Shell Game

 

Writer: Simon Furman

Publication date: December 24, 2007 (unofficial release)

 

This was supposed to be a comic series bridging the gap between Beast Wars and Beast Machines, but it was canceled when Dreamwave Productions declared bankruptcy in 2005. Only cover art for the first two issues was ever produced, but Simon Furman eventually released his script for issue #1 on his blog. Furman had already recycled the main story beats of the issue, including several verbatim lines of dialogue, into The Gathering, so we can't really headcanon Shell Game into our make-believe expanded Beast Wars timeline; the whole plot with Magmatron and a deep-cover Razorbeast building an army out of the Axalon's stasis pods can't happen here, post-"Nemesis," when it already happened back during "Changing of the Guard."

In this version of the story, Magmatron has done something to sabotage the Ark's Autobot escape shuttle so Optimus Primal and his crew, excluding Rattrap for some reason, go crazy while traveling through the transwarp portal back to Cybertron. Rattrap's dream of Optimus Minor, Wolfang, and Bonecrusher back in Ain't No Rat is revealed here to be some kind of hallucination seemingly brought on by the signal Razorbeast is broadcasting to the dormant stasis pods back on prehistoric Earth. Not sure how that makes any sense at all, especially since at the time of the broadcast those three Maximals haven't even been awakened from their protoform state yet, but presumably it would have been explained in future issues.

Issue #1 ends with Megatron breaking free from his restraints on the outside of the shuttle and using his dragon mode to melt through the hull and confront the Maximals, now apparently back in their right minds due to Rattrap deactivating the transwarp drive and dropping them back to their temporal/spatial starting point. The cover art for the unwritten issue 2 seems to show Megatron being put on trial by Magmatron and his henchmen.

Maybe we can work some of the material from the shuttle into our timeline to give some kind of justification for Ain't No Rat, but judging by the script I'm not sad this series never made it to print. The flashbacks in Beast Machines already made it pretty clear what happened between the two shows: Megatron fell off the shuttle in transwarp space and arrived back on Cybertron earlier than the Maximals, giving him time to take it over before they got there. Not sure why a completely extraneous story of the Maximals turning against Rattrap, taking the shuttle back to Earth, apparently fighting Megatron, and then Megatron being captured and tried by Furman's OCs, presumably all leading back to where everything started anyway, made sense to inject into a straightforward narrative chain of events.

Less canon than non-canon, not worth the effort to hunt up the script online.