Covenant

 

Writer: Simon Furman 

Publication date: January 1999

 

I've always found Transformers lore equal parts fascinating and frustrating. Its various mythologies are more elaborate and complex than a glorified toy commercial has any business being, but the fact that it ultimately is a toy commercial means that the soulless, undreaming executives who own the brand will always prioritize moving product over artistic integrity. It seems like whenever a creative person has a unique vision for the Transformers mythos and attempts to hammer it down, that iteration of the franchise is eventually canceled or micro-managed into oblivion. Then the continuity resets and the next iteration keeps some things but not others, changes things and reimagines things and throws things out wholesale, carries over a term but changes the definition, reuses a character's name but reinvents their history. Multiverses, alternate timelines, and continuity reboots come with the territory, but the thing Transformers is missing, what I've always wanted it to have, is a single, unified, overarching mythology that can reliably be understood to hold true regardless of the franchise iteration.

The "Thirteen Original Transformers" are a current canon mainstay, their roster (mostly) consistent across (just about) every universe and continuity. But years before that concept was introduced into the lore, there was the Covenant, a completely different group of the twelve original Transformers. Given life by the creator-god Primus at the dawn of time, they have lived on Protos, a moon of the planet Methuselah, for billions of years, waiting for the day of Point Omega, also called Shokaract: the Transformer Armageddon. They thought it was finally happening in 2005 when Optimus Prime was killed and Unicron attacked Cybertron, but Judd Nelson saved the universe all by himself, leaving the Covenant feeling like doomsday cultists after 2012.

But now "it is happening again," in the words of the Fireman, as the Chronarchitect materializes out of space and time to deliver the Covenant a warning: "THE LONG NIGHT BLOOMS. WHAT CANNOT BE IS, WHAT IS HISTORY IS FUTURE. THE BEGINNING, THE END, ALL IS CHAOS NOW. THE DOMINOES FALL. FALL. FALL. THE PLAN SHATTERS, IS LOST. WE FACE OBLIVION AND IT SMILES ITS PREDATORY SMILE. THE MOMENT COMES WHEN ALL IS POSSIBLE, NOTHING SET. WHAT IS BROKEN, RE-MADE. THE TIME-STREAM FLOWS TO A FORK. RETURN TO THE BEGINNING. PREPARE. PREPARE -"

Dude, chill.

We're told that the Chronarchitect is "one of the old gods, kin of Primus and Unicron," but then later we're told the full back story of Unicron and Primus (or one iteration of it, anyway) and it involves Unicron killing all the other gods who existed in the previous universe and destroying all energy and matter until he was the only thing that existed, then when the new universe was born Primus arose to protect it. So it don't make no sense for the Chronarchitect to be connected to either of them. Really he just seems like a proto-version of what would eventually become Vector Prime, a member of the Original Thirteen tasked by Primus with protecting space and time.

What's funny is that the original version of the Primus and Unicron mythology that appeared in the old Marvel Transformers comics, the slightly different version put forth here along with the introduction of the Covenant, and the reference book Transformers: The Ultimate Guide, which introduced the Thirteen and changed the Unicron mythos yet again, were all written by Simon Furman. He just keeps reusing and refining his own ideas every time he writes for a new continuity, but with no regard for how those ideas fit together across the broader Transformers multiverse.

For another example, issue #65 of Marvel's The Transformers, written by Furman, developed the lineage of Matrix-bearers, introducing the character Prima as the very first. Furman repeated the same lineage in Covenant, but now had Prima preceded by a new character called Primon, about whom nothing was established and who has been ignored by all subsequent iterations of Transformers mythology. When asked about this discrepancy in his own writing, Furman replied "iunno."

Anyway, we got a little sidetracked there, but the point is that what makes Covenant interesting and cool is its exploration of deep Transformers lore, but reading this in 2024 rather than 1999 and knowing how the mythology has developed over the past quarter century counteracts that interest, because wherever this story goes, ultimately it's just another one of Simon Furman's rough drafts. If the story had literary value in its own right, that wouldn't be a deal-breaker, but, well...

 

TO BE CONTINUED IN REACHING THE OMEGA POINT PART IV: THE RETURN OF JAFAR!