Terminus

 

Writer: Simon Furman 

Publication date: July 28, 2000

 

At last, the conclusion! Across time and space, all roads have led to this: the Omega Point, the final battle between the Covenant and Shokaract, between Primus and Unicron, between good and evil. Some Beast Wars characters are also there for a little bit.

Last time, Shokaract had traveled back to prehistoric Earth from the 32nd century and ripped Optimus Primal's spark from his chest. Pretend that last part didn't happen though. Shokaract slaps aside the defenseless Maximals and is about to rip Optimus Primal's spark from his chest when he's suddenly struck by a series of attacks that, inconceivably, impossibly, hurt him. The Covenant, the Original Twelve Transformers created by Primus, legally separate and distinct from the Original Thirteen Transformers created by Primus, emerge from their hiding place on Protos, ready to kick ass after 13 billion years of sitting on theirs.

Actually, only eleven of the Twelve are here, because the last of their number has been undercover on Shokaract's Cybertron, leading the joint Maximal/Predacon resistance under the name of Sandstorm... and now he's here too! And Windrazor is still here, and he meets up with Optimus Primal while the Covenant fights Shokaract. And then the two of them are joined by Apelinq, the mysterious figure who started all of these shenanigans by stealing the "plot device" that Onyx Primal and Packrat were looking for back in the first prologue. Apelinq is a red repaint of Transmetal Optimus Primal, but I guess the real Optimus Primal just doesn't notice this, or he's too polite to say anything.

 

But Shokaract has another trick up his sleeve, and suddenly his heralds Antagony and Cataclysm are there, her mind and his molecules completely restored, because I guess that's just a power Shokaract has now, and they start fighting the Covenant!

But now more Transformers appear as well, materializing from different times and different universes, Maximal and Predacon figures you saw on toy store shelves who never showed up in the cartoon: Drill Bit and B'Boom and Air Hammer and Polar Claw and Transquito! All the stars are here!

Meanwhile, Megatron, true to character, is trying to figure out how to turn this giant clusterfuck to his advantage. He realizes that the Dark Essence in the cave is the same energy in Shokaract's Matrix of Conquest, the evil talisman that gives him his power. He deduces that at some point in the future, Shokaract will find the cave and the Dark Essence, enabling his rise to power, but Megatron's meddling with the timeline has endangered that course of events, so Shokaract himself has come back to ensure that his own history remains unaltered. 

Megatron discovers the rift in spacetime through which the Dark Essence was drawn after Unicron's destruction in 2005 and threatens to destroy it. While his heralds hold off... everyone, apparently, Shokaract goes to Megatron, who demands knowledge of his own future in exchange for not sending the Dark Essence back through the rift. But Shokaract reveals that Megatron, untrue to character, actually holds no cards at all, for Shokaract has already psionically anchored the Dark Essence to this time... somehow. Then he kicks Megatron's ass.

One by one, the Covenant members begin to fall in the face of Shokaract's unspeakable power to make things randomly explode, but numbers may yet turn the tide as Antagony and Cataclysm, having done nothing, died, and come back, now die again. But then Sandstorm, aka Scorpius, shoots Transquito in the back, revealing himself to be yet another herald of Shokaract! His master welcomes him back to his side with open arms. Or claws, rather, because the great Shokaract, the most evil and powerful villain in Transformers history, is actually just a repaint of Rampage, a much more interesting character who doesn't even appear in this story except as a namedrop.

But this was just a subterfuge, because Scorpius is actually a triple agent, and he turns on Shokaract and shoots him in the face with the power of Primus the Creator-God, Bringer of Light. In return Shokaract squashes him flat like a bug, killing him. But Scorpius's attack forces Shokaract to transform from beast mode to robot mode, for some reason, and apparently this means that he can be hurt now? Even though the Covenant already hurt him before by attacking him conventionally? But I guess he can be hurt now so Optimus Primal, Apelinq, and Windrazor launch a heroic assault.

 

The remaining members of the Covenant now realize what the broken warning of the Chronarchitect meant: when he told them to return to the beginning, he meant that they must revert to their beginning as pure energy. They do this, because of course they just can, attacking Shokaract on the astral plane where the Dark Essence is bonded to him. Their combined spirits take on the likeness of Primus, while the Dark Essence manifests itself in the form of Unicron, and they fight each other with spectral swords!

Back in the physical world, the heroic Maximals suddenly find their number joined by Optimus Prime, the original Megatron, Grimlock, and Soundwave, the mythic heroes of J'nwan having reconsidered Scorpius's/Sandstorm's plea in the last chapter and leaving the halls of Robot Valhalla to do battle once more. If I'm making this 26-page comic sound severely over-crowded with characters and convoluted lore, good.

It's unclear what effect if any this heroic last stand has on the resolution of the story, however, as the Covenant-as-Primus strikes down the avatar of Unicron and severs the Dark Essence from Shokaract. No longer bound to this time, the Dark Essence slips back through the rift in spacetime, taking the remnants of the Covenant with it. Will they reincarnate in their physical forms? Are they dead? Will they be reunited with their creator and reassured that their sacrifice of sitting around from the beginning of the universe waiting for the end of the universe was not in vain? Who knows, who cares, it'll never come up again.

But with the Dark Essence gone, Shokaract's entire history has been unmade. Instead of winking out of existence, though, he is consumed in a humongous explosion, presumably taking the ghosts (?) of the G1 Autobots and Decepticons with him. Did they get sent back to J'nwan? Were they ever really there at all? Why was Megatron his old self again instead of Galvatron and why was he helping? He was already dead (I guess???) so why would he care if Shokaract took over the universe? And what of Apelinq and Windrazor? Who knows, who cares, etc.

"And the never-ending battle? Even that must end, here... at Point Omega."

Epilogue: Another time, the same place. The Hunter, now the Hunted, runs for his life, pursued by Megatron's armies. He stumbles upon the entrance to a cave; from inside, he hears a voice, promising him all the dark desires of his embittered heart. But when he ventures in, there is nothing: just an empty pit, and the sound of the wind.

 

This is a train wreck. There are so many characters, most of them have no reason to be there, and the ones we already know and care about have the least to do of all. The new characters have barely any development and little memorable or interesting about them, despite the four drawn-out chapters spent introducing them. I understand that the nature of this story as a con-exclusive serial made to sell limited-release repaints of old figures means that there's only so much that could have been done with it, but if this had all been done as a multi-issue comic series that was really able to take its time and properly develop the major cast (and maybe had a different writer), it could have turned out a lot better.

That said, Terminus is definitely the highlight of the series, or at least of the parts that were written by Simon Furman and weren't intended to be a big joke. Switching media from prose to comic does a lot to hide the more noticeable weaknesses of his writing style, and while he still works in plenty of overwrought text boxes, the addition of a major visual element means that he can only prattle on so much on any given page. The art itself isn't the greatest, especially when it comes to depicting characters from the cartoon whose likenesses are already firmly established, but it's perfectly acceptable for a presumably low-budget Transformers tie-in.

I like the use of Unicron here via the Dark Essence, as a malignant corrupting force rather than a unique individual intelligence, more than in the previous chapter, in which I thought he sucked. I would rather have just kept the Dark Essence as a plot device (but not the "plot device" that Apelinq stole, whose purpose is never explained in this story) and not had Unicron himself come back at all if he was just going to be around for five minutes, act like a cheesy cartoon villain, and then die again. The legacy of his evil remaining in the world even after his defeat is a more interesting use of the character in my opinion, at least in this specific story.

As for Shokaract himself, the greatest Cybertronian villain from all of history, a galactic conqueror with the face of an immortal psychopath and the power of a dead god... he's kinda lame, ngl. There's really nothing at all to his character. He comes, he sees, he conquers, he dies. The closest he gets to being interesting is in the two brief flashback sequences to his life as the Hunter, even though his backstory as a Predacon hunting Maximals for Megatron after his conquest of Cybertron makes no sense and doesn't fit at all with the backstory established in Beast Machines. The epilogue where the Hunter, who once could have been Shokaract, finds the empty cave is by far the best scene in the entire series. In another life, he would have become Shokaract, but that destiny is now forever lost to him, and he'll never know it. Really awesome conclusion, just one in want of a story and characters good enough to justify it.

 

Needless to say, Reaching the Omega Point makes no sense as Beast Wars canon. I didn't hate it, but I also can't imagine ever wanting to read it again.