantly for an association with DC comics properties extending back over the last twenty-five years, he started writing cartoons at the end of the 1970s at Filmation, working on series such as Tarzan and Sport Billy. While this association continued into the 1980s with cartoons including Flash Gordon and notably He-Man and the Masters of the Universe, he also wrote for Marvel Productions and Ruby Spears on Dungeons and Dragons and Mister T – series worked on respectively by future Sunbow script editors Steve Gerber and Flint Dille. Although his work for Sunbow is limited, writing just one episode each of Transformers, GI Joe (Jungle Trap) and Jem (Magic is Magic), he had by that point garnered something of a reputation and in interviews Dille cites Dini specifically as one of the people who influenced the direction of the third season. So, although his name only appears on The Dweller in the Depths, it’s possible his advice helped in steering the series overall, and he was certainly part of the pool of talent that Dille remembers as being integral to the development process.

Although a later story, The Dweller in the Depths fits the early third season format by focusing on the core film cast, and again shows the choices and influences of an individual writer in the final product. Dini’s decision to pare the heroes back to a small team consisting of diverse personalities mirrors the basic structure of any number of cartoon series, examples from his own writing contemporary to the time being the way Dungeons and Dragons and Scooby-Doo work around small, central core teams having episodic adventures. Equally, Galvatron being backed by just Cyclonus and Scourge (along with the cannon fodder Sweeps) follows the standard cartoon formula of the principle bad guy having two chief henchmen (Beastman and Trapjaw/Bebop and Rocksteady etc). Where Dini diverges from this is by adding the Quintessons as the chief antagonists, which is much in keeping with the third season, but as shown in many episodes also has the knock-on effect of reducing Galvatron’s role almost to a stooge himself. Comparing this Galvatron to the tyrant of the previous episode, Fight or Flee, illustrates how although the Quintessons added a much-needed extra dimension to the series, their presence in stories stopped the new Decepticon leader ever becoming as threatening or over-arching an adversary as Megatron.

This setup aside, the episode also features a monster-of-the-week style adversary in the form of the Trans-organics and their hideous boss, the titular ‘Dweller’. Often ascribed to being inspired by HP Lovecraft’s ‘Great Old Ones’ (a pantheon of ancient fictional deities who once ruled the earth but now sleep within it, first popularised by the story Call of Cthulhu, 1928), the story’s inspiration could come from any number of sources ranging from Greek mythology (Poseidon and the sea serpents he released to challenge both Heracles and Perseus, popularised in films such as Clash of the Titans, 1981), as well as the Kraken of Alfred Tennyson’s poem (1830), itself adapted from legends of giant squid-like sea monsters in Icelandic Sagas of the 13th Century.

Certainly, the Dweller’s behaviour bears more than a passing resemblance to Lovecraft’s most famous Old One, Cthulhu, whose return to the world is said would cause mankind to “become as the Great Old Ones; free and wild and beyond good and evil, with laws and morals thrown aside and all men shouting and killing and revelling in joy” (Call of Cthulhu), much as happens to the Transformers affected by the Dweller. Cthulhu is also described as being a cross between octopus and dragon, with the tentacles hanging from his face turned into mechanical equivalents for the Dweller. Dini’s own notes describe the Dweller as:

“A massive Trans-organic, originally designed to be a living power siphon. It is ten feet taller than Galvatron and somewhat resembles a gigantic black leach outfitted with mechanical, fanged tentacles. It drains other mechanical creatures of their power, turning them into zombie-like ‘vampire’ creatures”

It’s notable that the Dweller also collects its victims in storage cylinders on its back, and this combined with the zombifying ability points at a more direct source of inspiration than Lovecraft. At the time Dini was writing this episode, Flint Dille was developing Hasbro’s Inhumanoids property into a cartoon series, and the character D’Compose seems a simpler explanation for the Dweller’s origin. A monstrous, skeletal ancient being, D’Compose lives beneath the earth and turns people into undead mutants with his touch, collecting them in a cage in his ribs. Dille has spoken in interviews about the connection between The Inhumanoids and Lovecraft, and had even previously included tentacled monsters and undead skeletons in a GI Joe episode he wrote the year before (Skeletons in the Closet). He explains this as being a by-product of his work on designing Dungeons and Dragons modules with Gary Gygax at the time, and the influence on The Dweller in the Depths is obvious.

Putting a more Transformers relevant twist on the mutation idea – draining victims of their energy instead of turning them into mutants – coincidentally fits in with the Quintessons’ recently revealed motives of sapping other planets and cultures of their resources (The Quintesson Journal). It suggests that before the era of the Transformers, the Quintessons were a little more upfront about their desire for universal domination and were perhaps more overtly aggressive than during their latter-day attempts using corrupt business practices (unless the Trans-organics, described as ‘warriors’ by their scientist designer, were intended to be a product for sale like the Transformers). The vampire/zombie aspect of the Dweller’s abilities is also the focus of the episode’s original synopsis:

“The Quintessons fool Galvatron and the Decepticons into releasing an ‘energy-vampire’ called the Dweller from deep within Cybertron. It's up to the Autobots to stop the creature before it turns all the Transformers into similar zombie-like creatures and reduces Cybertron to a powerless, dead world.”

This again shows a connection to The Inhumanoids in that D’Compose’s principle weakness is a vampiric aversion to sunlight. While his victims can be restored to health by the sun, in the case of the energy sapping Transformers’ equivalent, it’s an extra power surge at the conclusion of the episode which restores Kup and the others. Given the depth of thinking behind the Dweller, it’s a shame he wasn’t developed into a speaking character, although with the Decepticons and Quintessons already in the episode a third opponent needing its own motives and share of the dialogue would have stretched the narrative too far.

Beyond the interest in looking at the origin of what is an unusual adversary for the series, The Dweller in the Depths is a very straightforward episode with a simple plot. The Autobots are trying to repower Cybertron, the Quintessons trick Galvatron into releasing the Trans-organics, and the rest of the episode is the cast slowly being picked off horror-movie style before Perceptor neatly resolves everything by removing the Dweller, the new Autobot power convertor and the Quintessons at the same time. On paper, it looks like a story that needs something more to make it work, but the fact Toei are in charge of bringing the Trans-organics to life lifts matters considerably – especially as given the chance to include an element of horror, some scenes take on a violently anime-inspired tone (the Quintesson scientist losing his face to the Dweller in his flashback being a notable example).

The setup also offers more insight into the history of the Quintessons, with confirmation of them having an incredible lifespan that must stretch into tens of millions of years if the Trans-organics were precursors to the Transformers and the scientist in this story lost one of his faces when they were first made. This was suggested by the scientist in The Killing Jar, who seemed to imply he had been personally involved in the design of Ultra Magnus. It’s an oddity created by the fact the Transformers themselves are millions of years old. Far from being the descendants of the Quintessons who lost Cybertron, to maintain the direct need for revenge it makes more direct sense if they’re the same ones. The timescales involved just mean the Quintessons, essentially a biological lifeform, gain an extraordinarily long lifespan.

The idea of different echelons of the Quintesson race working independently of each other, particularly the scientific and military branches, is expanded on when they teleport to Chaar to talk to Galvatron. He claims to have been betrayed by them before, to which the scientist replies, “how can you be so certain we are the ones who betrayed you?” This is furthered by the fact that the scientist based Quintesson episodes don’t feature the original five-faced variety, who tend to be involved in stories focused on conflict or business transactions. It suggests there are at least two castes who work in conjunction with each other, and the long shots on the Quintesson ship show multiples of the standard scientist model (adapted from the one that was used in The Killing Jar and Forever is a Long Time Coming) with one prosecutor type in charge of the ship. It seems likely the unique character in this episode, the disfigured scientist, gained an individual character model just to cope with the fact he needed a normal and a damaged face.

Being a movie cast ensemble piece, there isn’t much in the way of character development. Dini chooses to use the characters as they are, rather than trying to find something interesting to say about them. The story uses the idea of Rodimus sitting some way distant from the action as a thoughtful and considered leader while Ultra Magnus acts as his on-the-ground commander – seen several times in stories that need to push Magnus to the fore. There’s a degree of humour in the way he has to lead the zombified Autobots all the way back to Rodimus just so Perceptor can solve the problem, but the only character who really gets anything out of the story is Arcee, who has a larger share of the dialogue and the action than she has anywhere else in the series to this point. Her ‘weakness’ as a ‘female’ is sadly underlined by her straining to lift Galvatron’s hefty canon up, and if this is a focal episode for her (which would presumably have been deemed unnecessary by Hasbro due to her not having a toy) it doesn’t add anything to her underused character.

The Deceptions are used purely as cannon fodder, possibly losing out to the necessary exposition from the Quintessons and the screen time needed for the Dweller. Galvatron is played true to form, but his cowardly nature and penchant for self-preservation is demonstrated in the way his expendable Sweeps are literally thrown at the problem to try and solve it. Even Cyclonus is an acceptable sacrifice to him. The Decepticons become the episode’s padding, with the answer to the question “Why can’t we find our way out?!” at the start of the third act clearly being because there’s still five minutes to go before the resolution.

In all, The Dweller in the Depths is a passable third season effort that garners interest purely because of its appealing visuals and slight additions to the history of Cybertron. Beyond that it’s a simple horror yarn in the vein of films such as Friday the 13th (1980), where the ‘last one alive wins’ stereotype almost extends to Arcee, but for her need to reach the safety of authority who can solve the problem for her. Given the number of different factions involved, it’s surprising the plot remains extremely straightforward, and shows the experienced Dini in autopilot mode filling in for friends at the busy Sunbow offices.

[The Huff]

Don't know if you spotted it, but something I always liked in this episode is when Galvatron actually hesitates for a moment when Cyclonus calls for help before continuing to run.

[Pinwig]

Yes! He thinks about it, but then puts himself first. The ultimate coward. It's definitely a post-Webworld Galvatron in the way he thinks about the situation rather than just going in all guns blazing. But without the mania being so strong he is much more about self preservation. Like how he deserts the Decepticons at the end of Fight or Flee.

Cyclonus would have been such a better leader!

[Pinwig]

3.23 – Only Human

Only Human is a third season foray into the fantastic that asks a ‘what if?’ style question by taking four of the series stalwarts and turning them into humans, giving them the problem of finding a way to return to their natural forms. It joins Forever is a Long Time Coming and Madman’s Paradise in not featuring the Decepticons at all (although this wasn’t the original intention, see reference to the synopsis below) and revisits the New York of David Wise’s second season stories twenty years into its future, complete with the associated crooks and villains. Writer Susan K Williams hasn’t left much of an identifiable footprint on the internet, and apart from writing the GI Joe episode The Spy Who Rooked Me around the same time as Only Human, appears to have taken her career in a different direction in subsequent years.

As is common with clutches of sequential episodes in this season, there are similarities between Only Human and other stories around it. The Dweller in the Depths was about as close to being a feature episode for Arcee as she got, and she also features prominently in Only Human, which again eschews the wider pantheon of 1986 toys that dominated the middle of the season to go back to its roots in focusing purely on the movie’s core stars. In this case just Ultra Magnus, Rodimus, Springer and Arcee get real attention, with cameos for four other film characters. Really, this episode is more about the human world.

As well as recurring characters, there are also links to Dweller in that both episodes recycle ideas from GI Joe stories of the previous year. Where the Lovecraftian monsters of Skeletons in the Closet were reimagined as Trans-organics, Only Human goes one step further by taking an idea established in GI Joe and bringing it lock, stock and barrel into the Transformers’ wing of the two shows’ vaguely shared continuity. Marissa Faireborn’s presence in earlier episodes had already connected the Joe and Transformers worlds – a crossover made simpler by the fact the Transformers stories were running twenty years into the future of the concurrently airing GI Joe season.

The first season Joe stories The Synthoid Conspiracy and There’s No Place Like Springfield are the seed from which Only Human grew, both showcasing different aspects of the ‘synthoid’ technology that facilitates the mind transfer in Only Human. Both significant in being two-part stories, in the first, Cobra try to bring down the Joes from within by replicating Duke and the US Military’s top brass using the synthoid technology, and in the second, synthoids are used to create an artificial, Prisoner-esque environment into which Shipwreck, a Joe regular, is put to try and extract secrets from him. Both stories aired at the tail end of 1985, predating Only Human by a year, and there is probably no coincidence that the Springfield two-parter was also written by Steve Gerber, who was firmly ensconced in script editing Transformers by the time of Only Human.

What’s interesting about the GI Joe connection is that it came after the submission of the original idea because the story synopsis makes no reference to Snake or his possible origin, instead keeping the Decepticons as the principle antagonists:

“The minds of Rodimus Prime, Ultra Magnus, Springer, and Arcee are trapped in synthetic human bodies by a human gangster allied with the Decepticons. Can they find their robot forms – and transfer back – in time to stave off a Decepticon attack on earth?”

As originally intended, the story carries the feel of the David Wise ‘Raoul’ stories of the second season, where human villains carry out schemes in the foreground for Decepticons hidden behind the scenes. The original intention seems to have been to have them behind the synthetic human technology, but the connection to GI Joe proved too irresistible for the production team and so Galvatron was replaced by Snake. The resulting story is fast paced and densely scripted, and it’s hard to see how the Decepticons could have been meaningfully fitted into it. Galvatron’s bluster would also conflict with Snake, who as an older version of Cobra Commander occupies the same role in the narrative as the shadowy power behind Drath.

Where The Killing Jar had offered a glimpse of an aged Flint, Only Human brings back his principle adversary, who is clearly identified as such in the script, if not so overtly on screen. His first line in the script is prefixed with the direction “(COBRA COMMANDER'S VOICE!!)” and the unusually verbose cast list for the story describes him as:

“A BUM in a ragged suit, floppy hat, and torn gloves – and COBRA COMMANDER'S METAL MASK! We can see through his torn gloves that the skin of his fingers resembles that of a real snake! In fact, he is Cobra Commander, 20 years later, after his presumed death and the fall of Cobra.”

The reference to his fingers resembling a “real snake” and his “presumed death” is an unusual demonstration of forward thinking on Sunbow’s part as the transformation of Cobra Commander into humanoid snake form happens in GI Joe: The Movie, first seen on its video release in April 1987. Doubtless in production at the same time, Only Human was broadcast well before this on November 13th 1986, allowing the episode to retroactively fit into Joe continuity when Cobra Commander’s fate was revealed five months later. As with Flint’s appearance in The Killing Jar, Snake is voiced by his original GI Joe cast member, in this case Chris Latta, whose portrayal bears more than a passing resemblance to his most famous Cybertronian character: Starscream. The casting note that Snake should wear Cobra Commander’s distinctive metal mask beneath his floppy hat seems altered slightly in the finished episode, perhaps to add an element of ambiguity to the character in the same way his final cry of “Cobraaaaa!” at the end of the story collapses into a coughing fit before he can complete it. However, the distinctive vertical black lines give the impression of the original helmet while coming across more as cloth than mirrored metal, perhaps unless the eye-like circle is intended to be a reflection.

Only Human’s action-packed opening provides another glimpse of the apparently now war-torn future Earth that pops up occasionally during the season. Last seen in the curious mish-mash of European cultures in The Ultimate Weapon, this time it’s New York where the Autobots are again assisting the local Police in trying to keep the peace (in some depth if Rodimus’ “We've been waiting weeks for a break in this case” when talking to Chief Turan is anything to go by). Both episodes open in a similar fashion, showing terrorist activities disrupting the peace. In what must have been a deliberate storyboarding decision, the episode also opens with a long shot of Manhattan showing landmarks such as the Empire State Building and the World Trade Centre being dwarfed by gleaming steel and glass constructions more than twice as high, showing some serious industrial development in the twenty years between seasons two and three. Megatron showed in City of Steel that Cybertronian technology could be used to erect such behemoths, so it seems feasible this new skyline was constructed with more than a little help from the Autobots, just like the EDC space platform in Five Faces. It’s pleasing to see this degree of cohesion in the way the Earth’s backstory is used from episode to episode and again begs the question of how it got into this disturbingly realistic state.

Once the Autobots establish the next step in their investigation, Springer’s comment that Drath is “only human” introduces the moral backbone of the story because it leads to him ignoring the possible consequences of a human being the cause of the disruption. Assuming it to be a trap, but one that won’t cause giant robots any harm, puts the Autobots in trouble and leads to them having to work their way out of the situation in human form, thus learning about the resourcefulness and ingenuity of their diminutive friends in the process. Although Ultra Magnus recognises this just after he becomes human by saying they “underestimated” Drath, Springer remains uninterested in learning the error of his misjudgement, deliberately shown by his short exchange with the ‘Cultist’:

CULTIST: “The Path to True Humanity” – only four ninety-five – tax-deductible!
SPRINGER: Sorry, pal. I'm a robot at heart.

Sadly, the opportunity to explore what the Transformers think and feel about seeing things from a human perspective is largely side-lined amid the need to unfold what is quite a complex plot for the series. Rodimus almost comes to recognise the fragility of the human form when he is shot, calling for the Matrix in a way that suggests he usually uses it for restoration or regeneration when wounded. Another ‘human’ facet is vaguely alluded to through Michelle’s, “It’s called breakfast, dummy” and the way she clings to him the morning after taking him in, subtly suggesting some kind of after-hours engagement, which would also explain her motive in lying to Drath’s men about not seeing him before suddenly handing him over anyway. This seems to be followed up at the end of the episode with Rodimus’ “maybe a little too much” in reply to Perceptor’s question about whether he enjoyed his “sojourn”. More innocently it would be nice to think this is simply a reference to Rodimus enjoying discovering what it was like to see through human eyes and the exciting adventure it led to.

The logic behind using the synthoid technology in the first place is somewhat convoluted, it being that Drath perceives the Transformers as invulnerable, so to destroy them he transfers their consciousness into bodies that he can then kill instead. This last step seems unnecessary if he has access to machinery that can extract their conscious, and it would have been more logical to bottle the Autobot intelligence for future use in the same way Snake suggests reusing their bodies. The conversion process adapts the synthoid technology slightly – originally the synthoids in GI Joe were Blade Runner style sentient replicants that didn’t affect the original they were copied from (indeed at one point Duke fights his own synthoid counterpart in The Synthoid Conspiracy). Here, the synthoids are formed in the same tubes from the same grey globular matter as There’s No Place Like Springfield (called ‘pseudo-plasm’ there) but instead of making a copy under the control of the creator, Rodimus and the others transfer into the bodies leaving their robot shells behind as husks.

This transfer of consciousness is perhaps significant in that it foreshadows a much more in-depth exploration of similar themes in the Headmasters series, after all, the characters in Only Human are only one step short of re-joining their original bodies as heads, but in both instances it demonstrates Transformer intelligence and personality is something that can exist outside a host body. This also concurs with the ideas presented in The Key to Vector Sigma – there are similarities between the way Megatron’s initial drone Stunticons act and the way the Autobots’ bodies are used as weapons here. In addition, Starscream’s Brigade and even SOS Dinobots showed how the ‘brains’ of Transformers are removable from their bodies. What is surprising is just how fast Drath’s laboratory can install the cockpits needed for the human drivers – the Headmasters concept is a much simpler mechanism in that regard.

As humans, it’s comical but inevitable that the four Autobots mimic their Cybertronian forms. Just happening to find working clothes at the dump they escape from is believable, but the bright pinks and greens almost ruin the effect of the Autobots blending into human life for the sake of ensuring the audience recognises the characters. The BA Baracas style dungarees, turned up shirt collars and extended shoulders are also about as 1986 a version of 2006 as you could imagine, making the whole ensemble seem ridiculous to modern eyes (this is a fashion theme that runs through other season three stories with human characters – everyone has huge shoulders). More subtle touches, such as Ultra Magnus’s grey temples distinguishing him as the oldest of the Autobots (he is said to be in his fifties in the script, with reference to Sean Connery’s James Bond as a model). Likewise, the way Arcee’s ‘Farrah Flicks’ curl to suggest the domes of her robot head is more in keeping with the mid-eighties fashion for big hair rollers than giving her the Princess Leia ‘cinnamon buns’ her head is said to be actually modelled on. Interestingly, in these modern times of heated discussion over the sexualisation of Arcee and criticism of her Thrilling 30 toy, her description in the cast list specifically states that her human form should have “a trim build – not buxom”. In contrast, the detail for these two characters points out how plain Rodimus is, despite being the leader. It’s a shame Peter Cullen’s thick black hair and trademark moustache wasn’t an option.

Even the EDC don’t escape the big shoulder treatment with their uniforms, but it’s nice to see the return of the outfit after being largely ignored since their introduction in Five Faces. Their presence at Autobot City, and the human sized entrances and corridors, shows further integration of the two races, and makes the Spike and Sparkplug repairman routine from The Ultimate Weapon seem less unlikely. Kup trundling off into the distance also gives the impression the Autobots are few and far between on Earth (despite Drath recognising the need to remove “an entire city of them”), furthering the idea of Transformers needing to rely on humans as much as the Earth authorities do on them.

Only Human is an unusual but engaging episode, brought about through a cleverly worked plot that provides each of the four main Autobots with their own intertwining plot threads. Regardless of the mechanics of the consciousness transfer, the story itself is fascinating in the way it comes together and there are plenty of nice touches that range from simple smile inducing moments like Springer piloting his own body, to others that show a real familiarity with the subject matter – such as Magnus suggesting that attacking Metroplex will trigger his transformation into battle station mode.

The speed with which the resolution plays out at the end, with the last three scenes tying up the various characters’ plots taking less than a minute of screen time, serves only to show how complicated it is. This doesn’t detract from the enjoyment of watching it though, and to work in a denouement that includes Autobot City under threat without the Decepticons is something of a rarity. Previous episodes that haven’t featured them leave the viewer feeling something is missing, but in this case their absence isn’t noticeable. Offering the idea of Cobra as the hidden threat behind the typical New York crooks is tantalising to say the least, and is something that recurs repeatedly in the comic continuities. The first issue of GI Joe and the Transformers had appeared on newsstands two months before this episode aired, and while the Sunbow office may have got wind of Marvel’s intention to publish a crossover series, the eventual decline of Hasbro’s association with Sunbow made Only Human the last chance Flint Dille and Steve Gerber had to unite the two properties they loved the most.

[Pinwig]

This one was quite awkward to write. Lots of ideas that didn't fit together. I think I've edited and rearranged so much I've lost track of what I was doing, so if it's bitty I apologise.

3.24 – Grimlock’s New Brain

Grimlock’s New Brain is significant in that it marks the arrival of the first 1987 toys in the series, airing in November 1986 just before they would have begun to appear in shops. Written by established series staffer Paul Davids (see Cosmic Rust for more on his role at Marvel), it’s something of a return to form for him after the messy debacle of A Thief in the Night, but not quite as outstanding as his earlier stories.

Given its focus on the Technobots and Terrorcons, it is perhaps something of a surprise to find that it wasn’t originally conceived as an introduction story for either of the new combining teams. The unexplained appearance of Hun-Gurrr and his crew makes that much clear, but the careful introduction of each of the Technobots as rounded characters and some subtle details (such as the appearance of Scattershot’s often forgotten weapons mode) makes it seem odd that Davids wasn’t pitching for the job of bringing in the new guys from the start. Instead, he has said in interviews that the story was initially just about Grimlock – one of his favourite characters – and the Technobots came afterwards:

“The basic plot of Grimlock's New Brain could still have worked without the Technobots. But as per Hasbro, it was necessary to use the story to introduce the Technobots. As it worked out, it was probably a better episode for it, because it gave pathos to the ending to have Grimlock deliberately sacrifice his new-found intelligence for the benefit of the new Autobot group.” [1]

Unfortunately, the story’s synopsis doesn’t give much indication of what Davids’ original intention might have been, only that the solution to the anti-electron problem would have come more directly from Grimlock instead:

“When an accident causes the Dinobot, Grimlock, to become a super genius, he’s the Autobot’s only hope against the Decepticon’s latest scheme. What will be the genius Grimlock’s solution? And who are the incredible Technobots?”

It’s somewhat surprising that Grimlock was afforded a feature episode this late in the day, but his lasting popularity as a character comes from the humorous slant put on his movie guise. He also features prominently in Call of the Primitives, which also includes the rest of the Dinobots properly for the first time in the season – oddly just as their long presence in shops was coming to an end. Davids has said that he favoured the “characters that provided an opportunity for some humor”, and that Grimlock endured because of this:

“After the movie, we had so many new characters to deal with, we could only let a somewhat limited selection of the earlier characters still be featured. Grimlock was simply among the most memorable, for his delightful stupidity and egocentricity – he was the Dinobot who was like a very spoiled two-year old child in his 'NO!!' phase. The movie might have over-exaggerated this to some extent, and the episode writers just kept the ‘game’ going.”

Davids has also said that it was a deliberate decision to keep Grimlock in his dinosaur mode throughout the episode, again because of the overt humour in him becoming super-intelligent in this form:

“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.’”

The writer’s affection for humorous characters and extensive knowledge of the series would also explain the return of both the mercenary Skuxxoid from earlier in the season, and his second season equivalent, Slizardo – last seen leaving Lord Gyconi’s employ to become a bounty hunter with Devcon at the end of The Gambler.

Less humorous is the inspiration for the story, cited by Davids as being the 1968 film Charly (an adaptation of Daniel Keyes’ 1966 novel, Flowers for Algernon, in turn expanded from a short story published in the April 1959 edition of The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction). Of all the literary sources used to inspire Transformers episodes, this one is probably the most successful because of the way Grimlock’s eventual sacrifice incorporates emotional as well as narrative ideas from the original text. In it, Charlie Gordon (a plastics factory caretaker with an unusually low IQ) is selected to undergo an operation to increase his intelligence after the experimental process is successfully tested on a laboratory mouse called Algernon. As Charlie’s intelligence increases, his perception of the society he lives in changes – as does other people’s view of him. When Algernon’s intelligence fails and the mouse dies, Charlie realises his new-found brilliance is only temporary, leading to an emotionally powerful conclusion as he struggles to accept both changing back and the pity of those around him.

The story is as much about our perception of others as it is the nature of intelligence, which makes Grimlock’s somewhat underplayed sacrifice to imbue the Technobots with his wisdom more resonant. This is possibly where their incorporation into the story most affects it – denying Grimlock the screen time necessary to explore the decay of his new brain. Ironically, Grimlock’s portrayal in the series has seen a degradation in his intellect from his introduction anyway; as episodes such as Madman’s Paradise showed, the brutal but ambitious Dinobot leader of the first season had long since been replaced by an apron wearing buffoon – but the opening scene of this episode dials that up even further to emphasise the point with the button pressing slap-stick. It’s impossible to see the original Grimlock calling himself “silly”, but the setup is necessary to emphasise the change to come, which is then reinforced with the breaking of the electro-map and Grimlock’s feeling of rejection when treated like a difficult child. The viewer is encouraged to laugh at him, just as they’re encouraged to rankle at his conceit when putting down Perceptor’s “limited” mental abilities a few minutes later.

The fact the Autobots are trying to replace Perceptor’s new power core from two episodes previously (The Dweller in the Depths) is a pleasing continuity link, and although specific reference isn’t made to the earlier episode, the gradual rejuvenation of Cybertron post-Decepticon control continues to form a loose backbone to the series as much as the peace conferences did earlier on. Why the generator exploding should alter Grimlock’s intelligence is one of the episode’s major unexplained plot points – especially when it’s emitting the anti-electrons that are damaging the other Transformers. Similarly, it seems odd that Unicron, who is essentially a planet sized Transformer, should have a brain full of the things.

Unicron being their source also raises another knotty continuity point. When Slizardo drops the canister of anti-electrons at the start, the Skuxxoid says, “Good thing you didn't break it, ‘cause Galvatron says he searched the whole universe for more, and he couldn't find any”. Grimlock then later identifies “the source of the anti-electrons was Unicron, before his body exploded”, which is what puts him on to thinking that’s where the Decepticons would go to find more. It’s Slizardo who reveals Unicron as the source to Galvatron though, so if he didn’t give Galvatron the original supply, who did? And how did they extract them from Unicron while the planet-eater was still whole?

That pedantry aside, the biggest unexplained problem the episode presents is of how Grimlock gives the Technobots life without using Vector Sigma to do it. While there are any number of retro-fits that could explain this, the on-screen evidence is limited to the fact that Grimlock didn’t become sentient using the super-computer either, and Perceptor’s wish that Dinobots had “more sophisticated brains” perhaps intentionally recalls their original creation by Ratchet and Wheeljack as being abnormal. Computron does claim to “lack the intelligence” to feed his “computation capacity” when considering how to defeat Abominus, but the Technobots themselves don’t exhibit the slow thinking of the Dinobots, or the initial brainlessness of the Stunticons, leaving the method of their creation unreconcilable with the existing continuity.

Unlike Charlie Gordon, Grimlock’s return to his original state doesn’t seem to faze him and he considers it “much more better to be good ol’ Dinobot Grimlock” to ensure the episode doesn’t end on a dour note, but with the Autobots laughing at him again instead. Perhaps there isn’t space in a children’s cartoon to fully explore the consequences of this reversal, but his earlier decision that, “You will now receive my intelligence, Computron. And I will return to my former state” does provide a poignantly emotional moment for the show. In the scene prior to this he tells Scattershot, “I won't be of use to you much longer”, which could mean as with Charlie he knows his intelligence is about to decay, but the story doesn’t seem to follow that path and Davids has said Grimlock’s sacrifice was deliberate, making it read as if he knows he will need to donate his intelligence to the Technobots to ‘complete’ them. As such he is making a choice to give up his intelligence rather than having it taken away from him. In that regard, Nosecone’s suggestion that he is their father seems apt.

This sacrifice is what makes the episode work: the gruff and distant Dinobot leader displaying a compassionate side revealed only by his intellectual elevation. It’s interesting how this suggests love is a product of intelligence (in contrast to the war that comes from Grimlock’s usual barbaric state) which makes for an unusually deep moral point for the viewer to chew on. Really this comes part and parcel with the source material used, but is reinterpreted just enough to make it unique to the episode and Grimlock’s character. While Charlie Gordon sought to cling on to his intelligence for as long as possible, trying to avoid the descent into his former life, Grimlock embraces it for the sake of bettering the Autobot cause and giving life to his creations. Whether he is the right character for this story is a separate question, and quirks like him carrying out his scientific experiments with tiny Tyrannosaur arms and making his big sacrifice while wearing a comical tin hat subtly preserve an element of the humour his elevated state tries to leave behind, but the underlying idea can’t fail to make Grimlock’s New Brain one of the most thought provoking third season stories. The fact it also introduces ten new Transformers in a plot that manages to integrate half of them properly at short notice is an added bonus, on the whole making it essential, if flawed, viewing.



[1] While it seems the decision to incorporate the Technobots came early enough for the narrative to be adapted to suit them, the same can’t be said of the Terrorcons, whose sheepish debut stood behind Galvatron is almost comical in the way it goes uncommented on. Their handling in the story points to a situation similar to the one the Protectobots suffered in the second season – the last team to be added and the least well served. Sinnertwin is the only one listed as having a speaking part in the episode’s cast list, and it appears to have been recorded as such, but by the time it was animated his first line was changed to come from Hun-Gurrr instead (both characters are verbally indistinguishable in later episodes, making it hard to be sure). Perhaps the only speaking Terrorcon in this episode was intended to be the group leader, and the fact both Hun-Gurrr and Sinnertwin are two headed dragons caused a mix-up. This is further suggested by it being Sinnertwin who later calls for the team to merge into Abominus. The dialogue script also ascribes a line to Blot during the Terrorcons’ first conversation with Galvatron (“Destroy! Destroy!”) but this uses one of Sinnertwin’s voices as well and is overlaid on a shot with Blot’s back to the camera, again indicating a late attempt to spread the recorded lines among the group.

In addition to this, it’s worth noting that the debut of these new teams in this episode on November 14th 1986 is roughly parallel to the Aerialbots and Stunticons on November 21st 1985, which would suggest a similar gestation period. Documentation explored under The Key to Vector Sigma showed that Sunbow first became aware of those combiners in July 1985. If that was roughly the same for the Terrorcons, the development process can be traced back further because recently unearthed paperwork revealed a design sketch for Hun-Gurrr’s beast form which has “86 3/19” written in one corner. This could be read as 19th March 1986, showing that it took eight months from conception to the finished character appearing on screen, and a further few months for the toys to appear (presumably around the start of 1987).

www.allspark.com/2017/09/even-more-diaclone-and-g1-concept-art-fortress-x-hun-gurrr-and-mobile-command-base/



Technobots – The Next Big Thing?

Being broadcast in the autumn, each new season of the Transformers eventually reached a point where it began to introduce toys from the following year’s range. Otherwise, with no new episodes for the first nine months of the year, the earliest releases would be old hat by the time the next season started broadcasting. As with any new toys brought into the series, how well this was accomplished seems to come down to a combination of the lead time on Hasbro’s requirement to feature them and the interest of the story editors at the time. However, another factor that began to become increasingly noticeable during the third season was the diminishing interest Hasbro had in cartoons, and comparing the debuts of the Technobots and Terrorcons with their forebears from the year before highlights this.

The first season successfully integrated many of the 1985 toys into what became the series’ most consistent narrative because story editors Bryce Malek and Dick Robbins had the benefit from the outset of knowing what the toys were. The thirteen episodes largely became a framework for new character origin stories because the initial toy range had all been crammed into the original mini-series. The care with which this was done shows a conscious desire to world build and produce an enthralling ongoing narrative under Marvel’s guidance.

In contrast, the enormous number of second season debutants – all required by Hasbro to have their own focus stories – affected the way an evolving narrative could unfold. An ongoing story that had to stop each week to find a new way to introduce a new character would have become very repetitive, and the decision to have characters appear en-mass as if they’d always been there also meant episodes weren’t restricted to a specific running order. It wasn’t until the last ten episodes, when the new characters were once again grouped into teams (as with the Dinobots, Insecticons and Constructicons) that logical introductions could be constructed to bring them in with a purpose. The special focus given to the combiners also shows the importance that Hasbro assigned to them.

The third season found a middle ground between the extremes. It had the benefit of the movie acting as a mini-series length introduction for the core cast, and the vague excuse that in the months after the Autobots regained control of Cybertron others returned home from the far reaches of space – neatly excusing the sudden appearance of characters like Sky Lynx. Others, like the Predacons, were at least acknowledged as being new, even if their arrival wasn’t fully explained, and some, like Sandstorm and (arguably) Octane, were given full blown introduction stories. In that regard there doesn’t appear to have been a policy on how introductions were handled in the third season; Hasbro determined which toys should appear and how many times and the story editors would break that down into episodes. How writers accommodated that was up to them. Grimlock’s New Brain is a good indication of the haphazard nature of this planning as writer Paul Davids has said the instruction to include the Technobots came after he’d formed his initial idea.

The few 1987 toys that were brought into the end of the third season (just the two combiner teams and the Decepticon cassettes Slugfest and Overkill) show how Hasbro’s interest in cartoons was beginning to change. While the first four combining teams had those ten episodes set aside to promote their impending arrival, the Technobots and Terrorcons were wedged into a handful of episodes at the end of this season. While the Terrorcons were afforded a run of three stories – the usual number assigned to focus on a single new toy – the Technobots only managed this episode and the next before becoming part of the standard cast in the much later produced The Return of Optimus Prime. Arguably, the new combiners were continuing a gimmick rather than launching one (and were very much in the outgoing style of Diaclone design, superseded by the bigger, bulkier Hasbro originated toys), but the lack of fanfare for ‘the next big thing’ is noticeable. This downsizing would eventually reach extreme proportions when the entirety of the Headmasters line was fitted into just three episodes in 1987, shortly before Hasbro withdrew from using cartoons as a marketing tool completely.

[Philip Ayres]

Andu's favorite episode.

[blueshift]

Oct 1, 2017 10:01:27 GMT Philip Ayres said:

Andu's favorite episode.

Oh come on, we all know nothing can topple Rebirth for him!!!!

[Philip Ayres]

It introduces his favourite characters!

[Andy Turnbull]

Silence!!

[Pinwig]

3.25 – Money is Everything

Having written Forever is a Long Time Coming at the beginning of the season, Gerry and Carla Conway returned with their second and final Transformers story, Money is Everything, toward the end. Ostensibly another promotional piece for the Technobots and Terrorcons, it bears many similarities to the Conways’ previous story and expands on the unique perspective they had on the series. Most notably, as with A3 and Beta before, it prioritises original characters over the existing cast – in this case bringing back the rarely seen Marissa Faireborn and introducing the roguish space trader Dirk Manus. It’s likely an experienced writer such as Conway chose to do this to put something of his own creativity into the series, but it’s also a neat trick to avoid potential continuity clashes with the long-established histories of the regular cast. There is also a deliberate attempt to humanise the narratives in his stories – because of their appearance and distance from the usual cast, A3 and Beta come across as very ‘human’, and in Money is Everything Marissa and Dirk become the focus characters. The Transformers themselves are almost incidental characters in both tales, but more so in Money, which is more about the human world than it is the Cybertronians’.

Because of that, there’s no back story here framed by the core characters as would usually be the case. Rodimus is mentioned in passing as having assigned the Technobots to the science station on Earth, and that’s all that gives the story a point of reference. Instead, Marissa is the focal character who holds the narrative together, with the Technobots played almost as her support team. Equally, the Terrorcons are without the other Decepticons, and it’s the shadowy Quintessons who determine their actions.

The reappearance of Marissa and the Quintessons gives the episode an early season three feel. This makes sense in that the Conways would have based their approach to writing it on their previous experience, which was heavily tied to the world built up by Five Faces of Darkness. As the season went on, it began to move away from Flint Dille’s original foundation, but it’s reasonable to assume that the Conways would return to the toolset they were originally provided with. While Forever came across as an idea heavily scaffolded to fit the narrative set up by Five Faces, Money is Everything feels much more like the writers taking that experience and developing their own idea.

That said, the decision to bring the human characters to the fore and push the new Transformers into supporting roles doesn’t harm the presence of either faction in the episode. While Hun-Gurrr and Scattershot don’t get the screen time and responsibility incumbent with being leaders, the absence of any other characters means that the Technobots at least are all given identifiably individual traits and personalities – as much as the Stunticons and Aerialbots were in The Key to Vector Sigma at any rate. As well as trying to instil their characteristics into the dialogue, the writers also use stage direction for the delivery of lines to differentiate them in the script. Scattershot’s first line is prefixed with “(HAIL-FELLOW WELL-MET)” to express his soldierly persona, and Strafe’s with “(FULL OF NERVOUS ENERGY)” to echo the anxiety mentioned in his biography. Similarly, David Workman’s measured delivery of Nosecone’s lines matches the ‘slow and methodical’ theme of his tech-spec, which sets off Afterburner’s noted aggressive tendencies. Comically, Lightspeed’s nature as a daydreamer is communicated by the script saying his voice should carry the mellowness of Bing Crosby, but his desire to explore space is picked up with, “I can’t believe I’m finally out here” when the Technobots reach Saturn – leading to a short conversation with an uninterested Strafe about his dream of navigating the stars which is purely there to verbalise his tech-specs. In this regard, while it may not be immediately apparent when watching, the subtleties of the different Technobots are communicated well.

Seeing the Technobots as individuals only serves to reinforce the peculiarity of Computron – the variety of personalities that make up the whole don’t seem to match, and given the technological/computational theme of the team it seems odd that individually their personalities have very little to do with that. Scattershot’s brash warrior stance, Lightspeed’s daydreaming, Afterburner’s defiance, Nosecone’s caution and Strafe’s nervousness don’t naturally lead to a monolithic thinking machine. In the last episode, Paul Davids’ approach to solving this was to make out that before adding Grimlock’s super-intelligence to their combined form it was pretty much an empty shell with the capacity but not the intelligence to compute. This creates something of a disconnect as the five individuals, although well written by the Conways, make up a combined form which is pretty much just Nosecone’s character with a deeper voice. Bob Budianski’s Marvel biography is clearer on why the difference exists, which explains it’s because of the variety of individual personalities that Computron becomes a slow thinking gestalt – having to process the opinion of each individual member before reaching a conclusion. The difference is subtle, but leaves the cartoon version somewhat disjointed in comparison.

That said, the Technobots fair better than the Terrorcons again, who occupy an odd position in this episode as stooges not of Galvatron, but the Quintessons. Narratively speaking, it’s possible to reconcile this as Galvatron borrowing the Terrorcons from the Quintessons in the last episode under their shaky alliance, because the other Decepticon beast combining team, the Predacons, also seemed to originate from the Quintessons (Five Faces - Part Five). The timer used to control the Terrorcons’ actions also suggests they’re a recent Quintesson creation – and this point was obviously one important enough to push as the line “No choice! Master set timer to control us!” after Rippersnapper questions why they’re not continuing to chase the Technobots isn’t in the dialogue script and may have been an afterthought to make their situation clear. At any rate, they are only ever referred to as Terrorcons in this episode, without the word Decepticon being mentioned in relation to them or anyone else.

While the difference between Sinnertwin and Hun-Gurrr had been sorted out by the time this episode was made (see the footnote to the previous episode), the Terrorcons continued to be less well defined than the Technobots. They come across as less intelligent even than Soundwave’s beast cassettes, and (like the equally simple-minded third season Dinobots) appear to prefer their beast modes to their robot forms. In addition, Rippersnapper is called ‘Frenzy’ in the cast list, indicating the characters still hadn’t been properly finalised[1]. The only one who gains any characterisation is Hun-Gurrr, despite continued inconsistencies in the spelling of his name. His constant desire to eat is shown in his first line, “Hun-Grr, HUNGRY!” and continues through his dialogue. None of the others show any of their tech-spec characteristics in meaningful ways.

In fairness, the comic was equally dismissive of them, with three of the five members never receiving the extended biography treatment that made up the Transformers Universe entries. Abominus doesn’t even have an English tech spec because the Terrorcons weren’t sold in a giftset in the West, and is portrayed as a simple war machine – an unthinking monster whose sole purpose is devastation. This is perhaps the only way these two completely different teams could be paired with each other as rivals – brain versus brawn – and becomes the deciding factor in the battle between them at the end. Computron favours Abominus’s brute strength as the deciding factor, putting the odds in his favour, but his analysis of his opponent’s attack leads him to work out a strategy that wins the fight.

The tussle between these two teams is a surprisingly small part of the episode though, with the writers clearly having much more fun playing with the human characters and their interpretation of the Transformers universe. The Star Wars style space opera backdrop they painted previously depicted the Transformer/Quintesson conflict as a war being fought strategically by fleets of spaceships and armies of Sharkticon troops. The plot-establishing conversations in this episode carry the same feel – with Manus talking about Hun-Gurrr’s pursuit of him being the result of finding a “Quintesson base I came across on one of the terraformed moons out near Saturn.”[2] Not only does this present the Quintessons again in a militaristic light – slowly encroaching on Earth by building staging posts in the solar system – but it reinforces the position of humans as a spacefaring species integrating with alien races. These few lines are carefully constructed not only to set up the backstory of Manus’s secret, revealing the shady business dealings of the Quintessons have now reached the human world, but also to make the story feel as though it’s happening in a pre-existing, real universe as opposed to a throwaway artificial setup. Manus claiming to be from Epsilon Ariadne is another example of this – while it’s very unlikely that in the twenty years since 1986 humans have colonised other planets long enough to see the first off-Earth births, certainly for someone of Dirk’s apparent age, it adds to the sense that the story is happening in a wider universe, rather than being the universe itself. Later, the Quintessons mention the molecular disassembler is “crucial to our operation in this solar system”, suggesting it’s a teleport device they intend to use to ‘beam’ an army directly onto the Earth. Galvatron has also expressed an interest in Earth as a strategic part of his plan to conquer Cybertron (Carnage in C Minor among others), so it makes sense the Quintessons should do the same.

Once Marissa and Dirk meet, the story becomes a neatly plotted combination of their interaction and the character development that comes with it. It perhaps seems odd to put two incidental characters centre stage in a story primarily concerned with pushing toys, but many episodes have shown that bringing human characters to the fore can have the effect of making the Transformers feel more a part of the world around them. This is touched on in the way the Technobots make observations about the growing relationship between Marissa and Dirk, starting with Lightspeed’s “Just another odd human custom, I suppose” when he kisses her hand (audibly, if not in the animation) when they first meet. This has the effect of reminding the audience that the Transformers are aliens themselves – something the series played on more strongly in the early episodes with Spike’s observations, but lost in the later (particularly third season) stories that treat the Transformers almost as human characters themselves. This is another example of how the Conways’ spin on the series shifts the viewers’ perspective slightly – expanding on Flint Dille’s attempts to show the Transformers are part of a wider universe, rather than the be all and end all of the series.

It also has the knock on effect of giving Dirk and Marissa more character depth than humans usually get, necessary if they’re carrying the plot. Dirk’s moustachioed, suave countenance is much in the mould of silver screen scoundrels of the Errol Flynn variety, and the constantly twisting question of his loyalty keeps the viewer guessing. Meanwhile, Marissa’s previously strong position as an EDC captain (recall how it was she who effectively saved the day in The Killing Jar by making Ultra Magnus and Cyclonus see eye-to-eye) is weakened somewhat by her inability to evade Dirk’s charm. To a modern perspective the ‘swooning female’ feels dated, and the scene in which the two dine and dance is possibly the most left-field of the entire series. The writers try hard to build the relationship in very little screen time, and there are some fantastically cheesy shortcuts inserted to help, such as the dreadful “If you weren't who you are... and if I weren't who I am... maybe we could've had something special” – just begging to be mumbled by Humphry Bogart standing on a foggy airport runway. Marissa does at least stand her ground, and knocking Dirk to the floor when she catches up with him after he leaves her tied up is a great moment, sadly undermined by her “in spite of all you've done, part of me almost likes you too”, seconds later when he tries to excuse himself by claiming his actions were “nothing personal”. The final payoff though, with both characters laughing at each other’s ingenuity, does provide some balance.

It’s easy to point at the Harrison Ford/Carrie Fisher chemistry of the Star Wars films (1977-1983) as possible inspiration for the relationship itself, what with Marissa being the straight-laced upholder of good and Dirk a morally ambivalent trader, but his physical appearance makes their love/hate relationship seem modelled more on something like the Burt Reynolds/Sally Fields dynamic of Smokey and the Bandit (1977). It’s also possibly no coincidence that he shares a first name with Dirk Benedict, whose portrayals of Starbuck (Battlestar Galactica, 1978) and Templeton Peck (The A-Team, 1983) are derivative of both the Bandit and Han Solo.

Of all the third season writers who sought to put their own spin on the series, Gerry and Carla Conway are among the most successful. Both this episode and Forever is a Long Time Coming provide a consistent look at a unique world that tried to move the Transformers closer to the sci-fi of the post-Star Wars era, replete with galaxy-spanning battles and character stereotypes lifted straight from the silver screen. Their stories don’t feel quite as self-contained as something like The Ultimate Weapon, but blend the series’ existing expectations with just enough originality to make them stand out. Original touches, such as the Transformers largely being under the control of an external party all the time (the Quintessons in Forever, and again here as well as Marissa) and not focussing on the usual characters, as well as small differences such as the way the story takes time to develop all the characters, are enough to make the viewer aware they’re not watching a run of the mill episode, but one that the writers’ have put some thought into how to make uniquely appealing.


[1] There doesn’t seem to have been a deliberate intention to reuse the name. Rippersnapper’s tech-spec notes that the smell of organic lifeforms sends him into a “ferocious frenzy”, which might have seemed like an appropriate choice for a name until someone spotted it had already been taken.

[2] The terraformed moon is later mentioned by Marissa as being Titan – the one on which Perceptor and Jazz helped Talaria lead a revolt against Astrotrain and the High Priest Jero in The God Gambit. It seems unlikely the Conways would have known this, but in terms of preserving the show’s continuity it raises the appetising question of who did the terraforming and why. Did the Quintessons vanquish Talara’s people and take over? Or did the now spacefaring human race strike a deal with them to develop their moon, given it evidently had a breathable atmosphere?

[Pinwig]

3.26 – Call of the Primitives

Donald Glut was part of the regular Transformers writing team under first and second season editors Bryce Malek and Dick Robbins, but set aside with the other main contributors at the start of the third season when Sunbow moved control of scriptwriting duties in-house. Given he was the man who effectively created the Dinobots though, writing both their introductory episodes, it’s not impossible to think the production team saw him as something of an expert on the subject and a natural fit for Call of the Primitives. It’s not clear whether Glut pitched the idea or if it was offered to him, but for Glut, a self-professed dinosaur enthusiast (see Dinobot Island – Part One), the chance to write the last Dinobot focussed story of the series and crown them kings among the other ‘beast’ Transformers may have seemed like a golden opportunity. Sadly, he is generally dismissive of his Transformers work and despite the potential appeal of the idea, it hasn’t left a lasting impression on him. When asked about its origin by the Cybertron Chronicle website he said, “It was probably one of the plot elements Flint came up with. I have no recollection of anyone named Primacron and only a vague memory of Unicron. I really don’t think any of my Transformers episodes was particularly good, in terms of script writing and then in the way they came out.”

Despite this dour perspective, what the episode does offer is the chance to evaluate Glut’s writing away from the heavy editing of Ron Friedman. Copies of Friedman’s scripts in the public domain show how his role in keeping the character dialogue uniform often meant wholesale rewriting, and Glut’s scripts appear to be among those most heavily altered. Freed of that restraint and placed instead under Sunbow’s editors, Call of the Primitives perhaps shows us something truer to Glut’s own style, particularly in the interaction between the beast Transformers.

As is often the case with third season stories, this episode’s original intention seems to have expanded during writing to accommodate additional ideas. In this case, the original synopsis seems simpler than the final story in that it focusses on the idea of the ‘Primitive’ Transformers being summoned to do battle with the newest and greatest of them, giving the impression of something akin to gladiatorial combat:

“The Dinobots, Predacons, and Terrorcons desert their fellow Transformers in the midst of a life and death struggle. What is the mysterious ‘Call of the Primitives’, and can anything stop the energy creature Tornedron, who is sweeping the galaxy?”

This feels very Glut-like in origin, carrying over themes of strength and animal instinct from stories such as Dinobot Island, and perhaps even the ‘clash of the titans’ nature of Heavy Metal War; it’s about spectacle and raw power and notably doesn’t mention Primacron. The final episode preserves this aspect by being very battle-heavy, which is visually arresting (especially with the animation style used), but is devoid of any real depth in exploring the motives or thoughts of the characters. It would have been a great opportunity to examine the lingering question of exactly how different these beast Transformers are to the others, but even Grimlock’s New Brain showed that when offered the chance to do a bit of soul searching, the series shied away from philosophical or psychological questions to remain as light as possible. Instead, to develop the story beyond being a simple battle royale, it’s linked with an attempt to explain Unicron’s origin – on the surface something that doesn’t seem like a natural link, but is perhaps vaguely connected by the theme of strength and power.

The result almost works, and comes across as an action-packed tale that moves at a frantic pace from the very start. Glut ignores the need to explain why the two sides are fighting on the moon to provide a snappy, attention grabbing opening. It carries the feel of the battle scenes from Transformers: The Movie, and the crashing film music and constant gunfire recall the intensity of the Battle of Autobot City. Much of the episode is fighting punctuated by pauses for characters to deliver gung-ho lines that explain the next set piece, with early dialogue such as Rodimus’s “If the Decepticons had any guts, we’d be taking a serious pounding” mirroring Blaster’s similar, “The Decepticons are blitzing Autobot City! We're really takin' a pounding!” on the big screen. Characters speak and act more like their film versions that ever, suggesting for these ensemble scenes Glut used it for character references. An example is Springer’s reply to Rodimus, “I got news for you. This isn't any picnic”, which perfectly matches his dry, “I got better things to do tonight than die” resilience of the film.

It's with the beasts, though, that Glut’s dialogue really shines. Thankfully he doesn’t seem to have been aware of Snarl’s absence from the film, and he is reinstated with a speaking part here, although Sludge is mistakenly called ‘Sweep’ when the Oracle first calls to the Dinobots. The journey in Trypticon is undoubtedly the highlight of the episode and the verbal sparring between the various groups is reminiscent of the Decepticons arguing about who should lead them as they travel back to Cybertron in the film. Headstrong sniping at Grimlock, Snarl’s protective response and the scuffle that ensues shows Glut in his element – capped by the especially dim-witted Terrorcons lurching into the fray to fight everyone regardless of their allegiance like a drunk at closing time who can’t remember who he came to the pub with.

The heavy focus on action could be one reason why this episode was given to an animation studio other than Toei or AKOM. Its visual style is heavily influenced by a more traditional anime look than is usual for the series, and undeniably the non-stop fighting benefits hugely from the dynamism of the visuals and superlative attention to detail. Whether it was an artistic, financial or scheduling decision that led to this happening isn’t clear, but the match is well made[1].

While the battle scenes show that the episode does action very well, the Primacon plot underlying them is somewhat more troublesome. There seems to be a deliberate intention to explain Unicron’s origin in a fashion that belittles him as a failed experiment, one-upped by his replacement Tornedron, but the ambiguous and unexplained allusions to the Matrix also being a product of Primacron’s research make the sub-plot more confusing than revelatory.

If Glut is right and the idea came from Flint Dille, it’s possible to see how these vagaries occurred. Documents in the public domain for the previous season show how Dille would send one-line ideas to potential writers to encourage them to develop pitches, and ‘Unicron’s origin story’ sounds like something he might dash off given his desire to use the series to expand ideas from the film. Passing this to a writer not heavily invested in the movie mythology could then lead to ambiguities, especially if the eventual script editing wasn’t tight enough to spot them.

Having opted to use the Quintessons as the driving force for the series, Dille may have seen Unicron as being less important than he would become in fan-lore and other continuities in subsequent years. The Marvel comics, particularly in the UK, made him an essential figure in the origin of the Transformers, but with the Quintessons doing that in the series, Unicron’s place is diminished to the point that he is not much more than an inflated villain of the week. His third season presence seems to support this, with Ghost in the Machine his only episode of note. It’s possible that with Unicron essentially being Ron Friedman’s creation, Dille deliberately chose to side line him.

This would explain the rapidity with which Tornedron is installed as Unicron Plus, doing what his forebear couldn’t in a fraction of the time. His initial attack on Cybertron – draining it of power without any opposition – is designed to show how much more powerful he is. His attack compacts the motive of the entire movie into a few seconds, which not only makes him out to be hugely overpowered, but derides the climax of the film, making it nothing more than a prologue to this episode. Tornedron is explained as being more effective because he is a being made of energy rather than matter, but the cartoon has done this before with characters such as Kremzeek, and Tornedron conveniently turns into a giant spider anyway to give him some screen presence and to conform to the episode’s ‘Primitive’ theme.

Despite the premise being that energy creatures are more powerful than physical ones, the Oracle seems to think the opposite and syphons the beast Transformers off from the others to combat Tornedron. It believes their simple natures will be the perfect antidote to Primacron’s “infinitely complex plans”, suggesting the beast-formers have some latent ability to overcome his newest creation. This equates might with matter and intelligence with energy for the purpose of defining the two sides in the story, which is eventually resolved in ironic fashion by Grimlock uniting the two to overcome Primacron. It’s a shame at this point that what feels like the episode’s originally intended climax – the showdown between the beasts and Tornedron – is so one sided. It has to be because of the way Tornedron has been established as all-powerful, but the rapidity with which it dispatches them (notably starting with the biggest, Trypticon) makes the whole ‘call’ sequence anticlimactic.

However, this is only the tip of the iceberg when it comes to unpicking the complications introduced by the Oracle’s “tale of long ago”. The Oracle explaining that Primacron made the Primitives seems to imply that he, rather than the Quintessons, is responsible for creating the beast Transformers. This appears to be why Sky Lynx says, “I believe we’re coming home”, when they arrive on the planet, but of course this makes no sense in terms of established continuity – especially in the case of the Dinobots, whose Earth origin was written by Glut.

The Oracle is also strange in that it appears initially as a pool of convulsing light, mystical and with an echoing voice, in contrast to the humanoid/simian nature of Primacron – a character who is established as the Oracle’s superior. This leads to the most confusing point in the episode – the suggestion that the Oracle is somehow connected to the Matrix. Glut’s original script states the Oracle is “the ‘energy force’ of a former Transformer ‘Primitive’” and in the script the Oracle refers to itself as Primacron’s “assistant”, with the inverted commas. Perhaps ‘assistant’ then is misleading, and the Oracle was actually part of the process Primacron was using to create the Primitives. This might make it analogous to something like Vector Sigma, and in the wake of Unicron’s attack on Primacron, it’s sentient nature meant it took the opportunity to escape destruction – explaining why in the flashback it’s the Matrix that appears to rise from the devastation. The purpose of the Matrix in the cartoon is never properly defined, other than it being a method of accessing the wisdom of the ancients (Five Faces – Part Four), so there’s nothing to dispute this being its origin. What it doesn’t explain is how it can simultaneously exist on this planet as a shimmering light, and in the chests of the successive Autobot Primes. It’s possible it could exist in many places at once, but it’s the container associated with being in the chest of successive Primes that is shown to be the Oracle’s escape ‘vessel’.

This would retroactively give a reason why Unicron sought to destroy the Matrix in the film – something else which is never adequately explained beyond him knowing the whole ‘light our darkest hour’ bit would cause his downfall. This episode suggests what he was doing was trying to finish his mission to become supreme by removing the possibility of something more powerful than him being created – such as Tornedron. Believing that he had beaten Primacron, destroying the Oracle/Matrix would be the last step he needed to take. It’s entirely possible this is the real intent of the episode – not only to give Unicron an origin, but explain his intentions in the film – however it’s hidden behind so many layers of conjecture that it’s hard to know.[2]

As a viewer, if you’re willing to accept all this, it does make enough sense to work. It’s haphazard and ill-explained, but separates the Matrix from the Quintesson version of the origin story and gives it a history in the context of the cartoon universe (which, like Unicron, is easy to confuse with the much grander place it holds in the comics). The fact the story wants to focus on this mythology leaves it with a problem in that the impossibly powerful Tornedron has to be gotten rid of in some way, which leads to the swift and largely unsatisfying conclusion of Grimlock proving his strength (surviving being squashed by Trypticon) and intelligence (apparently his special ‘Primitive’ way of thinking means he can see things Primacron overlooks) can save the day.

This is where it becomes most clear that the narrative of the Primitives being called to the Oracle simply becomes the mechanism by which the origin story can be told, rather than the build-up to the titanic clash the first act suggests is coming, and having done that, the plot involving Tornedron is tied up as quickly as possible. It’s almost a shame that the spectacle of a proper battle between the Primitives and Tornedron is shunted into touch to make way for the episode’s loftier ambitions, and the tongue-in-cheek conclusion jars with the previous five minutes of mystical revelation. In short, Grimlock confronts God, who turns out to be a monkey, and halts the out of control Tornedron by reversing the polarity of its energy. Although there is a Wizard of Oz vibe to the way the curtain is drawn back to reveal an insignificant character behind everything, it’s worrying to think that Sunbow were happy with Primacron, the originator of Unicron, being portrayed in this way. Perhaps this again shows the distain Dille seems to have had for the character, and Grimlock’s claim he is “here to save the universe!” when he bursts into Primacron’s lab only adds to the trivial way this is dealt with. Perhaps, like Grimlock’s New Brain, someone in the editing process felt the episode needed a light-hearted ending to lift the third act’s sombre tone, but it’s a shame that when there is so much about Call of the Primitives that could be series defining material, the various elements of the plot don’t feel in tune with each other and lead to an equally discordant whole.


[1] The question of who really did animate this episode is one that has long been the subject of informed guesses and fan discussion. The reality is that no one knows, although Paul Davids, whose job it was to parcel up the audio tracks and storyboards to send to Japan (Toei) and Korea (AKOM) for animation, has recalled that a studio in the Philippines was used at one point in the third season as well. For further discussion on the subject see the trivia section for this episode on tfwiki: tfwiki.net/wiki/Call_of_the_Primitives

[2] This also raises the important question of how the Transformers came into contact with the Matrix and why it gained near holy reverence. Perhaps it was the factor that gave them sentience leading to the rebellion against the Quintessons, or perhaps the technology was something the Quintessons bought (or more likely stole) from Primacron for their own ends – possibly to make Vector Sigma (which would explain Sky Lynx’s instinctive sense that the Oracle is part of his past). Primacron’s name also suggests a deliberate link, being a portmanteau of Prime and Unicron, a whole from which the two names signifying light/good and dark/evil are derived in the Transformer world. This creates a biblical allusion in that Primacron is the creator, God, and Unicron, Satan (who fell from grace because of his hubris – just as Unicron does in this story). This would put the Oracle, and by extension the Matrix, in the role of an archangel, and makes the Transformers themselves innocents caught in the crossfire of the war between Unicron/Satan and Primacron/God. The wholesome Autobots ‘pray’ to the holy light of the Matrix, while others like Megatron are tempted by Unicron’s promises to the side of evil. It’s a shame that the one person who could shed light on the truth behind any of this, Don Glut, can only offer the answer, “I don’t have a clue” when asked about it.

[Pinwig]

3.27 – The Face of the Nijika

Coming after several episodes focusing on the introduction of new toys, The Face of the Nijika feels oddly out of place with its tale of Quintesson involvement in the alien world of Zamojin. The small cast eschews any of the recently added characters to concentrate on the main movie names again (aside from Sky Lynx, who as in Chaos is piloted by others to act as transport), making the story feel like an overhang from the mid-season episodes farmed out to new writers unfamiliar with the series. Being written by the last of the new-comers brought in by Sunbow, it’s probably exactly that, and it fits the template of stories such as Surprise Party and Madman’s Paradise in that it plays off ideas from Five Faces of Darkness and sticks to the core characters to create a simplified toolset for the writers to use.

Entering the series by the same route as Gerry Conway and Len Wein, Mary Skrenes and Steve Skeates were well established comics writers experimenting with the idea of writing for television. Skrenes had started her comic career in the early 1970s turning out horror and romance stories for DC, but in 1975 co-created and wrote the short-lived Marvel title Omega the Unknown with Steve Gerber (a title green-lit after then Marvel editors Marv Wolfman and Len Wein championed it to Stan Lee). She also created the character of Beverly Switzler (said to be based on her) for Gerber’s Howard the Duck series, founding the friendship that would eventually see her write for GI Joe and Jem as well as The Transformers. She gave up writing for comics in 1976 when Omega was cancelled, but much later reunited with Gerber to write the DC Focus series Hard Time in 2004.

Steve Skeates had a long-established writing partnership with Skrenes dating back to the 1970s, and although he is only credited with co-authoring The Face of the Nijika among the nine episodes Skrenes wrote for Sunbow, interviews suggest he may have collaborated on more. Skeates gained a foothold in the comics industry in 1965 when Stan Lee took him on as an assistant at Marvel. With this credit on his CV, he secured work for a variety of independent publishers, most notably writing THUNDER Agents for Tower Comics, before involvement with Aquaman and Hawk and Dove at DC brought him in contact with Skrenes.

As was the case with Gerry Conway’s writing, the Skrenes and Skeates’ comics background can be seen in The Face of the Nijika in its fast pace and concise scripting. The language of the opening space battle is similar to Conway’s in that the Autobots fly ‘shuttles’ and ‘compute course changes’ while the Quintessons pilot ‘ships’ and request ‘status updates’, carry out ‘bombardments’, ‘adjust headings’ and ‘commence attacks’ that ‘engage’ the Autobots in battle. It’s a far cry from the gun-slinging Western stylings of the fights between Optimus and Megatron of old, but as seen in Forever Is a Long Time Coming and Money is Everything the vocabulary lends a grandly naval feel to the action that echoes the space operas of 80s cinema.

This opening serves to introduce the idea of the quadrant lock, a device by which the writers can contain their contribution to the series literally inside its own pocket continuity. It keeps the existence of Zamojin discrete, presenting it as a part of Quintesson history that can’t cause conflict with the existing universe. In contrast, some of the elements that Skrenes and Skeates use to facilitate their story, such as Perceptor’s ‘universal emulator’ (apparently containing his consciousness), do seem at odds with what the viewer knows about the workings of Transformers – showing how assumptions made by new writers could easily jar with what was generally understood.

Apart from Perceptor’s supposition that “In time their capabilities will be as limitless as thought itself”, no specific reason is given why the Quintessons felt it necessary to lock the Zamojins away, but it does play to their ambitious and domineering nature that they would employ technology to control a potential rival power. Trapping them, rather than destroying them, suggests the Quintessons considered using the Zamojins in future, unlike their much harsher intent to destroy the ‘upstart’ Transformers completely. No doubt this comparison wasn’t intended by the writers, but in terms of fitting the story into the chronology of the series, it shows that the Quintessons were expanding their empire in the recent past – 5000 years being a drop in the ocean compared to the millions of years they’ve waited to reclaim Cybertron. It also suggests the Zamojin culture is a very young one, and perhaps naïve, and was considered more an asset than an enemy in the Quintessons’ overall strategy.

Making all this work involves the only disappointment in the plot – the mechanics of the quadrant lock and the equally vaguely named “isolator key” and “universal emulator”. Even more obviously than usual for the series, the backbone of the story is nothing more than a string of convenient coincidences: the Quintessons’ isolator key is damaged as they pass through the lock, meaning they’re conveniently trapped along with the Transformers on Zamojin; the Autobots conveniently have a solution in the form of Perceptor’s universal emulator, but to extend the plot he conveniently can’t transform; which means he can’t resist when Katsu notices his faction symbol looks conveniently like Nijika’s face, which when removed conveniently takes the emulator with it. In terms of the standard introduction, problem, complication, crisis, resolution structure used in simple storytelling, the story becomes awkward because of the convoluted way it establishes the complication the Autobots need to resolve to get home.

That said, the overly contrived plot skeleton is easy to forgive because of the unusually detailed embellishment that fleshes it out and some excellent world building in the way the Zamojin culture is shown. It’s with this that the writers seem to have most fun, and the episode almost feels like it wants to restart itself at the point the Autobots fall through the planet’s atmosphere. Stirring music and long shots of an elaborate stepped city change the tone completely, and Katsu Don is introduced as the town blacksmith by his recognition that the strange falling objects might be of more practical use to him than to the barbarians outside the temple. It’s worth noting how Skrenes and Skeate’s careful writing establishes the city of Tozin as a real place, giving it a community and characters that conflict and contrast with each other. Compared to other examples in the series, such as the awfully one-dimensional and boring world of Menonia from Craig Rand’s Madman’s Paradise, Zamojin is a fine example of how building up incidental characters and locations can get viewers invested in what they’re watching.

The thought put into the Zamojins is apparent from the notes about their culture in the cast list for the episode. They are described as “enormously strong, muscular creatures –and big: about two-thirds the size of an average Autobot. They have two relatively humanoid eyes and a third eye, a GLOWING CRYSTAL in their foreheads (not ornamentation; they're born with it). They are evolved from cat-like carnivores and look like leonine Mongolians”. It’s a shame that some of these details, such as the reference to leonine origins, is only vaguely touched on in the finished episode.

The description also shows how the writers thought about the problem of scale, in that for the story to work the Zamojins need a stature equal to the Autobots, and are therefore very large humanoids. The fact they are enormously strong means they can do things like causing damage to the Sharkticons, and Rodimus and Ultra Magnus deliberately note the planet’s strange properties when they land (“I didn’t even dent that tree, it felt like a steel girder/This planet has an incredibly dense molecular structure”), giving a reason for Blurr’s bent strut and further explaining how the Transformers and Zamojins can operate as equals. This is another example of how the Transformers are treated as characters within a wider universe in the third season (most recently explored under Only Human) and how in contrast, the size difference between Transformers and humans was used heavily in the first season to reinforce the power of the alien invaders and the insignificance and helplessness of the locals. Here, the Zamojins are equals despite essentially being ‘human’ equivalents.

Zamojin society is based on sixteenth century Mongolia, again noted by the script: “Later, after their technology has been shut off, they have reverted to the look of sixteenth century Mongol Barbarians: furred boots, flare-shouldered, quilted hunting vests, fur trimmed, horned helmets, unruly hair, spears, bows, swords and other primitive weapons”. This accounts for the ornate temple with Buddha-like effigy at the centre of Tozin, called Kodu Ri in the script, given Buddhism became the principal religion in Mongolia around that time (although the visualisation of the barbarians is much more akin to the popular stereotype associated with the Ghengis Khan type image of four hundred years earlier).

In contrast to this, the Zamojins from before the time of the Quintesson attack are described as much more technologically advanced: “In the opening scene, they wear no weapons and light, silken sarongs, tributes to climate control and an advanced society”. This oriental look isn’t seen in the episode until the flashback when Katsu Don fills in the back story for Nijika, suggesting the scene might originally have come at the beginning of the script as an introduction, but the deliberate contrast, and fine detail such as the clothes being lighter because of climate control, shows how much thought went into creating the race – even when details like that aren’t evident on screen. However, the writers weren’t taking things so seriously that there wasn’t space for the odd joke, with the only individually named Zamojins, Katsu Don and his ancestor Niko Don, both being the names of Oriental fried pork rice dishes.

The story of Niko Don’s bid to reach the stars and the invention of Nijika the Sky Dancer is laid over this intricate backdrop, much like the first journeys into space from Earth weren’t taken by humans. Kodu Ri is made out to be a tangible presence, providing the power for the rocket (“Kodu Ri, help us make this journey. Give us the power. Open your heart to Zamojin!”) but internally appears to be a computer, or generator, when attacked by the Quintessons. The Zamojins regard the attack as having “made the Guardian sleep”, but also connect Kodu Ri’s dormant state with the lack of starlight: “They stole the stars from the sky! They stole the light from our minds!” Later in the episode, Perceptor realises this when the quadrant lock is shut down and the Zamojin system is removed from the ‘pocket’ the Quintessons hid it in:

ULTRA MAGNUS: Incredible! They have a telepathic technology!
PERCEPTOR: Powered, apparently, by starlight.

This shows that Kodu Ri slept simply because the Zamojins couldn’t power it up, which implies that Kodu Ri is a solar-powered battery, charged by the Zamojins reflecting natural light onto a receiving point on the statue’s forehead. This is a clever technical metaphor which again links the Zamojin society with the theme of Buddhism – the return of the light provides the Zamojins with intellectual enlightenment – something core to the Buddhist ideology and associated with self-realisation, awakening, knowledge and transcendental truth.

The Transformers in the episode are almost bystanders to this narrative, learning as much as participating, but there are some attempts at character development and oddments worth noting. Early on, it’s a little unorthodox that the Autobots exit Sky Lynx via his mouth, despite that being the shuttle cockpit, but the care and detail the writers put into the story is evident even here in the way Sky Lynx asks the Autobots to, “Don your rocket packs, gentlemen” – acknowledging that they shouldn’t be able to fly unaided. Because an animation oversight means these rocket packs aren’t visible in following scenes, this inadvertently excuses the Autobots also being able to fly in Gerry Conway’s episodes.

Of the characters in the story, it is Blurr and Perceptor who gain the most exposure. At the point the Quintessons realise their isolator key is damaged and the Autobots bizarrely survived an 82.5 million to one chance of passing through the lock, their immediate response is not one of surprise, but intrigue as to whether Perceptor was among them:

QUINTESSON1: We have a statistical anomaly. The Autobots live.
QUINTESSON2: Including Perceptor? See, he's equipped with a Universal Emulator – which could serve in place of the Isolater Key.

This shows the Quintessons know Perceptor has a universal emulator. Given they probably built him this would make sense, but as the Quintesson asked about him specifically, it suggests this is something unique to the Autobot scientist. Being an emulator of universal properties, this also suggests that Perceptor carries within him the phenomenally useful ability to recreate and copy anything, something you’d think the Autobots would make more use of generally.

The story also acts as a spotlight for the overlooked Blurr, whose rapid and repetitive speech patterns have kept him out of the limelight almost completely since his scenes with Wheelie in Five Faces, despite being one of the important movie characters. The story is fashioned to deliberately create points when he doesn’t have to speak so quickly, notably when he is in pain because of his bent strut pushing on a “sensory circuit”, and then when this is repaired by the lava pool at the end. This proves that he doesn’t have to speak as fast as he does and that it’s a side effect of the intensity of his nature, which then used humorously in the way the Zamojin torture becomes a relaxing bath that cures his tenseness: “That's it –good and warm, nice 'n hot just right for –gettin' the kinks out!” as if Radox is all he needs to unwind a little.

Mary Skrenes and Steve Skeates’ take on the Transformers is just as unique as the other experienced writers new to the third season. Being the last of the new names, it’s possible to look back over the variety of different spins writers put on the series and see the way their different influences led to it becoming the season fans have the most polarised opinions of. The Face of the Nijika is certainly among the more interesting and original ideas presented by the newer writers, and although the initial set up is clunky and too full of coincidence to sit easily with the mature viewer, the exploration of the Zamojin world than follows more than makes up for the awkwardness needed to fit it into the Transformers universe. With the natives freed and having achieved enlightenment, it would be interesting to see how they could become part of the Autobot governed universe. As the Quintessons once again escape scot free, despite their part in the story revealing them again to have perpetrated unimaginable war crimes, the viewer must turn to the episode’s underlying Buddhist teachings to find a satisfying resolution. It’s a shame that the fourth season being cut short meant that writers who found their feet in this one, including Skrenes and Skeates, didn’t get a chance to further explore the wider universe they helped to build.

[The Huff]

This is another of my favourite episodes - it's easy to rate better looking ones (like Call Of The Primitives) higher just because of the animation quality rather than on the premise of the actual story (or intended idea) instead. Another great review Pinwig! The only thing I was hoping you'd mention (or even explain) was when Cyclonus and the Quintesson Judge were clearly standing in the crowd of Quintesson & robot hating Zamojins sticking out like sore thumbs calling for the death of Blurr (and no one notices them!)

I can't believe we are nearly trough Season 3. I will miss reading these on a Sunday.

[Pinwig]

There comes a point with these that I force myself to stop or they'd go on forever! That is a weird scene - equally so that some of the locals are clearly wearing white hoods with eye holes, giving it a bizarre KKK vibe as Blurr is strung up.

[The Huff]

See if you can see evil invaders hiding in this crowd scene.

[Pinwig]

I had a think about this because it really doesn't make sense, but there's the odd clue that suggests Cyclonus and the Quintesson should have been disguised in this scene like a lot of the other Zamojins:

Addendum – the crowd scene

It does seem very odd that the Zamojins should burn a Quintesson effigy at the same time as one is stood in the crowd watching Blurr being strung up. The Quintesson is clearly concerned about being spotted when he says, “Be silent! Don't call attention to us”, but Cyclonus is having too much fun manipulating the crowd to listen. It’s odd that his conversation with the Quintesson implies they are old friends (“You've never understood mob psychology, have you?”), unless this is an oblique reference to the way the Quintessons were unable to control the Autobot rebellion on Cybertron. This sequence seems to suggest that Cyclonus and the Quintesson are in disguise in the way some of the Zamojins are – wearing hoods and masks in a manner that is disturbingly reminiscent of the way the Klu Klux Klan are seen in media.

It’s only when the Quintesson tries to counter Perceptor’s revelations by shouting, “The doll is possessed! Don't listen!” that things start to go wrong – the locals take this as a prompt to demand Nijika be burned, and Cyclonus then has to break cover to try and rescue it. As Katsu Don tries to stop Cyclonus fleeing with Nijika, the dialogue script suggests the following ad libs for the crowd (which aren’t audible in the finished episode) – “The devils return! We are doomed! etc.” which suggests a sudden recognition of the Quintesson, and again implies that during the crowd scene he and Cyclonus should have been disguised in some way for them not to be noticed until they try to escape.

[The Huff]

I also found this on TFWiki:

'A crowd of Zamojins gathered to watch Blurr's execution is apparently supposed to feature some of their number costumed as the hated five-faced demons and their robot servants, thus explaining why Cyclonus and the Quintesson can just stand around in the middle of the crowd that hates their kind. The animation, however, almost totally fails to convey this, having the Cybertronians tower over the largely un-costumed Zamojins, who are mostly just wearing some little face masks. Furthermore, the animation mistakenly colors the masks flesh-toned, almost completely hiding the fact they're wearing them at all'.

Sorry Pinwig - didn't mean to make more work for you!

[Pinwig]

That's interesting. I wonder where that came from - I'd think the only place that would be explained is in the original writers' script. I suppose there's a Halloween type thing going on there then, dressing as the things you're most afraid of. It would also explain the odd mask wearing the Zamojins are doing, which doesn't seem to have any purpose otherwise. But even then, Cyclonus would stand out to the Zamojins because no one would have seen him before, so no one would be dressed like him.

[Pinwig]

3.28 – The Burden Hardest to Bear

While The Burden Hardest to Bear is attributed solely to Sunbow staff member Michael Charles Hill on screen, the original synopsis additionally credits scriptwriter Sharman DiVono as having helped devise the story. Perhaps reflecting his role as producer and general ‘filler in’ at Sunbow in 1986, this would make Burden the third of four consecutive Transformers episodes Hill wrote in conjunction with other people. These days DiVono is a science fiction novelist with a small portfolio of published books, but in the mid-1980s was half way through a career in television animation writing that encompassed shows such as Star Wars: Droids and Duck Tales. At the time Hill was writing Burden, she was completing the fourth of four episodes for GI Joe (Not a Ghost of a Chance) – a series for which he was one of the senior producers. In subsequent years, DiVono became most noted for contributing forty-eight scripts to Garfield and Friends (1988-91), as well as providing supporting voices for seven episodes.

Like The Face of the Nijika, The Burden Hardest to Bear is an end of season mopping up story designed to ensure that Hasbro’s remaining toy promotion requirements were being met. Whereas Nijika pushed Blurr and Perceptor to the fore, Burden does the same for Scourge and Hot Rod, while making up screen time for other less exposed toys, particularly Broadside. It also rapidly showcases all of the combiners that were released prior to the Computron/Abominus partnership and gives cameos to some of Hill’s own recurring favourites, such as Sky Lynx and Astrotrain.

The result is a busy episode with a lot of faces crammed into little screen time, initially feeling more like an encore than a story in its own right. Long gone were the days of the combiners being the most powerful entities in the series – in the opening shot alone both Predaking and Devastator chase after Broadside with one line of dialogue shared between all three characters (although several lines cut from the final script suggest the scene’s abrupt finish originally ran on a little longer). Broadside, sporting what Jim Sorenson’s book of animation models (The Ark, IDW 2007) regards as being his correct, toy accurate, form (as opposed to the Marvel comics version that featured in Carnage in C-Minor), bows out of the series here, but doesn’t actually speak at all beyond his cry of pain when attacked by Scourge. This might suggest the lines cut from the opening were his, removed because his voice artiste, Bill Martin, had no other roles in an episode that is overloaded with characters making short appearances. It’s a shame because it highlights once more how Broadside was a character who fell between the cracks – possibly realised too late to get the attention Sandstorm and Octane did, but also not part of the big movie names who dominate the season. However, it is at least fitting that Devastator is the Decepticon wading after him through the waves, it being that he was the Decepticon dropped on by Broadside in his aircraft carrier mode in Carnage. Broadside’s enormous size is consistent with his previous appearances and makes him uniquely interesting – having a jet mode he could have been the Skyfire ‘troop transport’ of the third season had the stories not mostly been set in space. Being one of the last toys made in the smaller Takara style, there is an irony in how (like Astrotrain, Blitzwing and even Springer) his cartoon appearance is significantly ‘beefed up’ to market his presence in a way that allows him to compete with the newer, chunkier Hasbro originated film characters.

Further lines are missing from the dialogue script as Superion takes on Astrotrain in an oddly mismatched pairing designed to remind viewers the Decepticon isn’t just a shuttle, and Defensor encounters Bruticus for a few seconds as the revolving door of supporting characters continues. These scenes are so rapid, the dialogue is reduced to one-line soundbites to remind viewers of the personalities on display: Defensor worries about protecting humans, Sky Lynx replies “Yes, Kup, I know” to the old timer’s compliment about how good his shooting is, and Silverbolt barks tactical commands to the Aerialbots. Technically, it’s clever writing – not only does it set up Rodimus’s frustration with things getting out of control, but it also carefully and precisely reminds viewers about the traits of no less than seven individual Transformers and six combining teams in less than two minutes of screen time. It makes for a hectic and action-packed opening, but one that also suggests the Decepticons seem to be out of control, leading to Rodimus’s headache.

With the Hasbro requirements boxes ticked, Hill is then at liberty to get on with the story he wants to tell – an exploration of responsibility and the effect it has on Rodimus. It’s an obvious point to pick up on when highlighting his character, and one that is visited several times through the series without any real consistency. He ranges from being the reluctant leader who learns to shoulder responsibility, as shown here and in Five Faces and Dark Awakening, through playing the resigned and caring adult in stories such as Nightmare Planet and Madman’s Paradise, to the cold, no-nonsense military leader of stories like Fight or Flee. It’s almost possible to get a coherent character progression for him by rearranging the order of the episodes, but this one and Dark Awakening both vie for the point he accepts who he is – in both cases needing to be Hot Rod to do it. Pragmatically, this reversal of the transformation seen in the film is purely down to Hot Rod still being available as a toy and therefore needing promotion, but it’s a shame there wasn’t more consideration given to how to deal with both Hot Rod and Rodimus. Hill himself has explained why this didn’t happen in interviews:

“I'd like to say that we had completely mapped out the Transformers universe beforehand, but the truth is we were making it up as we went along. If I had to do it all over again, I would go with foresight and devise a series arc for each season. But as it was, due to syndication issues, we had to make our stories also work as stand-alone episodes (with the exception of the mini-series), as there was no guarantee that they would air in sequential order in every market.”

Even from his position as a producer at Sunbow, it seems Hill wasn’t aware that the ‘boy becomes a man’ idea had been done earlier in the season in Antoni Zalewski’s script, but at least Burden is a different take on the concept. When looking for ideas, Hill said he would, “always go back to the series bible and refresh myself with the characters’ bios... looking for a ‘trigger’ that would suggest a story based on character”. This might mean the character documentation for the third season was a little more extensive than being just Bob Budianski’s movie character biographies; the cartoon Rodimus has many more facets than the dismissive ‘caring but hot-headed’ veteran of Budianski’s version, and given his movie origin, Flint Dille is more of a father to him. Rodimus’s inner concern about being cast into the role of leader is a natural story hook to pick on, and Hill could see how this would work linked to Japanese ideas of honour. He said that the story was, “a by-product of my interest in Japanese culture and literature. Plus, my fascination with Bushido... the Way of the Samurai”. This differentiates the story from Zalewski’s: in Dark Awakening, Rodimus’s principle concern was not being able to live up to Optimus, here it’s more about him accepting his burden of obligation as leader.

This is explained in the scenes that follow the opening. Rodimus is berated by Japanese locals for shirking his moral responsibility to defend them, and is then summoned to the Imperial Palace for the same reason. His reaction, “maybe you oughta try protecting yourselves” is worded to lead into Kup’s comments to Marissa about him after her demands tip him over the edge. Kup specifically references Rodimus’s “giri” as being the problem, which he explains as being “the burden hardest to bear”. He compares Rodimus to Optimus by saying, “Optimus learned to live with his giri and respect it”, which implies that Kup thinks Rodimus is still undergoing a journey to reach a true understanding of his position. Why Kup should suddenly be an expert in Japanese culture isn’t clear, but it’s this point that the episode hinges on. It’s significant that Rodimus’ aide in this story is Kup rather than the more down-to-earth Ultra Magnus – Kup’s older, wizened nature is deliberately balanced as an Autobot equivalent to the sensei in the Dojo.

While giri (as in duty/obligation) is a value integral to Japanese culture generally, and one very difficult to approximate in English translations, Hill’s professed interest in Bushido shows the approach he took to using it. Bushido is a term that refers to the honour code by which Samurai live their lives in Japanese culture, roughly equivalent to the Western idea of chivalry [1]. This is demonstrated in the episode as Rodimus’ reluctance to resolve the multitude of problems presented to him, leading to him shirking his responsibilities instead of coming to terms with his ‘giri’. Hill’s desire to specifically reference the word in the script, rather than just using the concept, allows the Japanese setting to make sense, and is then developed in the conversation Hot Rod has with the sensei towards the end of the episode.

Hot Rod is perhaps a character who doesn’t lend himself naturally to the Bushido ideology, but when compared to the superficial use of Japanese honour codes in other Transformers continuities, particularly the Michael Bay interpretation of Drift (or even the aloof and dismissive Robots In Disguise (2015) variation with his doting mini-con prodigy), The Burden Hardest to Bear comes across as a much more natural and sympathetic use of the idea.

Rodimus being chased by Dead End and Wildrider is a pleasing throwback to the way the Stunticons were introduced at the end of season two, the reckless driving on Earth roads and focus on combiner limbs as individual characters a rarity in the third season. That Wildrider uses Breakdown’s leaky fuel pump ability is forgivable, especially as his dent-free shunting of Rodimus over the cliff unintentionally recalls the ‘impenetrable forcefields’ given to the Stunticons by Megatron in The Key to Vector Sigma. It’s nice that both Stunticons retain their original 1980s car modes, which the viewer is only reminded of when Marissa chases them using a ‘spinner’ – a reference to the types of car used in Blade Runner (Warner Bros, 1982) that Hill’s Cybertron Chronicle interview shows was deliberate: “My own personal vision of the future at the time was probably more akin to the setting of Ridley Scott's Blade Runner. But that might have been a little too dark for The Transformers, and too expensive to animate all that detail.”

This episode furthers the discussion about the Matrix encouraged by Call of the Primitives, in that its purpose is labelled in various ways during the episode. The dialogue still shows uncertainty as to what it actually is, apart from being the McGuffin that allows Hot Rod to turn into Rodimus. Wildrider calls it “the secret to the Autobots’ power” when he first finds it; Scourge, “the key to the universe” and also an “ultimate, unfathomable power” (apparently equivalent to a hundred thousand Decepticons); and Ultra Magnus, “the essence of the Autobots – our link to our history, and our future”. All three definitions neatly skirt a proper definition, but the episode leans toward it being a source of power in the way it mutates Scourge. This suggests the true burden of responsibility bestowed on successive Autobot leaders is not necessarily to help others, but to act as guardian to the power of the Matrix. As with Unicron’s destruction in the movie, this does tend to lean toward the Matrix’s true nature being a weapon of good – which is shown here in the way the corrupt Decepticons can’t control it. This links to the biblical allusions explored under Call of the Primitives, and again implies the near sentient nature of the Matrix as being equivalent to an arc angel.

Its purpose as a power source is shown in the way Galvatron inserts it not into his chest, but his canon, providing a war-like equivalent to the way it has the connotation of being a heart in the chest of a Prime, or a source of life and love. Being intrinsically the Autobot Matrix of Leadership, Galvatron can’t use it, and when trying to fire his weapon is instead greeted by visions of previous Autobot leaders, who may not look the same as the ones encountered by Rodimus in Five Faces, but are clearly intended to be. The way the Decepticons are frightened by this is curious, suggesting these ancients have some vast power, especially as Galvatron fears these ghosts but not Rodimus.

That Scourge thinks differently is simply a mechanism by which he can become a feature character in the episode, and his sudden lust for power is at odds with the way he is portrayed in his other most prominent role in the series – that of Starscream’s lackey in Ghost in the Machine. In that, his fear of Galvatron is so severe that he eventually turns to the Autobots to resolve the problem of Starscream and Unicron working together, but here he seems to have an instinctive knowledge, perhaps from his link with Unicron, that the Matrix is something that can elevate him almost to godhood. He is the only one on Chaar who concludes that ‘power’, as in ‘control’, is not just about might: “the Matrix is no mere weapon – no simple energy source – it is power!” It’s a shame that Scourge is the one to come to this conclusion – the path that Cyclonus has taken through the season, questioning Galavtron at times and almost wanting to assume control himself, makes him a much more natural fit for this idea. This approach is very different to the one taken in The Return of Optimus Prime, where the Matrix’s ‘power’ is shown to be the accumulated knowledge of the ancient Autobots.

The story takes the same approach as Dark Awakening, in that without the Matrix, Rodimus transforms back into Hot Rod, suggesting it’s the wisdom of the ancients that sustains his Rodimus persona. This is clunky in that it doesn’t fit with the way the Matrix was seen to work with Optimus (if anything, without the power of the Matrix in him, Optimus died almost immediately, and Rodimus also referred to needing the power of the Matrix to sustain him when injured in Only Human). However, the back and forth transformation happens often enough that it has become accepted lore, and recent toy lines such as Power of the Primes have incorporated it in the Deluxe to Leader class transformations that turn Orion Pax and Hot Rod into Optimus and Rodimus. Hot Rod and Rodimus aren’t treated as separate characters (as is pretty much the case with Megatron/Galvatron) but Hot Rod works on the assumption that it is holding the Matrix that makes him leader, not (as the film implies) that he has been chosen for the role and therefore has some deep-seated connection with it. His desire to escape responsibility means he ignores the knowledge and wisdom he has accumulated as Rodimus; he assumes he can’t be leader because he is no longer Rodimus.

It’s odd then that the first thing he does with his new-found freedom is to go to the dojo to listen to the teachings of the Sensei, which is a far more responsible action than the fast driving that got him into the situation in the first place. In a short episode, perhaps there isn’t space for ‘the adventures of Hot Rod’, so Hill reunites the two halves of the character using the giri theme, but it is eventually Hot Rod who accepts the mantle of responsibility, not Rodimus. The conversation he has with the Sensei is somewhat confusing, but the message comes across as not to overthink situations and instead do what his sense of responsibility tells him to do. For Ozu this means not worrying about whether he will win or lose a contest, but to approach it without expectation. The Sensei then applies this “rid yourself of thinking” idea to Hot Rod, who is told that worrying about his responsibilities is what’s preventing him from shouldering them, so instead it’s better to use “Whatever destiny obliges one to do” as a motivation because, “he who deserts his obligation is already defeated”. This very strongly pushes the giri ideology – that in life there are things we have to do without questioning them.

In Hot Rod’s case this means reassuming the mantle he has spent a lot of the season trying to shirk, but when he returns to battle it is defending humans (where the episode began with the Decepticon attacks) that finally convinces him. Scourge’s initial desire to destroy the Autobots is ramped up to “Destroy Everything!!!” through his increasing mania, leading to some odd confrontations with humans he could just step on (“Did I frighten you, madame?”). The switch to him attacking ‘helpless’ humans is necessary to finally give Hot Rod the impetus to accept his responsibility. However, it isn’t just his obligation to protect the innocent that finally sways him – his line, “The Matrix did this to you? Then I have to take it back – I see now – it’s my obligation. I belong to it as much as it belongs to me”, also refers to the theme of power in the story. Hot Rod sees the Matrix as a near uncontrollable power that in the wrong hands can be infinitely destructive, so he feels an obligation to contain that power because he can, as much as he feels obliged to lead. This is then wrapped up at the end of the episode when Hot Rod talks about finding a figurative “missing part” of himself and Kup somewhat patronisingly offers the response, “That’s the point, son. No matter who carries the Matrix – that part’s what you’ll never lose”, showing that because of his great age he is just as worldly wise as the Sensei, but obviously couldn’t find a way to get Hot Rod/Rodimus to understand that a true sense of responsibility comes from the heart rather than a title.

Ultimately then, Hot Rod ‘finds’ himself and resolves the problem. Hill’s perspective on the Autobot leaders is interesting in that it echoes Kup’s ‘shut up and get on with it’ attitude quite succinctly – “Rodimus Prime was an interesting character to explore for that one particular episode because of his doubts and insecurities. But I think Optimus Prime was a more interesting character to write for because of his lack of the same. There is no whining with Optimus Prime. He is a hero. He knows what has to be done and he does it. No matter what the personal cost to himself.” From this we can see what drives the episode from the point of view of the writer, and perhaps this second attempt to get Hot Rod to fulfil the role laid out for him could have been developed further in a fuller fourth season with him less doubtful about his role. That said, because of his ever-shifting portrayal in the third season he stands out as one of the series’ most interesting characters, and Hill’s exploration of this through the Japanese idea of responsibility and duty is perfectly fitting.


[1] Although its origins are contested, literature provides evidence for Bushido as an ideology from the 16th century onwards, and has Buddhist undertones in that it links the violence of the samurai way with inner wisdom, loyalty and honour. A likely reference point for Hill would have been Bushido, the Soul of Japan, by Inazo Nitobe, published in 1899, because it is regarded as a seminal work on the subject and the first book to document it. In it, Nitobe explained that mastery of the moral code of the warrior is just as important as the physical code of weapon use, and in the third of its seventeen chapters, on the subject of ‘rectitude’ (righteousness), wrote:

“…let me linger a little while on what I may term a derivation from Rectitude, which, at first deviating slightly from its original, became more and more removed from it, until its meaning was perverted in the popular acceptance. I speak of Gi-ri, literally the Right Reason, but which came in time to mean a vague sense of duty which public opinion expects an incumbent to fulfil.

Giri primarily meant no more than duty… that in our conduct… though love should be the only motive… there must be some other authority to enforce filial piety; and they formulated this authority in Giri.

Very rightly did they formulate this authority, since if love does not rush to deeds of virtue, man’s reason must be quickened to convince him of the necessity of acting aright. The same is true of any other moral obligation. The instant Duty becomes onerous, Right Reason steps in to prevent our shirking it. Giri thus understood is a severe taskmaster, with a birch-rod in his hand to make sluggards perform their part.”

[Pinwig]

Quick note -

Work is absorbing a huge amount of time at the moment, and I'm not able to maintain a rate of writing up one story per week because I'm just not getting much free time. My bank of unposted reviews has been whittled right down to nothing, not helped by the fact that the first part of The Return of Optimus Prime is a huge essay - over a thousand words longer than any other entry - and has taken a fortnight to write. So I'm going to split it into two halves - the main write up this week and the additional essay on the original script next week (which covers two big scenes not in the final episode and the Throttlebots). That way I might just manage to get part two to follow on time. However, there will probably then be an unintended gap of a couple of of weeks between seasons three and four just so I can get most of Rebirth done before putting up the first part.

[Pinwig]

3.29 – The Return of Optimus Prime – Part 1

To all intents and purposes, The Return of Optimus Prime is the all-action finale to the third season, although its unusual origin means it wasn’t deliberately conceived as such. Being a two-part story, it has room to breathe in terms of character and plot development, and unlike many of the two parters, spreads itself evenly across its two halves. The first reintroduces Optimus Prime and sets up the concept of the hate plague, and the second explores the value of heroism and how that links with the Matrix of Leadership.

The story was devised by Marv Wolfman and Cherie Wilkerson, but the duo only wrote the first episode. It’s Wolfman’s first on-screen writing credit for the series, although his primary role as a story editor for Sunbow meant his involvement went well beyond the casual freelance nature of the other comics luminaries who contributed to the third season. He is usually credited as a story editor for the latter stages of the third season, but his own memories of working on the show include talking about the three main seasons as a whole and also favouring writing dialogue for Bumblebee, which implies some involvement in the second as well. The entries for Forever is a Long Time Coming and Webworld explored the incestuous nature of the writers at the time, and Wolfman’s own website (marvwolfman.com) contains a plethora of interviews with other names associated with the series (including Peter David, Buzz Dixon, David Wise and Wolfman’s long term friend, Len Wein) highlighting the close-knit relationship between the comics industry writers then working at Sunbow and their friends. By way of example, before coming to Sunbow, Wolfman had worked at Marvel and DC alongside Gerry Conway and notably Wein, with whom he began his career in the 1960s.

In his own right, Wolfman is a multi-award-winning comics scribe with an extensive CV. He created the character of Blade for Marvel while writing The Tomb of Dracula in the 1970s, and is also celebrated for writing The New Teen Titans for the entirety of the 1980s, as well as creating and writing DC’s landmark 1985 mini-series, Crisis on Infinite Earths – a comic that redefined the DC universe and is today regarded by many as being the definitive comics cross-over event.

As with many of the third season writers, Wolfman’s time at Sunbow seems to have been a stepping stone to moving into writing for television. Two GI Joe episodes by him predate Return, as well as one before and one after for Jem and the Holograms, with stints on series including Starcom, Fraggle Rock and the 1988 Ruby/Spears incarnation of Superman in the years following. Latterly he also pitched and devised the Mainframe Beast Machines series. Meanwhile, Wilkerson appears to have been a writing partner of his in the mid-eighties. She also collaborated with him on his second Jem episode, as well as writing an episode of My Little Pony alone. She later worked with Wolfman again on Superman and a storyline for Action Comics.

The fact that both parts of The Return of Optimus Prime were written in-house by Sunbow editors (the second by Michael Hill from Wolfman’s outline) may give some indication as to its unusual nature. Airing in February 1987, three months after the intended end of the season, it would have gone into production just as the rest of the season was wrapping up, and at a point when Hasbro were beginning to reverse out of the idea of using cartoons to promote toys. The four-month window from initial idea to finished episode shows that it would have been commissioned during October 1986, just after Dark Awakening had aired. It works best when thought of as a direct sequel to that episode, rather than a continuation happening twenty episodes later, suggesting the public reaction to Prime’s self-sacrifice in Dark Awakening on top of his death in the film was enough to prompt Hasbro to request a story that reversed the situation. Speaking to the Radio of Horror Youtube channel in May 2016, Wolfman remembered how the story came about:

“I was the story editor on Transformers and they asked me to write that two-parter very, very quickly because of the backlash from killing Optimus Prime. They never expected that; it had never been done before, so there was no reason for them to think that the people who bought the toys would be so vocal about the character’s death. For them it was a change of the toyline, and that’s all. They didn’t realise how much the people loved the individual characters and when they realised it, since I was still on salary there working as story editor, they asked me to do a quick two-parter to bring him back.”

A key point in this seems to be that Wolfman was asked to write the story because he was “on salary” at the time, something that Michael Hill also remembers about his role in writing the second episode (see Part Two). It seems the story was a PR exercise on Hasbro’s part, pushed into production on the cheap using staffers already under contract. The memories of other production crew of the time also indicate that Hasbro felt they had to make the story [1].

Return is famous for the number of continuity errors it contains and that despite the fact it picks up on events from Dark Awakening, it doesn’t follow on fluidly from it. At the end of Dark Awakening, Prime sacrifices himself by piloting his shuttle into the Quintesson trap, which causes an explosion that destroys the solar system it’s in, apparently along with himself. He is also shown to be seriously damaged as the Quintessons attack the shuttle to try and stop him, losing an arm and half his face. The fact that Return begins with a pristine Prime who is rescued from the still intact shuttle raises a lot of questions, but when looked at properly, it becomes clear that the writers made a very clever attempt to weave the beginning of Return into the end of Dark Awakening. Wolfman himself doesn’t remember having seen Dark Awakening, but his own script for part one shows he must have been because it refers several times to the episode.

The intention to link the two stories is made clear by the fact that Dark Awakening was repeated the day before this episode aired, with an amended ending discussed under the entry for that episode (Rodimus’s last line, “So long Optimus” is removed and the voice over, “But is this really the end of Optimus Prime? Find out tomorrow”, added). The shot of the shuttle hitting the planetoid and triggering the trap is deliberately reused in Return to show it is the same event. However, the preceding set up that shows Swofford and Jessica’s mission is happening in the vicinity at the same time neatly slots their rescue of Prime into the moments between the Autobots losing sight of the ship and it hitting the planetoid.

It’s a skilfully worked conceit that the scientists are testing a heat resistant alloy, giving them a perfectly good reason for being where they are at the point Prime’s shuttle appears as well as a way to survive the nova. It seems unlikely that the nova would have been an anticipated part of their experiment, but Jessica at least combines their testing with the triggering of the Quintesson trap with the line, “Gregory – the sun’s going nova and our ship’s surviving! The experiment’s a success!”. The episode also gains an exciting opening through the ‘against the clock’ peril of Swofford and Jessica rescuing Prime (who we assume has passed out after his final exertions at the end of Dark Awakening). Perhaps the suns in this system had properties different to the one local to Earth, which is why the scientists were there, but the way what is essentially an excuse to put a rescue party in the right place to retrieve Prime becomes an essential part of the plot is an unusually layered set up for a Transformers episode. [2]

The music also features strains of the original Transformers theme as Optimus Prime enters the story, announcing his presence, although this also introduces the only true continuity error in this scene in the way Prime is mysteriously complete, and not the ghoulish, half-destroyed version he was in Dark Awakening. However, the original script for Return shows that the intention was to have Prime exactly as he was at the end of Dark Awakening:

Image ripple dissolves through the exterior of the ship to show OPTIMUS PRIME, locked into the position as in the final scenes of ‘Dark Awakening’.

JESSICA (CONT): It's an Autobot!

SWOFFORD angrily indicates the scars on his face. Behind him, on the monitor, we PUSH IN on Optimus's destroyed face.

SWOFFORD: Optimus Prime...

In addition, when Swofford and Morgan later reanimate Prime, the script notes that, “Without an exterior face we see his interior facial circuitry” and that during his reconstruction, “A new face plate is added”. These multiple references suggest that rather than being an animation error, the change was made deliberately because of the commotion over his death that instigated the episode in the first place.

The intricacy of the opening shows the lengths to which the writers went to integrate their story into Dark Awakening, even going to the extent of giving Swofford a proper back story to explain his hatred of Optimus. The flashback to Optimus and Megatron fighting in his laboratory may feel a little convenient, but compared to the depth most incidental characters get, it shows genuine consideration for making the story make sense. There are plenty of small touches that bring these characters to life, such as Jessica appearing to be complicit with her father but then going behind his back. Then, in the present when the Terrorcons arrive to try and steal the alloy for Galvatron (another perfectly sensible motive that not only dovetails into the plot but begins to develop it), the ingenuity of Wolfman and Wilkerson as writers compared to the usual ‘just because’ explanations in the show demonstrates their talent in plotting as well as character development.

Past the opening set up, most of this episode revolves around the slow spread of the hate plague and the way Rodimus’ desire to allow Optimus to rest in peace becomes an attempt to revive him. It’s typically rash of Rodimus to risk entering a trap when driven by something like pride, and his “Autobots, roll out!” shows how much Optimus is still a figure he respects and aspires to be. The decisiveness he shows and the size of the ‘assault force’ he takes echoes the military leader of stories like Fight or Flee, but equally, the consideration he shows in shutting down Metroplex rather than risking a Transformer the size of a city becoming infected also illustrates how his impetuousness can be tempered by rational thought.

Very little of the tone of this story matches the future world of 2006 shown in previous episodes. Swofford and Jessica sport suitably futuristic space suits when on the ship, possibly to differentiate them from the flashback to Optimus and Megatron fighting, but beyond this it feels more like a second season story. The scientists wear typical white coats and ties, and the population of San Francisco don’t wear the wide-shouldered jumpsuits typical of other episodes. The police also have standard uniforms and drive 1986 style cars. The only concession to the story being set in the future is that the police handguns fire lasers. That the dispossessed Decepticons skulk in a sports stadium when Ratbat reports in also feels very second season, and there’s no reference to Chaar as there was in The Burden Hardest to Bear (the reason for this appears to be that Galvatron originally begins this scene by shooting several dummy Autobots, implying an element of ‘sporting’ target practice taking place to alleviate his boredom). Galvatron himself is only a bit part in this first episode, characteristically turning tail and fleeing when he sees his troops in trouble, almost exactly as he did in Fight or Flee and The Dweller in the Depths.

A comparison to Paul Dini’s earlier episode is apt because of the way both stories revolve around a plague spreading among the Transformers, but the superiority of this story is clear not just because it has twice as long to play out, but because there is far more complex reasoning behind the use of the plague as a plot device. This is where Wolfman’s writing origins show through – Swofford and Morgan are typical superhero comic villains, one accidentally scarred by a laboratory accident involving the hero in the past and the other seeking revenge for an injury to his daughter. A devastating plague is a tried and tested comic trope, as is the fact it gets out of control needing the superhero to save the day. The significance of human characters is a common factor in episodes written by comic book graduates, and Wolfman and Wilkerson do just as good a job with theirs as Gerry and Carla Conway did with Marissa Faireborn and Dirk Manus.

Beyond the human characters, the most interesting aspect of this first episode is the nature of the plague itself. Swofford’s initial observation is that, “The spores are a virus that manifest hatred”, which is followed by Rodimus referring to it as a “madness plague” and then Bonnie Carlson of KSUN TV, a “hate plague”. The question is whether by ‘manifesting’ hatred the spores are artificially creating a mania within the victim, as with a fever, or if it’s amplifying a latent emotion instead. Ultra Magnus seems concerned entirely with causing harm to Rodimus when infected and there is other incidental evidence that infected Transformers seem to have specific targets, as with Superion appearing to go directly after Defensor. As soon as he is infected, Magnus shows a desire to attack just Rodimus. In turn he calls him a “punk” and a “kid” suggesting he has a deep-seated resentment that his own leadership of the Autobots was passed over almost immediately in favour of him. While lines cut from the broadcast episode can’t be regarded as canon, the sequence of Magnus chasing Rodimus is massively shortened from the original script and has additional dialogue that seems to imply that far from being in a mindless rage, he is actively venting frustration and is capable of rationalising his thoughts. In the cut lines he says that Rodimus is “too stupidly noble” to hurt him, and also plays on Rodimus’s inner fears about living up to Optimus: “I only need you to die – like Optimus Prime died. He was a real leader, kid... not a failure like you”. Wanting Rodimus “to die” puts a slightly different spin on the mindless violence and mayhem that the plague otherwise seems to exhibit in others (for much more on this cut sequence and others, see Script to Screen – Optimus’s Original Return next week).

As the first half of a two-part story, Wolfman and Wilkerson’s opening is a great episode that sets up firm anticipation for the finale. Building a surprisingly solid foundation from Dark Awakening, retro-fitting ideas that not only make sense but bring in some interesting comic book characters, it incorporates enough of the show’s mythology to make Optimus’s return a significant event. The Autobots are laid low and their current leader out of commission, needing the return of the greatest hero to save the day. Having been killed twice already, resurrecting Prime is shown to be touch and go, with Swofford and Morgan unable to do it and the Quintesson undergoing an arduous and lengthy process. Rodimus’ claim that Optimus was originally built by the Quintessons makes sense even in the face War Dawn (because Alpha Trion rebuilt Orion Pax into Optimus, rather than creating him from scratch) and adds another layer of detail to the Autobot leader. Having the Quintessons under threat and needing to work for the race they’ve spent the season trying to thwart gives the story a sense of importance, and the final shot of the great redeemer, glorious against a holy burning light, sets up the next episode superbly with the portentous conclusion that this time, “no force in the universe” will stop him.



[1] Navigating the hazy memories of the writers involved makes it unclear what the actual trigger for the story was. In his 2005 interview with the Cybertron Chronicle, Flint Dille recalls a “controversy over a zombie episode” because “a kid somewhere in the Midwest had locked himself in his room after Optimus killed himself” suggesting it was Dark Awakening, however in the same interview he also talked about the fact that, “nobody knew… we had an episode in the pipeline that killed him again”, seemingly remembering Dark Awakening again. Five years later, talking to the Moonbase 2 podcast, his memories were clearer:

“After the movie came out and Optimus Prime was killed some kid somewhere locked himself in his room and wouldn’t come out, and his parents wrote Hasbro a letter about it. [Hasbro] weren’t real happy with how the movie did to begin with, and now they had a kid hiding in the closet and they think it’s hurting the product, so all of a sudden they got mad, and there was this general sense that they were mad about the fact we’d killed Optimus, as if this was all our idea. So, they were really excited about it and wanted us to bring Optimus back.”

Marvel’s production co-ordinator, Paul Davids, also remembers the moment:

“…there was outrage over the destruction of Optimus. It was as if DC Comics had killed off Batman or Superman forever. You just don’t do that with superheroes. There was a lot of criticism that it was done 'for greed,' just to sell new toys, since no toys sold as widely as the Autobot and Decepticon leaders. Someone had the philosophy that if you replaced the leaders, you’d generate massive new commerce. What it generated instead seems to have been massive ill-will from Optimus Prime and Megatron fans. I never favored taking The Transformers in that direction and felt the first day I heard about it that it was like 'killing the goose that laid the golden egg'. I frankly can’t speculate on how the third season might have ended if the story editors had not brought back Optimus. But when they brought him back, I think they were trying to save their jobs... and the show!!”


[2] Dark Awakening doesn’t do a good job of explaining what the Quintesson trap actually is, but there is evidence in the script that shows they intended to blow up a planetoid sat between binary suns to cause a nova that would wipe out the Autobot fleet. Ultra Magnus exclaims “We’re on a collision course with that red sun!” at one point, and at the end of the episode talks about the ‘nova’ being a fitting memorial to Optimus. The Quintessons also talk about the planetoid being a ‘detonator’. The background art supports this, showing a red and blue sun next to each other with the planetoid between them.

The science behind this might be shaky, but the original script for Return takes this into consideration as it mentions the heat experiment is taking place around a “binary star”, which is also shown on the ship’s monitor. Further to this, there is also the tantalising possibility that the Quintessons planted the hate plague spores on the sun, or at least knew they were there, as a precautionary measure against the nova not doing its job. This might also explain why Sky Lynx knows they’re “in hiding on the far reaches of the galaxy!” when Rodimus requests he finds one – an odd line for a race who have been seen to aggressively expand their territory during the season, but perfectly in keeping with one who would want to keep out of the way of a plague.

[Pinwig]

Script to Screen: The Return of Optimus Prime - Part 1

The original script for the first part of The Return of Optimus Prime exists in the public domain thanks to the endeavours of Cybertron Chronicle writer Rikard Bakke, who typed up a copy he gained when interviewing the episode’s Production Co-ordinator at Marvel, Paul Davids. It being this came from a Marvel source, it’s from the tail end of the pre-production cycle and as such is very close to the broadcast version. However, it does offer the opportunity to look at moments that were either cut from the recording script or altered in their final form.

For the most part the cut sections fall into two categories: either lines trimmed from existing scenes (in most cases it seems to avoid repetition), or where entire scenes have been cut to shorten the run time of the story. There are two of these, both focussing on Rodimus. In its original state, the story gives much more precedence to the current Autobot leader, further exploring his relationship with Prime and his almost solo attempts to prevent the hate plague taking hold.

The first of these scenes depicts the dream Rodimus has that prompts the line, “Why do I keep seeing you in my dreams, Optimus? Are you telling me I'm not the leader you were?” in the broadcast episode. As it stands, Rodimus interprets his dream as his inner nagging fear that he can’t live up to Optimus, which is the only way to read the line as broadcast, but the script indicates Rodimus is having these dreams because Optimus is sending a cry for help via the Matrix.

The dream happens in the Autobot mausoleum from Dark Awakening, and in it Rodimus chases a continually fading Optimus who repeatedly calls to him. Rodimus finally catches up with him and Optimus is revealed to be in his damaged state, which causes Rodimus to wake in shock with the light of the Matrix flaring in his chest:

INT. METROPLEX - RODIMUS'S QUARTERS

Rodimus awakes with a start, disturbed by what we now realize is a dream. Rodimus's chest flashes--his Matrix is pulsing with life.

RODIMUS (SHOUTS IN TERROR)

ULTRA MAGNUS and KUP enter Rodimus's chamber, concerned.

KUP: (concerned) Are you all right?

RODIMUS (embarrassed, but upset) I keep dreaming about Optimus. He begs me to help him!
(beat; then bleakly) It was so real!

Kup and Ultra Magnus exchange glances.

ULTRA MAGNUS: (kindly, but firm) You're just under stress, Rodimus. It was only a dream--Optimus is dead.

The largest cut in the episode shortens the confrontation between Ultra Magnus and Rodimus, removing a fight that happens after the chase sequence and before Rodimus is infected. Rather than heading directly into the dead end as in the final episode, originally Rodimus was to lead Magnus into the Autobot repair bay first, where Magnus blasts away at “thousands of robot parts” while trying to find him. Rodimus was then to confront Magnus and try to force him into submission:

Rodimus is holding up a long metal cutter pointed right at Ultra Magnus's face (NOTE: the metal cutter has its blade on the end of an extension tube to be used to reach into distant places.)

RODIMUS: I think it's time we had a little chat.

He flips on the switch and the blade begins to WHIR ominously.

RODIMUS (CONT): I want you to back up slowly and don't make any sudden moves. I'm taking you to a place where you can't do any harm.

PUSH IN on Rodimus's concerned face.

RODIMUS (CONT): You need help, Ultra Magnus. I want to make certain you get it.

In the scuffle that follows, Magnus produces his own metal cutter and the pair inflict damage on each other. Rodimus eventually escapes outside to the dead end where he is eventually trapped, but, rather curiously for someone infected with the hate plague, Magnus stops to weld shut his wound before following him.

Aside from these instances, the other most noteworthy changes encompass how the Throttlebots are dealt with. It seems likely that had the episode been designed to promote these new toys, as Money is Everything had been the Technobots and Terrorcons, the Throttlebots would have had a bigger role. Instead, their limited presence suggests Hasbro took the opportunity of an episode so late into production to show-horn in the latest toys they had ready, but what is strange is that they have a bigger presence in the original script than they do in the final episode.

During the clunky but endearing roll call of Autobots enlisted to help rescue Optimus, the script specifically requires all the names to be read out list-like, but in the broadcast version the Throttlebots are grouped under their ‘team’ name instead. In the script, they are named individually as Searchlight, Freeway, Chase and Wideload in the roll call. This suggests that although the script has the names right, there was still some indecision about whether they had been finalised. A strange error in the animation at this point also shows the four named Throttlebots in robot mode running onto the screen, but Freeway disappears when they transform.

Later, when the Autobots search the lab for Optimus, Chase had a line which read, “Nuts. I don't want to leave empty-handed. Rodimus will be so upset”, just before the plague dust is pumped into the room. In addition, and adding to the idea the names hadn’t been finalised, a scene in the melee of infected Transformers towards the end of the episode featured differently named Throttlebots as well as Rollbar, who is missing from the introduction scene:

EXT. SAN FRANCISCO STREET

A winding mountainous street; a cable car moving down. INTO FRAME come the Throttlebots in car mode who are crashing into each other, trying to knock each other off the road. Detour is hit by Payload and skids into the sidewalk on two wheels. He crashes into store windows, glass shattering as the car careens wildly out of control.

NEW ANGLE - THROTTLEBOTS

Rollbar is the first of the Throttles to transform into robot mode. The others follow suit all the while attacking each other. Their blasts go wild. Glass-fronted buildings shatter explosively as one of the other of the Throttlebots runs into them or shoots their various weaponry at the dodging robots.

Of the smaller cuts and changes, a few are significant enough to mention – not least that despite the fact the spores are originally said to be a “reddish dust” when in space, once the plague takes hold it is consistently described through the entire script as being a blue glow around the infected characters.

Other removed lines support or expand on facts already established, such as when Jessica is hurt during the Terrorcon attack on the lab. Swofford’s frustration comes out as, “Haven't you monsters already done enough to me?” before Morgan adds rather strongly, “You blasted robots! I swear I'll make you suffer for this!” In the scene following at the hospital, lines are cut that make it clearer that the Protectobots are outside the operating theatre anxiously waiting for news of Jessica and First Aid is building the exoskeleton inside. This then appears to be the reason for another line removal, where Morgan explains to Jessica that one of the reasons he hates Transformers so much is that they, “take jobs from people”!

Later in the episode, lines are cut that develop the relationship between Sky Lynx and the Quintesson he rescues. Initially the Quintesson shows more reluctance to help save Optimus before Sky Lynx threatens to leave him to the infected Sharkticons, and then during the repair sequence there is more tension with a slower build up including failed revival attempts while the situation worsens in the streets.

What’s interesting about these small instances from an analytical point of view is that they support the notion that gaps left by cut lines can be spotted in the eventual dialogue scripts available for all episodes because of the jumps in line numbering. With the examples given here, the corresponding scenes in the dialogue script are missing the right number of lines in the places where they have been cut from the original script. Therefore, it’s possible with other episodes to see where scenes have been trimmed and speculate over what was removed.

[Pinwig]

Seven months after starting season three we come to the end. This one is hot off the press so may have mistakes in it. I usually like to give at least a week between drafting and editing, but it hasn't been possible here. I need a few weeks now to do Rebirth, so Sunbow Sundays will return in December for the last three episodes.

3.30 – The Return of Optimus Prime – Part 2

While Marv Wolfman and Cherie Wilkerson devised the storyline for the second part of The Return of Optimus Prime, it was written by series stalwart Michael Charles Hill. It’s logical that different writers should be assigned to the two episodes so they could be written simultaneously for speed, and when looked at individually there are fewer direct links between the two halves than it first appears, minimising potential continuity problems. The second part ignores the antagonists from the first episode, Morgan and Swofford, and instead focuses on Optimus’ mission to release the power of the Matrix. It’s also telling of the wind-down at Sunbow at the time that both Wolfman and Hill were Sunbow employees who could effectively be used to write the story free. Like Wolfman, Hill remembers this being the case:

“I ended up writing The Return of Optimus Prime - Part 2 simply because I had a ‘play or pay’ contract with Sunbow. By that I mean, in addition to my salary as a producer, I was also guaranteed ‘x’ number of script assignments during the length of my contract. As my contract was coming up for renewal, Sunbow realized that they would have to pay me for NOT writing scripts. Needless to say... that didn't sit well with them. So, in addition to being ‘assigned’ to write an episode for Jem [Out of the Past], I was also assigned the second part of The Return of Optimus Prime. Only this time, I had a pre-approved outline to work from. While I'm sure I did ‘color’ outside the lines to lend my own ‘voice’ to the story... I also strived to be as faithful to Marv and Cherie's story as possible.”

Hill’s “coloring” is evident in the change in tone the second part has. It’s a more exposition heavy episode compared to Wolfman’s straightforward comic book action of the first part, containing over forty more lines of dialogue, but at the same time carries some heavy padding in Optimus’s protracted mission to gain the heat resistant alloy. It eventually finds its purpose in the third act, delving into Cybertronian lore to support the resolution of the story and placing the Matrix above both Optimus and Rodimus as the true power behind the Autobots.

Allowing for resolutions to cliff-hangers at the end of each act, the three parts of the story largely break down into the resurrection of Bumblebee, the quest to find the alloy, and the use of the Matrix to solve the problem – each a separate sub-plot linked together by Optimus.

Bumblebee’s transformation into Goldbug is one of the instances where the comic got the jump on the cartoon series, although Sunbow copying the idea wouldn’t have come from reading it. Bumblebee is destroyed on the orders of General Hawk in the first issue of GI Joe and the Transformers, which went on sale at the end of September 1986, and Goldbug was revealed in the final issue of the mini-series at the end of December, by which point The Return of Optimus Prime would have been at the animation stage. Goldbug’s toy tech spec mentions he “Has the mind of the Autobot Bumblebee”, but his biography wasn’t fully linked to the GI Joe comic series until his much later (1989) Transformers Universe entry. As such, it seems likely Goldbug was supplied as a character to Sunbow with the ‘was Bumblebee’ label and no direct information about how the change should happen. The fact he is picked out from the other Throttlebots, still generic at this point and only mentioned by name in the script, shows the importance Hasbro put on including Bumblebee’s transformation.

It’s interesting to speculate why Hasbro decided to take this route with him, particularly because his destiny would have been decided before the outpouring of discontent over the death of Optimus in the film (its August release was only two months before the first issue of GI Joe and the Transformers went on sale). However, it’s notable that of all the characters who were culled in the big change of 1986, those that in subsequent years became known as the ‘Big Four’ (Optimus, Megatron, Starscream and Bumblebee) all have unique exits that denote them as being more important than the rank and file washed away in the violent first act of the film because none of them actually die.

In the case of the cartoon, Goldbug’s debut is far less dramatic than it was made in the comic; Bumblebee’s last scene in the first episode has him knocked for six by the infected Superion, the script for Part One noting he should “collapse to the ground” along with Kup and Steeljaw – suggesting an injury no more serious than those gained in the cartoon’s weekly pew-pew laser battles. The story gives no indication this is Bumblebee’s final scene, but perhaps given the reason for The Return of Optimus Prime being made in the first place, Sunbow decided to try and make the transition from Bumblebee to Goldbug as simple and undramatic as possible. An animation error means that Goldbug does actually appear in part one, stood in front of Defensor at the point Rodimus gives his orders for the rescue of Prime’s body, but having the Quintesson on hand to effect the change without fuss is a useful, in-continuity explanation for how it could happen. Unlike Prime’s return from death, Bumblebee’s transformation simply comes about through an over-zealous buffing to get him back on his feet.

The padding involved in Optimus’s quest to find the alloy is the weakest point of the two episodes. It recalls the disappointment of similar moments in previous stories, such as Spike and Carly’s dull quest through Cybertron’s bowels in the second part of Desertion of the Dinobots, and the giant spider delaying tactic is straight out of fluff like Prime Target. Because Rodimus focussed on rescuing Prime’s body rather than going after the Terrorcons, the Decepticons have had enough time to hide the alloy deep inside Chaar. It makes sense for Galvatron to try to protect something he knows to be valuable, but burying it so secretively seems to be at odds with his brash, showy nature. Even he doesn’t recognise that his clever ploy to have it protected by a spider that the flight enabled Decepticons can bypass is totally wasted by the fact he has to shepherd the Autobots past it anyway, just to placate his own curiosity. This does lead to the nicely obvious line, “Autobots can't fly!”, which is satisfying only in that this basic difference between the two factions is largely forgotten in the third season and to have it (albeit awkwardly) used as a narrative device at this stage is a pleasing call back to the early days. The fact Sky Lynx disappears for this scene and returns in the next is suspiciously convenient in making Galvatron’s trap work.

That said, the Decepticon leader seems more intent on enjoying his superiority in these scenes rather than causing genuine harm to his opponents. Of course, he wants to know why the alloy is important and so has to keep his old adversary alive, but it’s a shame that much of this sequence – including the entirely superfluous leech attack – couldn’t have been dropped in favour of indulging fans and extending the conversation between Optimus and Galvatron. Optimus’s line, “That's because I know you too well”, brings the pair tantalisingly close to rationally discussing the events of the past for the first time ever, but shies away for fear of dropping the pace and venturing into continuity conflicts.

Galvatron’s bigger role in this second episode brings attention to the fact that Morgan and Swofford are entirely forgotten as the story moves beyond their ability to control events. It’s a shame given their extensive introduction in the first part that they are reduced to simply making a quick appearance at the end to tie up their plot in this one, which is ridiculous given the severity of their crime. Given their hatred of all Transformers, a team up with the Decepticons wouldn’t work narratively (not in the way it did with previous mad scientists such as Dr Arkeville), which leaves them redundant. Once they’re no longer in control, the plague can’t be beaten by defeating them – in more adult fiction they’d have been killed before the end of the first episode to get them out of the way. This is how Galvatron ends up in the odd position of being almost an impartial bystander in the story and is another indication of Wolfman’s comic book plotting – his supervillains are human with human motives, creating an imbalance when they’re set against the Transformers.

The end of the second act leading into the third provides a repeat of the battle between Ultra Magnus and Rodimus from the previous episode, except this time Rodimus is the infected villain and Prime is protected by the alloy. Most of it even takes place in a car construction plant, which is lifted from the Autobot repair bay sequence cut from the last episode (See Script to Screen).

The Matrix’s purpose and power in this episode is derived from the way it is shown in Five Faces of Darkness – being a repository of accumulated wisdom, and therefore an aide to the leadership of the Autobots. Oddly, the synopsis refers to it as the Matrix of “Life”, rather than Leadership, but its power is shown to be a benign force for good – very different to the Matrix seen in The Burden Hardest To Bear. These different interpretations make it an interesting subject for discussion in the context of the cartoon; being devoid of the principle life-giving function it has in the comic, it needs another purpose – something evidently not defined by Flint Dille’s original outline. In trying to find a reason for its presence in the cartoon mythology, this story makes it out to be something akin to an Autobot reference library [1].

Once inside the Matrix, Optimus converses first with Alpha Trion, which has caused consternation among some fans because Five Faces established that he was never a Matrix bearer. However, Forever is a Long Time Coming showed he was a leader of sorts during the rebellion against the Quintessons, and having fused himself with Vector Sigma (War Dawn), it’s not unreasonable to think his essence could have become one with the Matrix. The oddity is that he wasn’t among the faces seen during Rodimus’ journeys into the Matrix in Five Faces, but if Optimus was going to seek advice from anyone, it would be him, which could mean he just wasn’t called on in the earlier episodes [2].

Sadly, the faces shown during the regression don’t match those of Five Faces, most likely because that sequence was animated by AKOM and this by Toei with no reference models to draw on, but it’s is clearly intended to mimic Rodimus’ earlier journey. The wireframe nature of the final face suggests Optimus has gone as far back as he can, but rather than providing a concrete name for what could be the original Autobot leader, the script refers to the character simply as ‘It’. The face is very similar to the most frequently seen of the five on a normal Quintesson (often referred to as ‘Death’), having the same mouth, teeth, jaw and a slightly softened version of the eyes – suggesting the Quintessons originally made Transformers in their own image (another biblical allusion).

It’s an awkward resolution that the “accumulated wisdom” of the Matrix can destroy the otherwise indestructible spores, and something of a cheap way out of a universe ending problem. Unfailingly, Peter Cullen’s “Now light our darkest hour!” to the strains of The Touch will give fans goose bumps, but when the film used this idea to solve the Unicron problem, the narrative had spent the best part of an hour setting up the enmity between the planet eater and the device he knew would destroy him. Here it comes somewhat out of the blue that the knowledge Optimus sought is actually the solution to the problem in itself, but it’s hard to think of another one that would have felt epic enough to counter such a problem as extensive as the plague. The fact Optimus had to regain the Matrix to find that solution does rather undo the previous episode and a half, because his statement earlier in the episode, “Without the Matrix of Leadership, I no longer possess the accumulated wisdom of our ancient Leader” implies that Rodimus should have been able to deal with the problem straight away by looking for the advice himself.

This also marks the end of Rodimus/Hot Rod’s tenure as the leader of the Autobots. Although Rodimus’ toy was still on sale in 1987, Hot Rod’s reissue as a Targetmaster vehicle in the Headmasters range meant when the Transformers series returned for a fourth season to promote it, it was Hot Rod rather than Rodimus that featured in the story. Here, with the wisdom of the Matrix dispersed and an empty shell left behind, Optimus resumes command of the Autobots and Hot Rod remains as he is. Hot Rod is the character who acknowledges the Matrix “is empty”, implying it can no longer transform him into Rodimus, but it’s a shame that as his self-doubt is one of the season’s very few ongoing plot arcs that there isn’t a proper resolution. Having spent thirty episodes struggling with the idea of being leader, and finally coming to terms with it at the end of The Burden is Hardest to Bear, Rodimus leaves the series without any sense of closure. Perhaps because this story is all about Optimus the last line needs to go to him, but sacrificing the giant spider and the leeches for a little more reflection on this moment and also the relationship between Optimus and Galvatron would have elevated this second part from being a good episode to a great one. As it stands though, The Return of Optimus Prime is a more than fitting end for the last main season of The Transformers.


[1] In that regard it works in a curiously similar way to the Matrix of the Doctor Who universe, as detailed in the 1976 Tom Baker story, The Deadly Assassin. In that, the Timelord Matrix is explained to contain the memories of dead Timelords, and can predict the future using that accumulated wisdom (just as the Transformer Matrix does in Five Faces - Part Four).

[2] A frequently noted point about this sequence is that the dialogue script for the episode notes that Optimus was originally going to talk to Orion Pax rather than Alpha Trion. This concurs with Cybertron Chronicle writer Rikard Bakke’s findings when shown a copy of the original script by Peter David, and also the Sunbow cast list for the episode, which lists Orion Pax on it and not Alpha Trion. This is more than likely a mix up over names rather than an intention for Orion to be in the Matrix as Optimus wouldn’t need to ask himself if he knew a cure for the plague. Orion also isn’t actually dead, being Optimus, but rather spookily Rodimus is shown just after his last on-screen appearance as the latest of the deceased Matrix bearers.

[Pinwig]

I still function!

Finally finished writing up The Rebirth this morning. I need to proofread and edit, but Sunbow Sundays will return next week with part one.