Writer: Glen Hallit
Publication date: July 13, 2001
Surprisingly, perhaps disappointingly, we've now finished all published Beast Wars tie-ins. Did any of them do anything to enhance our appreciation or understanding of everyone's favorite Transformers cartoon and its lovable cast of characters? That's something you have to decide for yourself.
But the answer is no.
Moving on to Beast Machines tie-ins, Departure is the first installment of The Wreckers, the next convention-exclusive storyline from 3H Productions. Simon Furman didn't write this one, which is surprising because it has the same glorification of OCs at the expense of the TV cast that was a running theme throughout his work. This time, though, instead of Megatron II getting owned to show how cool a different villain is, it's Optimus Primal's turn to get treated like an asshole so we can see how much cooler and betterer the Wreckers are.
But who are the Wreckers? To answer that question, we have to go back a few hundred years, apparently. It's the time of the Great War (the first one, I guess? Was there more than one in this timeline? What's going on). Some of the next-generation cast of The Transformers: The Movie, namely Arcee, Wheelie, and an adult Daniel Witwicky, battle an army of Nightbirds (fembot ninjas).
"Ammo's low, it's time to go!" rhymes Wheelie. Then he gets opened up with a lasersword! That'll teach him to be an annoying kid-appeal character in this adult franchise about plastic toys. Daniel goes to help him, but the other Autobots just run off and abandon the two of them to their fate. Except for Arcee, who gets dragged away by a character I didn't recognize but is apparently someone called "Hot Spot," an Autobot who transforms into a Wi-Fi router.
As he watches their friends fly away in their escape shuttle without making any effort to come get them, Daniel exclaims, "Oh @#$%, what're we gonna do now?" Which is a silly, memey throwback to when his dad said that in The Transformers: The Movie when he thought he was about to be killed by Unicron. However, the comedy is undercut ever so slightly when Daniel answers his own question by taking out a grenade and suicide-bombing both himself and Wheelie. Jesus Christ, guy.
Arcee slips into a deep depression and becomes a shut-in for the next 300 years. Great!
We're now early in Beast Machines Season 2. Optimus Primal has already died and returned to life for the second time and Megatron is now in his Giant Floating Head form. Optimus and Nightscream are on a mission to rescue the Deployers, a Transformers subgroup who got action figures but never appeared on the show. Although intelligent and autonomous, they don't have souls, lore which was explained on their toy packaging but didn't come up at all in this comic. I had actually forgotten that these guys even existed until they were shown here hanging out with Optimus Primal and Nightscream but were given no explanation for who they were or where they came from. They have no relevance to or role in the story at all, they're just there.
Optimus and Nightscream get into a fight with some Vehicon drones and get their asses kicked, but suddenly Ramulus appears and effortlessly takes out all the drones in one shot. "You through monkeyin' around, Primal? Why don't you stay down... and let the professionals handle this!" he quips. "The name's Ramulus, 'Captain.' You'd know that if you cleaned up your own messes."
This is like when the writers of Lost thought the best way to introduce the cool new characters of Nikki and Paulo was to have them randomly show up out of nowhere and immediately start browbeating a beloved member of the original cast. Even if your OC has a good reason to be acting like a dick, nobody's going to like them enough to want to find out what it is if they make a first impression this terrible.
Crisis abated, Primal Prime, a red repaint of the Optimal Optimus Beast Wars figure, comes out and introduces himself. "What are you doing in my old body?" Optimus Primal asks. "I can answer that," says Apelinq, a red repaint of the Transmetal Optimus Primal Beast Wars figure. "What are you doing in my old body?" Optimus Primal doesn't ask.
We get a recap of Reaching the Omega Point and Apelinq's journey back and forth through time as chronicled in his diary war journal. It's revealed here that all the characters left behind at the epicenter of Shokaract's explosion didn't get blowed up, but instead magic portals randomly opened like the end of Avengers: Endgame and conveniently sent them all back to their proper timelines. Apparently a portal also opened in Optimus Primal's brain and sucked out all his memories of this entire storyline as well.
"But why is Ramulus mad at me? :(" Optimus whines. Apelinq explains how Ramulus feels like Optimus and his crew abandoned him and the other protoforms on prehistoric Earth, even though they didn't suffer from this at all and apparently found a way back to Cybertron almost immediately. Optimus stammers some half-assed excuse about the Maximals' scanners not being good enough to detect any survivors.
Apelinq handwaves this away but this is all completely contrived melodrama. The implication on the show was that the remaining stasis pods were destroyed or irreparably damaged when the Vok tried to blow up prehistoric Earth. They're shown falling out of orbit when the Planet Buster fires into the atmosphere, and then later you see the smashed remnants of the destroyed Transformers within them littering the crash site. It's never explicitly stated that all the pods were accounted for, so there could easily have been a story or stories featuring surviving Axalon pods, but acting like the Maximals would just nonchalantly wash their hands of the whole thing and forget about it is a bad-faith interpretation of the source material.
Primal Prime, Apelinq, and Ramulus take Optimus Primal, Nightscream, and the Deployers to meet The Wreckers' unwieldily huge cast of characters. There are at least twenty Transformers here, and I'm sure most of them will get almost no meaningful character development. Some of them probably won't even be named in the story. They're all gathered together before the Oracle, the evolved version of the legendary G1 supercomputer Vector Sigma. The Oracle reformatted Optimus Primal and his Maximals into their Beast Machines forms at the beginning of the show and set Optimus on his spiritual quest to restore "technorganic" balance to Cybertron.
Apparently the Oracle is also giving marching orders to the three subgroups of Transformers introduced in this scene. There are the titular Wreckers themselves, including Primal Prime, Apelinq, Ramulus, Transmetal Tigatron, Transmetal Packrat (how did he become a Transmetal?), and former Predacons Fractyl and Spittor, who I guess turned good off-screen somehow. Conspicuously absent is Transmetal Airazor, who was part of this crew in Primeval Dawn. No one mentions what happened to her.
There are also the Dinobots. No, not the cool ones. These ones are led by T-Wrecks (embarrassingly misspelled as "T-Rex"), a repaint of Megatron's original Tyrannosaurus body. No one else is identified by name, but sticking out like a sore thumb at the back of the group is Magmatron! I was going to say, I guess this is what he got up to after The Ascending, but that was a different continuity. Does this version still have his Beast Wars Neo history intact? I'm almost afraid to find out.
Finally, there are the Mutants, who previously appeared in a random non sequitur sequence in The Gathering. That scene might have actually served some purpose if it explained their presence here (like Primal Prime recruited them on prehistoric Earth and brought them back to Cybertron with him), but that was also a different continuity so I guess in this version they were always on Cybertron and were just hanging out somewhere while Megatron took over the planet.
Optimus Primal is like, "Wait, guys, we have a fucking army here. If we all join forces we can easily kick Megatron's ass and take back our planet." But for absolutely no reason everyone ignores this idea, then the Oracle wipes Optimus's mind of everything he's seen. Why did 3H even bother putting him in these con-original stories if they were just going to erase his memories after each one of them?
Primal Prime gets a new command from the Oracle downloaded into his brain and says, "Our involvement in the affairs of Cybertron and the overthrow of Megatron are no longer our main concern. We have new marching orders." Are we supposed to like this guy? He has no agency or identity of his own, he's just an unthinking pawn of higher powers, first the Vok and now the Oracle. Even worse, the story doesn't seem to have any interest in examining this. It just has him do what he needs to do so that the plot can happen. Why am I reading about this loser?
Meanwhile, this comic assumes that off-screen, between the scenes of Beast Machines that actually exist, Megatron must have created more Vehicon generals than the five we see on the show, even though that runs counter to his whole MO in the series. Besides Mirage, who already died off-screen without ever appearing in an actual story, we're now introduced to Blastcharge and Quake, to whom Megatron assigns the mission of stopping all these crappy new characters. They catch up with our "heroes" in like the sewers or something, where the Wreckers have already reunited with Rodimus Who-Was-Prime and Arcee, who is now a repaint of Transmetal 2 Blackarachnia.
Okay. I don't understand this. Transmetals and Transmetals 2 were a phenomenon that only happened because of conditions unique to the Beast Wars on prehistoric Earth. Does Arcee just look like a Transmetal 2 without having any of the benefits and added powers of actually being one? Did anyone put any thought at all into writing this story?
Centuries later, Arcee is still depressed about Daniel blowing himself up and just wants to sit around in the sewers forever, even after Rodimus helpfully shames her for having mental health issues. Everyone storms out except Fractyl, who commiserates with Arcee by telling her about a friend he had who died. He's never mentioned by name but I assume the friend in question is Vice Grip, another fake Beast Wars character who was inorganically forced into continuity during Reaching the Omega Point and then never appeared again.
Who cares though because Blastcharge and Quake burst in and murder Fractyl on the spot. Arcee kills (?) them effortlessly, then uses some bullshit magic to resurrect Fractyl and turn him from a repaint of Terrorsaur to a repaint of Transmetal Terrorsaur, even though we already saw a different-colored repaint of Transmetal Terrorsaur standing in the group photo of the Dinobots. During this whole sequence, Arcee just will not stop running her goddamn mouth. She's just talking and talking and talking, monologuing to the reader for an entire page. She reveals that she wasn't actually depressed about Daniel at all, the real reason she's been in seclusion for 300 years is because she randomly has the ability to foresee the deaths of anyone she looks at now and it was making her crazy. What the fuck?
Whatever, I'm sure all will be explained!
Meanwhile, the Wreckers have decided to leave the planet for some reason, so Apelinq leads them to an Autobot shuttle that he and Primal Prime have been upgrading. I assume this isn't the same Autobot shuttle from the Ark that the Maximals took back to Cybertron after the Beast Wars, because that was destroyed in the first season of Beast Machines. So why is this an Autobot shuttle? Why not just use a modern Maximal ship?
Tigatron shit-talks Optimus Primal to Apelinq for a while, nakedly betraying the writer's unabashed bias against the show he has the privilege of writing officially licensed tie-in material for. "He had the look of obsession. That wasn't the Optimus Primal I once knew. I think this war with Megatron has blinded him to common sense. He needs to consider the implications of his actions. If I held a belief so strongly, would I be any different? Should Earth's organic nature even have a presence on this planet?"
Look, I'm not the biggest fan of
Beast Machines. In another life, I wrote a whole article
obnoxiously complaining about its nonsensical themes and blatant mischaracterization of the
Beast Wars cast. But I'd like to think I'd have the self-awareness not to use my fan-convention fix-fic to brute-force my personal viewpoint into canon. But don't worry, it gets even worse later!
Apparently this shuttle wasn't as well hidden as Apelinq thought, because it's suddenly surrounded by an army of Vehicons, including yet another made-up general named Spy Streak. But then the Wreckers are joined by even more new characters, a trio of former Decepticons named Rotorbolt, Cyclonus, and Skywarp. I guess that this is the same Cyclonus and Skywarp from the G1 cartoon? Which would make Cyclonus the former Insecticon Bombshell, before he was reformatted by Unicron in The Transformers: The Movie. Sure, why not?
The battle is joined again when Primal Prime, Rodimus, and the others show up. Blastcharge and Quake are here, so I guess Arcee didn't kill them after all, but then Arcee shows up and kills them. All the good guys pile into the shuttle and it blasts off, hopefully headed for a more interesting story. But there's an intruder onboard, and he's already taken out the Walmart-exclusive repaint of Transmetal Rattrap Packrat! "The name is Devcon!" he announces, brandishing a sword. Wait, who?
Elsewhere, the Oracle summons Alpha Trion's ghost back from the netherworld of the Force.
I did not care for this one bit. The plot is bad, the writing is mediocre, the characters are nonexistent, and the attempted revisions to established lore are obvious and artless. I understand that most fans may be looking to get nothing more out of a Transformers tie-in comic than cool drawings of action figures being bashed together, and if that's all you're after, this issue may well satisfy. But for me personally, that isn't very interesting, especially when the source material being expanded on wasn't that shallow to begin with. More fool me, I suppose.
