The Gathering

 

Writer: Simon Furman 

Publication date: February 15 – May 10, 2006

 

Let's take a little break from Reaching the Omega Point to read a comic that at one time you could actually go to a store and buy. (Spoilers: the characters on the cover appear for about one page out of the four issues collected in this series. Talk about your false advertising!)

Simon Furman returns to writing duties yet again (is he the only guy they can get to write Transformers comics?). His modus operandi in these Beast Wars stories seems to be introducing an unwieldily huge cast of new characters, exclusively focusing on them over the established cast people actually like, giving none of them any meaningful character development, then going through the motions of drama but without any of the difficult-to-write emotional stakes. Does this pattern hold true to form in The Gathering? You know I wouldn't be writing this if it didn't!

Magmatron, who we first saw as a blueprint drawn up by the Tripredacus Council 300 years earlier, appears on prehistoric Earth at the time of the Beast Wars. With him are his henchmen: Transquito, Manterror, Spittor, Iguanus, Drill Bit, and Razorbeast. Somehow, they all already have beast modes without needing to scan for local lifeforms like every other Beast Wars character did. Magmatron is kind of a Combiner, but only in his beast mode(s), when he splits into three different dinosaur robots: a Giganotosaurus, a Quetzalcoatlus, and an Elasmosaurus. Yes, I know that only one of those is really a dinosaur.

Magmatron and his men are here at the behest of the Tripredacus Council to complete the mission that Ravage failed at the end of Beast Wars' second season: arrest Megatron and bring him back to Cybertron to stand trial. However, little does the Tripredacus Council know that Magmatron has his own dark designs, namely to find all the Maximal stasis pods jettisoned by the Axalon when it crashed to Earth in season one and reprogram them into Predacons, thus building himself an army with which he can conquer Cybertron! This seems like the dumbest plan ever to me. How many pods does he think were on that ship? Are like twenty guys enough to take over a planet?

Magmatron tasks his lieutenant, Razorbeast, with setting up a broadcasting station that will send a signal to all of the crashed stasis pods, simultaneously awakening the protoforms within and turning them evil. This will save them all the trouble of having to get off their asses and go find the pods in person, as happened in many exciting episodes of Beast Wars. But Razorbeast is a secret deep-cover Maximal agent working for Lio Convoy from Beast Wars II. Lio Convoy is only seen in a brief flashback that doesn't mention his name or position in the Maximal hierarchy. Is this guy like the current Prime? Does he have the Matrix? Does the Matrix still even exist in this era? None of these questions are answered and no interesting worldbuilding occurs. Instead, here are some toys you haven't been able to buy from a retailer in ten years.

(Actually, there is one quick little snippet of worldbuilding here, where Lio Convoy grouses about having to sit with Magmatron on Bi-Partate Committee for State Affairs. After all that villainy he got up to in the anime, now they have to play nice and act like bygones are bygones. Can we get more Cybertronian political drama? No? Oh, okay.)

 

Razorbeast betrays Magmatron and implants his own signal in the broadcast, withholding Predacon programming from some of the stasis pods. He then runs away to find these newly awakened Maximals and recruit them to stop Magmatron. Comically, in his razorback beast mode he can regurgitate a giant mechanical signal beacon in his mouth to summon the other Maximals to him. Also, he has a nose ring in his pig snout. Why would his beast mode have a nose ring? No one else's beast mode comes with jewelry. The toy didn't even have one!

The other Predacons are like "Magmatron, what can we do about this unforeseen treachery?" Magmatron responds by splitting into his three dinosaur modes and saying "Unleash—the—Beast Wars!" That's how issue #1 ends, then in the next issue he's immediately back in his robot mode again.

Razorbeast meets up with some of the new Maximals and they decide to find Ravage's crashed transwarp cruiser from "The Agenda" and use it to send a message through time to Cybertron. Why didn't Optimus Primal ever think of doing that? Is he stupid?

 

Meanwhile, Magmatron has the same idea. Although he has come back in time to build an army he can use to overthrow both the Maximal Imperium and the Tripredacus Council, he's suddenly afraid of not keeping to his bosses' timetable. For some reason he feels compelled to complete his assignment and capture Megatron for the council, even though he's planning to betray them. Because this will keep them from becoming suspicious of him, or something? Why would they have time to get suspicious? How long is he planning on waiting to stage his coup after he gets back?

Anyway, both sides find Ravage's crashed ship, which is weird because the cartoon showed it being obliterated in a small nuclear explosion, but whatever. They fight and the Maximals escape with the transwarp amplifier. However, it's broken and they need Cybertronian technology to repair it, which they plan to salvage from the Ark. 

 

In the wreckage of the transwarp ship, Magmatron finds Ravage's body, which has been damaged beyond repair, but his spark still survives! Somehow! Pretty sure he got incinerated in two back-to-back giant explosions but all right! No one's ever really gone!

They find yet another stasis pod with a blank protoform (this makes number five if we take everything as canon) and implant Ravage's spark into it. He comes back to life as a repaint of Transmetal 2 Cheetor, except with a cat head instead of a robot head. Since Transmetal 2 Cheetor's entire transformation process was basically just popping out his robot head and standing upright, Ravage's new body just looks like a messed-up cat walking on its hind legs. Also, how are some of these new Transformers coming out of their stasis pods as Transmetals 2? That was specifically an advancement developed by Megatron using Vok technology. Now it just affects random background characters in this Dostoevsky-sized dramatis personae.

Optimus Primal and the other Maximals finally put in their cameo in issue #3, where they are totally oblivious to the presence of Razorbeast's troops walking past them to steal technology from the Ark. You see, the Beast Wars participants of The Gathering are "chronally displaced," existing out of sync with the cartoon's "chronal phase." For some reason they can still see and hear Optimus and the others, though. How convenient!

Elsewhere, some of Magmatron's troops fight the Mutants, a sub-group of the Beast Wars toyline featuring Transformers with two beast modes but no robot mode. Okay.

Using his chronal phase facilitator armband, Magmatron shifts into the normal timestream and attacks Megatron shortly after he has begun installing the Maximals' Sentinel security system in the Predacon base at the end of "Changing of the Guard." Megatron recognizes him, as apparently they know each other from Cybertron. Megatron is able to hold his own against Magmatron, calling him a mere lackey of the Tripredacus Council, but then Drill Bit and Iguanus also enter the timestream and immediately incapacitate Megatron, a Transmetal, by jabbing him with a cattle prod. Megatron is now down and out for the rest of the comic, having shown up just to get owned by Simon Furman's OCs. That sucks!

Magmatron et al. shift back out of chronal sync again, taking Megatron with them. They have built something that looks kind of like a space bridge from the old G1 cartoon, only they call it a "transwarp shunt." Drill Bit activates the recall sequence and Magmatron tells him to set the machine to self-destruct after they use it so no one can follow them back to Cybertron. I thought the whole reason he wanted to go back in time in the first place was to recruit an army? But Drill Bit, Iguanus, and the unconscious Megatron are the only ones here. The vast majority of his guys are all off wasting valuable page real estate on pointless battles with the Maximals and Mutants. How's he going to get his army back to Cybertron if he blows up the machine before any of them can use it? He's going to overthrow the Tripredacus Council by doing exactly what they told him to do and not getting what he wanted? What the hell is his plan here?

But before they can shunt themselves back through space and time, they're confronted by a dinosaur who says, "Me... Grimlock!" Yes, it's the Grimlock, the G1 Dinobot! He's here too! Razorbeast, observing from the trees, notes that he was on the Axalon's crew manifest like it's completely normal and expected to have an ancient war veteran known for his dim-wittedness and savagery hire on to crew a scientific exploration vessel. Was his bizarre cameo in Dawn of the Predacus as a nametag on a stasis pod supposed to explain how he got there?

"Always the same," says Grimlock as he thrashes the Predacons. "Go into stasis, wake up grouchy." Was I the only person who watched Beast Wars and never once got the impression that protoforms were supposed to be already-living Transformers reverted to an amorphous mercury state for space travel? Like it seemed pretty apparent to me from the show that they were supposed to be the first stage of a Transformer's life cycle before they ever have programming or consciousness or a solid body. Was it just me? Did I miss something?

Magmatron splits into his three dinosaur forms and is able to overwhelm Grimlock, but Razorbeast uses this distraction to steal one of the Predacons' chronal armbands. Also, I should point out that Magmatron's Elasmosaurus beast mode has little anti-gravity jets behind panels that can open in his belly when he needs to move around on land instead of the water, which is every time he transforms in this comic.

 

What's funny about Grimlock in this comic is that he has to be some type of dromaeosaurid (raptor) because his Beast Wars toy was just a repaint of Dinobot. But Simon Furman really wants him to be a T-rex, because everyone remembers him being a T-rex. So the solution is to draw him as a raptor the size of a Tyrannosaurus. Compromise.

Elsewhere, Ravage leads the rest of the Predacons against the Maximals' secret hideout in a cave or something, but they're beaten back when more Maximals show up, including Torca, an elephant/killer whale Fuzor who had a normal-sized toy but is incongruously huge in the comic, like twice the size of a real elephant. Like so big he never would have fit in a stasis pod in the first place. Who wrote this schlock, Christopher Nolan's dad?

Ravage just watches from a distance and then leaves after doing nothing at all, proving there was no reason to resurrect him in the first place.

Magmatron starts preparing once again to take Megatron back through the portal, but now Razorbeast emerges to confront him. When Magmatron moves to strike him, however, Razorbeast uses the armband he stole to briefly desync from the timestream, then reappears behind Magmatron and shoots him in the back. This repeats several times, with Razorbeast being essentially unbeatable now. As the transwarp shunt counts down to its activation, Razorbeast blasts Magmatron one last time, knocking him into the portal. Magmatron screams like he's dying and disappears.

Two weeks later, the time-desynced Maximals have all reunited and are building their own village apparently. Razorbeast confides in Prowl, who... I assume isn't the G1 character (??), and I don't think has ever had a speaking role in this comic up until now (???), that there was a moment where he had Megatron at his mercy and could have won the Beast Wars and ended his threat forever, and it was only his respect for the temporal prime directive that stayed his hand. Apparently Razorbeast is a fucking moron who doesn't remember that he and Megatron are from the same goddamn time and killing him in the past wouldn't have changed the timeline at all.

"This is our Beast Wars now!" says Prowl. THE BEGINNING...? I hope not!

 

Pros: The art by Don Figueroa is very, very good! I had a lot of these non-show figures when I was a kid, and it was cool finally getting to see so many of them in action, even if just for a panel or two. Grimlock's cameo made no sense but it was a good use of the character, and I was glad to see him still speaking like a Neanderthal.

Cons: Everything to do with the story, plot, characters, and writing. Nothing made any sense and no one was likable or interesting.

 

The beauty of Beast Wars existing in an episodic format where every episode is its own self-contained story is that you could insert an almost infinite number of new stories between any number of episodes and it wouldn't disrupt the flow of the series' narrative at all! The limited cast on the TV show might make introducing new characters a problem, but they just went ahead and did it in the BotCon stories anyway. So what's the deal with making all these Beast Wars tie-ins that barely feature any of the good Beast Wars characters, except when they show up for five seconds to get their asses kicked by new OCs who suck?

Also, I should point out that one of the Maximals is a monkey Transformer called Optimus Minor. I find it exceedingly incongruous that Simon Furman has written about Beast Wars characters named Onyx Primal and Optimus Minor, whose names are both clearly derived from Optimus Primal's, yet neither story addresses this at all, even to lampshade it as a weird coincidence. The character bio on Optimus Minor's Tech Specs card said that he was like a clone of Optimus Primal or something, but in The Gathering they have no connection to each other and never meet. I wish the same could be said of this comic and myself.