And with a view of a new technorganic flower we be done!
First off, this episode was very well done. The fight scenes between Megatron and Optimus were gloriously over to top, as was befitting the end of the series. There were a few hiccups. Mainly The weird plot point of Megatron having to finish stealing the Oracle and the fact that he didn’t fly away while tumbling down to the organic core. The former I can see being neccesary to keep people from asking why Optimus never interfered with Megatron’s connection but the latter is a bit more glaring. I suppose I could see it being a side effect of his new size and not having the thrust to actually fly any more. Maybe even something with the Oracle finally keeping him from utilizing the immense power he was holding by having merged with all the sparks. That said, it’s never really stated why the flight capable transformer didn’t just decide to stop falling.
Not really much else to say about the episode is particular, but now it be time to discuss the series as a whole!
This was a series that I remembered very little about. I remembered Nightscream, Botanica, that Silverbolt, Waspinator, and Tankor were the original Vehicon generals, that Tankor stayed evil even when he remembered being Rhinox, and that it ended with Megatron and Optimus falling into the organic core to reformat the planet. I also knew that it was generally seen as a far inferior sequel to Beast Wars and overall had a poor reception. Something that is extremely evident with the resurgence of Beast Wars stuff over the last year or two with no mention of Beast Machines.
That said. I don’t think it was bad. There were certainly a lot of things that were... less than fun. The various personality shifts were... interesting to say the least. Optimus’s newfound super spiritualism was a little jarring but at least understandable after the end of the Beast Wars and him and the fact that he had been basically been made a prophet for the transformers. Rhinox as well was jarring but understandable if you remember the time he was reprogrammed to be a Predacon and the existence of Blackarachnia’s shell program. Having a Maximal turn evil isn’t all that out there. It just so happens that this is the first time that we had it last so long while also having the baseline personality to compare against. The others were, in gerenal also rather easy to swallow as being a side effect of the much more tense war they had found themselves in as well as the stress of having just finished a war only to find that everything they had done had been pointless. Megatron’s sudden shift to hating organics though was completely out of nowhere. We might be able to excuse it as a side effect of getting thrown out of the transwarp tunnel and going through who knows what for who knows how long before he returned to Cybertron to enact his plans but it’s still something that is never explained.
And speaking of Megatron, we get to the hardest thing to swallow in the entire series: the way he treated the entire war.
He was, in all honestly, too dangerous to take seriously. He had control of the entire planet. He could create endless armies of drones to wipe out of enemies. He regularly was able to find exactly where the Maximals were hiding underground. He even turned the entire city into a weapon to use against the Maximals. Yet despite all of that, he never got rid of them. You might be able to explain it as him finding things amusing given some of his words near the end of the series but that’s a major stretch.
Then you have his plans to excise his beast mode. At first it seems like something that is an understandable problem. Sure, it’s a little off that there apparently isn’t anything set up to remove an unwanted alt mode from a transformer but maybe the beast modes are a bit harder to get rid of. Yet in the end it looks like all Megatron had to do was remove his spark and transplant it to a new body. Something that he should have been able to do at any time. Even if he didn’t want to leave the Maximals alone he could have drowned them in drones to distract them for the apparently minute, if that, that it took from him to remove his spark and transplant it to a new body.
All together it kinda ended up nueturing him as a villain because if he ever used his resources properly the heroes would have never been able to win, meaning he had to act poorly just to keep the story going. Something that was exacerbated even more when Obsidian and Strika came by to act as the genius tacticians that just used the most basic of strategies to almost wipe out the Maximals. Strategies that Megatron used at the end to succeed in wiping them out and stealing their sparks.
Speaking of the generals there was that little issue of Waspinator being in Thrust instead of, as was implied, Silverbolt. It makes the scenes that looked like the power of love letting Silverbolt’s spark shine past Megatron’s shell program turn into Waspinator somehow managing to influence the shell program out of some sort of insanely powerful desire to cuck Silverbolt. Despite not really having shown that sort of interest in Blackarachnia during the Beast Wars outside of a few instances of her using her feminine wiles to manipulate him. And despite all of that the fact that he was there in Thrust never really went anywhere. He just stayed there with Megatron, eventually getting shoved aside by Obsidian and Strika.
Now, despite all the negativity I just threw out there, I don’t think the series was bad. Was it a proper follow up to Beast Wars? No. I don’t think so. It tried too hard to pivot into a darker storyline with technology vs nature overtones and completely hijacked the ending of the last series. The two were too different too really feel like there should be connected. Add in the changes to personality and you have something that I think could be really good as a stand alone thing. You could have the Maximals come in as a crew lured in by a distress call on Cybertron and maybe spend some episodes establishing the characters, get some flashbacks to explain their connections, and maybe set it early enough on in Megatron’s conquest that he can’t make full use of everything he has access to.
So in the end is this a good show? Is it something I would recommend watching? Yeah. It’s not Beast Wars but it’s not trying to be Beast Wars. It’s probably not going to be one of your favorite transformers series but it’s still pretty decent. And most of all it’s different. It’s one of the very few transformers series that isn’t Optimus Prime leading the Autobots in a thousands, if not millions, years old war against Megatron and the Decepticons. Due to people not generally being happy when the formula gets shaken up, a la Rise of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, you don’t generally see things get shaken up too much. Just enough to look new. And that’s something that is rather rare in these long running properties.
Now with this done I’m gonna be calling it quits for now. I might come back to this some time in the future. There are still tons of old cartoons out there to look back on and see if they were as good as I remember them being but for now I’;m done. So until I see you next, have a great time!