This is probably like my. Sixth rewatch of Fistful of Energon at this point, and I don’t think I’m ever gonna get to a point where I’m not cringing out of my mind while watching this episode 😭
Listen, I love watching Prowl do stupid shit and embarrass himself, and I think he deserves the space to be reckless and unpolished. It’s good character development. I’m also quite a big fan of his interactions with Lockdown, and their relationship has always been a point of interest for me.
But, to put it bluntly, the lesson of this episode makes no fucking sense. I have never understood why this episode frames modifications as a near one-to-one comparison with addictive substances. Modifications to Autobots are not something they use purely for fun—their mods are practically their only form of defense against enemies and Decepticons, and, as is *literally proven in this episode,* it often IS the stronger mods that have the better results. I mean, Prowl captures STARSCREAM (the real one) with the help of Ratchet’s EMP and a set of stasis cuffs. It’s only unforeseen circumstances (Lockdown and Starscream’s clones) that allow Starscream to escape, but Prowl *did* fully subdue him without any outside help.
I think there absolutely is something to be said about how beefing yourself up with a bunch of supplementary powers might make you cocky beyond what you can actually back up, and thus dull your actual skills and cause you to put yourself into dangerous situations, which, for whatever reason, never really gets addressed in the episode. In fact, the opposite is proven correct: the times Prowl actually fights, he is definitively the victor of every single skirmish. But instead, we have Ratchet insisting that any excess modification is bad, which is just odd given that both Prowl and Optimus are already pretty decked out with mods, and it’s never been a point of contention before. The only other time I can think that modifications were negatively portrayed was with Bumblebee and his turbo boosters, but the problem with those was always more about Bumblebee’s reckless use of them than the mods themselves somehow being a bad influence.
I believe a much more fitting lesson would’ve been the value of moderation, which also lines up more with what we know about Prowl as a character. This mod addiction thing really just comes out of nowhere, and then is never addressed again besides an errant line from Ratchet in Five Servos of Doom (in which Prowl keeping his new armor set, while a great visual representation of his growth in character, defeats the entire purpose of what he supposedly learned in Fistful of Energon). If I were to write my own version of Fistful of Energon, I think a scenario where Ratchet’s advice going from “any extra mods are bad” to “extra modification can be useful at certain times, but when relied upon too heavily, can cloud judgement and lead to dangerous oversteps” would be better. It’s a subtle change, but I think it reflects on both Ratchet and Prowl more positively, cause being honest, I didn’t really like how the episode ended with Ratchet being smugly in the right 🙃 it just felt a little too simple. And, by shifting the focus from being purely about the mods to the person using said mods, it also ties more neatly into Prowl’s character. Another aspect about why this episode lesson doesn’t work for me is this: why would the guy who spent (presumably) several decades/centuries training to prove himself worthy of receiving a single set of modified weapons *while also* learning the value of fighting WITHOUT relying on mods suddenly be sucked into a mod-induced frenzy? I’m all for character regression, but that inconsistency reeks to me of Prowl’s backstory not being solidified until the third season, which, unfortunately, made quite a few of his actions in the first two seasons confusing in hindsight. I’m not saying he wouldn’t have lapses in rational thinking, but the way it’s presented in Fistful of Energon, at least, doesn’t align very well with what we learn later about Prowl and how he ticks. Becoming so fixated on achieving a single goal at the expense of all else sounds about right, but it’s the inclusion of modifications into the equation that makes me squint a little bit. I don’t really have an idea of what the play-by-play of my version of the episode would look like, but a more gradual introduction of the mod-induced cockiness sounds good, seeing as Prowl almost immediately goes from “are you sure I need this?” about Ratchet’s EMP in relation to the Dinobots, to, minutes later, taking off to the moon to fight Starscream 😭 that shift is VERY jarring and could have been spread out for a cleaner transition into Prowl’s spiral
