The Ascending

 

Writer: Simon Furman 

Publication date: October 3, 2007 – January 9, 2008

 

A sequel to both The Gathering and, weirdly, Beast Wars Neo, The Ascending is more of the same, but worse.

We find Magmatron trapped in temporal flux, massless and formless. He blames this on Razorbeast blowing up the temporal shunt with him inside, which, if that actually happened, I completely missed. Magmatron can send his consciousness to any point in spacetime but is powerless to exert any influence. The time and place he goes most frequently is the dark future of Cybertron's ruination at the hands of someone who looks like Rampage and carries a glowing talisman that looks like the Matrix. Oh, no. Oh, no!

Back on prehistoric Earth, Razorbeast's Maximals and Ravage's Predacons are still waging their own lamer version of the Beast Wars, out of temporal sync with the real Beast Wars so Optimus Primal, Megatron, and their respective crews remain blissfully unaware of their intrusive presence. I don't understand this. Surely the same environment exists in both temporal phases. What happens if Razorbeast blows up a mountain? Would Primal et al. just not notice? Would they see the mountain explode but not be able to find who did it? What if Razorbeast picked up a rock right in front of them? Would it look like it was floating in the air? Are they ghosts?

Speaking of both ghosts and Razorbeast, our de facto protagonist from the previous comic, I hope you didn't get too attached to him because he isn't long for this world.

Anyway, the Maximals have won the Beast Wars and are preparing to return to Cybertron aboard an Autobot escape shuttle from the Ark. Ravage has a plan to free Megatron and commandeer the shuttle, but none of his people can physically interact with anyone aboard the Ark unless they get their hands on Magmatron's chronal phase facilitators, all of which are in Razorbeast's possession. Not wanting to be permanently stranded in the past, Ravage has his Predacons launch an all-out assault on the Maximals while he tries to steal the magic armbands. But the ones sitting out in the open are just a hologram. The real magic armbands, Razorbeast stupidly reveals after pummeling Ravage into pretend-unconsciousness, are in a little hole in the wall.

As soon as Razorbeast is gone, Ravage frees himself easily and takes the armband. Upon entering "chronospace," however, he is trapped between time by Magmatron, who tells him he must make peace with the Maximals in order to avoid the terrible future Magmatron has seen: "Angolmois. Shokaract. Unicron. A trinity of chaos!"

Man, are we really doing this shit again? Already? Rhymin' Simon only knows how to play his own greatest hits.

Magmatron travels back in time to The Gathering when the Maximals were trying to send a transwarp message to Cybertron. He is able to boost the signal and ensure it gets through to Lio Convoy, who rounds up "the Pack" and gets his own transwarp cruiser ready to come to the rescue.

So Unicron or... I guess, like, the ghost of Unicron? or something? He orders a Predacon with the improbable name of Rartorata to go back in time to the Beast Wars and clean up that mess so it doesn't threaten "the Ascending" of Shokaract into a suitable vessel for Unicron's rebirth. He tasks his other minions with continuing to distribute Angolmois to the Cybertronian populace. In this comic, Angolmois is like a deadly and addictive drug that causes Transformers to become mindlessly violent. It is also the lifeforce of Unicron, essentially Dark Essence in capsule form, but they don't mention that at all in the story because [reasons].

At this point we get cameo appearances from Ironhide, Silverbolt, and Prowl (Transmetal 2 owl at the end of The Gathering confirmed for Prowl II) as the Maximal Elders, apparently the current heads of the Maximal Imperium, as Magmatron called it. They no longer resemble their G1 forms at all, instead having the designs of their toys from the Beast Wars line. Unfortunately, they don't combine to form Magnaboss in this story. Instead, they radio Big Convoy and order him to find out what's making so many Transformers turn into antisocial nutjobs all of a sudden. Big Convoy doesn't take their call, however, because he's already found the answer: hard Angolmois coming over the border and poisoning our protoforms!

Lio Convoy and the Pack arrive on Earth and Ravage returns to the physical world. The two robots with cat heads on their bodies have a meeting of minds and agree to a truce. Just in time too, because Rartorata is also here now, his body all juiced up with Angolmois Energy. A lionfish/hornet Fuzor, he jabs Razorbeast with his stinger, transforming him into the infested boar god from Princess Mononoke.

Transquito (hey, didn't he die fighting Shokaract? Must have been a different Transquito) asks Injector, of whose toy Rartorata is a repaint, if their enemy looks familiar. Injector says "nah don't worry about it."

Razorbeast, driven mad by the Angolmois, is temporarily able to regain control of himself through the power of friendship. He tells Lio Convoy to return to Cybertron and stop Shokaract. The Last Alliance of Maximals and Predacons gets back in the ship, which can't fit everyone so they leave behind whoever is unable to fight because they're too injured or they suck. Rartorata is joined by his fellow Blendtrons Elephorca and Drancon. Razorbeast fights them all but tells Optimus Minor to kill him when he loses control of himself again.

Back on Cybertron, Big Convoy has found Shokaract's hideout. Shokaract punches his claws through the wall and rips Tasmanian Kid in half, killing (?) him. Noooo, not the Kid! Oh well. Shokaract then kills Big Convoy as well, but this is undone when Lio Convoy's transwarp cruiser returns through time to the moment after Tasmanian Kid was killed, distracting Shokaract before he can attack Big Convoy. I have a feeling Lio Convoy timed their entrance like that on purpose.

Shokaract summons his new heralds: a bunch of Japanese characters and also Antagony, whose presence here is hard to square with her 32nd-century origins in Reaching the Omega Point. Maybe she was always alive in this time and just lived for a thousand years. Actually I don't even have to invent a retcon to explain this contradiction between two totally separate continuities, the Beast Wars Sourcebook already did it for me! It says that she was created by the Vok and sent through so many different realities that she mistakenly believes herself to be from the future. Um.

While everyone fights the heralds, Lio Convoy has a guy he knows engineer a retrovirus to cure everyone on Cybertron infected with Angolmois. Ravage zips off to chronospace to consult with Magmatron, who tells him to bring Shokaract here so Magmatron can talk to him bot to bot. He also tells Ravage that he should totally screw over the Maximals in the process because that would be le epic prank. "Lmao," says Ravage.

Ravage cons Transmetal 2 Prowl to fly Snarl (not the G1 Stegosaurus Dinobot) over Shokaract's head so they can put a chronal phase armband on him. Prowl does this and is immediately vaporized. "Nnn-no!" cries Snarl. He lands on Shokaract's head and sticks the thing on him, sending him into non-space.

Magmatron shows Shokaract his future: "consumed by an influx of Angolmois too great for any mortal shell to bear, sacrificed... that Unicron may be reborn." Then it shows Unicron emerging from a portal in space to eat Cybertron. Didn't they say Shokaract was going to be a "vessel" for Unicron though? I took that to mean Unicron was going to possess him like he did to Windrazor in Reaching the Omega Point. Now he's a "sacrifice" to restore Unicron's original planet-sized body? How does that work? A sacrifice to whom?

But anyway Shokaract becomes severely depressed upon realizing that he was never destined to become the ultimate badass in this timeline, and he rips the Matrix of Conquest out of his chest, only now they call it the Matrix of Chaos. This has the effect of killing him, although the art certainly doesn't show that. That's what Magmatron says happened though: "An unexpected by-product of Shokaract's spectacular suicide—a timelash of unimaginable proportions. I'm free. I'm back!" Guess we just have to take his word for it.

Back on Earth, all the Blendtrons lie dead, but so does Razorbeast, shot in the pig head by Optimus Minor. Magmatron says they should build a statue in his memory. Good thing he didn't say that about Prowl!

In the aftermath, Lio Convoy and Big Convoy reflect at the work ahead of them: mass producing and distributing the Angolmois retrovirus, quashing civil unrest, rebuilding after all the devastation. They just hope that nothing else goes wrong before they're done! While somewhere on Cybertron, Megatron returns from the Beast Wars.

Admittedly I did enjoy seeing Lio Convoy and Big Convoy in this comic, but I wish their roles had been bigger because that was the only part of it I liked. Don Figueroa's art, the highlight of The Gathering, is still good, but feels a little looser and less detailed here. Maybe it's just me, but maybe it's not, because he quit the book before issue 4 came out and someone else had to fill in.

Thankfully, The Ascending doesn't undermine the characters of Beast Wars like The Gathering did, but despite this small favor it just feels like "been there, done that." Shokaract, Unicron, oh no, okay I got it. This time, though, we don't get any backstory for Shokaract, any description of what Angolmois is or where it comes from, or any introduction to the Japanese characters or explanation for their atypical Transformer names. This comic assumes the reader already has an encyclopedic knowledge of obscure Transformers lore.

Fortunately, we've read all those other Beast Wars stories so we can fill in some of the gaps, but now we have to figure out how Shokaract can work for Megatron's regime during the Beast Machines era if he already offed himself before Megatron got back to Cybertron. Maybe he just got better off-screen. No one stays dead in this universe.