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Cartoon Viewing Club: Zob's Thoughts on "B.O.T."
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Zobovor
Sep 15, 2016, 6:14:02 PM9/15/16
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"B.O.T." is episode 65 in the original Transformers cartoon, and first aired in the USA on January 9, 1986. By accident or design, it would be the final episode of the second season, which also makes it the very last of the contemporary-era Transformers cartoon adventures before The Transformers: the Movie and subsequent stories, which shifted the setting into the future by 20 years. Rather than finishing up an episode-wide story arc or bringing some sort of closure to the season, it's simply another, random Transformers adventure that exists largely in a vacuum, and a fairly goofy one at that. It's written by Earl Kress, creating more human characters who, like Carly, I'm sure he would have used again had the show continued in the same format for another season.
Our episode begins with the Combaticons terrorizing the streets of a major metropolitan community, arriving and transforming to vehicle mode. There's an odd scene where Swindle and Brawl both choose the same spot to touch down in vehicle mode, and there's a moment of contention as they vie for the space. "You two-faced pipsqueak! Stay behind me!" Brawl says gruffly, and the matter is settled. This scene seems to be written specifically to show that Brawl is an asshole. (This part was actually cut from the Sci-Fi Channel version. Brawl must have been helping with the syndication edits that day.)
Vortex the helicopter and Blast Off the space shuttle roll along on the ground with the rest of them for no adequately explored reason. This show has always been largely blind to scale—showcasing the relative sizes between the toys far more readily than demonstrating the difference in size of the real-life vehicles these guys turn into. Blast Off is drawn slightly larger than the others, which looks wrong on some levels since he's not the guy who forms the main body of Bruticus. We're visually accustomed to the team leaders being the biggest, regardless of scale. Combining into Bruticus is exactly what they do, in fact.
Bruticus doesn't even get a line of dialogue before he looks up, ostensibly at his Autobot foe, before he's quite literally blasted to bits. Something about the toy-driven nature of this show tells us this cannot possibly be real. Surely it's a dream sequence, or a fake Bruticus, or something along those lines. Characters simply didn't die on this show up to this point. We see now that it was Defensor who delivered the killing shot, making his first appearance in the series. (The Protectobots previously appeared in "The Revenge of Bruticus," marking their first episode, but did not combine together.) Autobot weapons are rarely this powerful.
Remarkably, it seems that Swindle, and Swindle alone, has managed to survive the destruction of the other Combaticons. Maybe he saw the blast coming and, being the self-serving jackanapes that he is, separated from Bruticus a mere instant before the others were blasted to pieces. There are some unfortunate coloring choices here as Swindle emerges from underneath a yellow-colored block that could only be the right leg for Bruticus——the component that Swindle forms and the only part of Bruticus that is this color. This is almost as egregious a mistake as Defensor and Hot Spot appearing alongside each other in "Carnage in C-Minor."
"Call sanitation. There's junk all over the street!" Defensor quips to the nearby humans, seemingly oblivious to Swindle's survival. Defensor does not help clean up the mess, nor does he check to confirm whether any Combaticons have survived—he is content to simply walk away. He's voiced in this episode, and subsequent installments, by Chris Latta, using the same voice he provided for G.I. Joe characters like Gung-Ho (and occasionally Wheeljack, when Sparkplug was in the same scene and he was trying to differentiate the sound of the two characters). Swindle resolves to start picking up the pieces of his comrades, muttering something about a need for spare parts.
He arrives at his destination where a lookout spots him. "A jeep just went by with no driver. Should I dust it?" he inquires over a walkie-talkie. The whole driverless car schtick is no longer a surprise; the lookout (voiced by Don Messick) immediately recognizes him as a Transformer. Swindle meets with a foreign national whom he addresses as El Presidente (voiced by Roger C. Carmel), and seems to be making a deal for new components in exchange for payment. Good ol' Swindle, always thinking of his buddies. We'll see eventually that this simply does not pan out, however.
Elsewhere, the Decepticons are testing a device called the orbit disruptor, which Megatron plans to use to just push the Moon out of Earth's orbit. This is phase one of a plan which will allow the Decepticons to control the movement of the tides themselves, using a second, unnamed device, ostensibly developed by Soundwave. The weapon is so large that apparently Bruticus is the only Decepticon capable of operating it. (Why not, say, Devastator or Menasor? This is not addressed. Maybe they're off on another mission somewhere.) Megatron's developed a visual simulation of what it will look like, and Starscream chastizes him in his usual tired manner for wasting his time.
Back on foreign soil, the deal with El Presidente has taken a different turn. Suddenly, Swindle's trade partner is asking for the computer systems and weapons from the Combaticons' remains, dismissing the rest of the parts as worthless and sending them to the junkyard. He gives the empty, deactivated head of Brawl a kick for good measure——and if there's any life left in Brawl, you can bet he remembers this later and is not happy about it. (Brawl's head seems incredibly small, especially compared to how large the disembodied Transformer heads were during the creation of the Headmasters in "The Rebirth.")
By the time Skywarp has been dispatched to retrieve the Combaticons at their headquarters, there's no sign of them anywhere. Apparently, the Autobot and Decepticon bases are so crammed full of new characters that they need to live off on their own. Skywarp, by the way, has adopted a very different dialect than most of his previous episodes. Frank Welker's voice delivery is closer to Bigtime Beagle from DuckTales than the Skywarp voice used for any of his previous episodes. Even as recently as "War Dawn" Skywarp sounded perfectly normal, but for some reason, Welker developed a completely different characterization for what would be Skywarp's final speaking role. This is arguably the only moment in which Skywarp is "useless without Megatron's supervision" as per his Hasbro tech specs. He discovers what seems to be a trail of Combaticon pieces, but is clueless how to proceed until Megatron finally prompts him to "follow the trail, dummy!"
Skywarp has recruited Starscream for assistance and they discover Swindle in the city dump, unloading the remains of the Combaticons. Starscream doesn't seem particularly concerned that the Combaticons that he, himself, created have been reduced to scrap metal, but he does recognize that Swindle is up to his usual dirty tricks and they capture him for a forcible relocation back to base. Swindle presents his case before Megatron, claiming the situation isn't really his fault——"this greed is built into my personality component!" This is a character moment, so it's hard to say whether Swindle is misrepresenting the facts for his own benefit or whether this is genuinely true (and, by extension, true that none of the Transformers can really change). Everything we've seen so far, in episodes like "Changing Gears" or "The Secret of Omega Supreme," suggests that a forcible reprogramming, either permanent or temporary, is the only way to really affect the behavior of any Autobots or Decepticons.
Megatron is not sympathetic to Swindle's situation, and arranges for Soundwave to install a bomb inside Swindle's head module. They give him fifteen hours to recover the parts and rebuild Bruticus before it goes boom. (Why 15 and not 12 or 24? Because the Decepticons were built by the Quintessons and they like to do things by fives, that's why.)
What follows is a montage of Swindle going back to all the places where he'd sold off some slightly-used Combaticon surplus and recovering it, but not actually bothering to offer any refunds. For all we know, this may have been the impetus for the Arabian country whose officials he angered to revamp their political structure into something far more socialist and xenophobic, like Carbombya. One can only speculate. We know he's sold parts to the land of Hyrule, because one guy there asks for his Rupees back. Wait, no. It was rubles, my bad. (In Soviet Russia, refund asks for you!)
Swindle manages to reassemble the other Combaticons in record time, looking exactly as they did before. None of them seem terribly upset over the whole ordeal with getting sold for scrap, but it's also possible he just hasn't told them about that part. The big problem here, as evidenced by the fact that Swindle has to drag Brawl across the room, is that the Combaticons cannot combine together any longer. They try to, and get part of the way there, but the sequence is automatically aborted before any of them can connect together. Brawl's personality component is still missing, a fact that Swindle had been hoping could be overlooked. "I didn't think it would matter," he says derisively. The implication is that Brawl's personality is so offensive, as seen in the opening scene from this episode, that Swindle felt like he was better off without it. Suffice to say, Megatron disagrees. (A close examination of the scene reveals that Brawl actually does begin to transform, which probably shouldn't happen if there is no life force inside his body.)
This raises a lot of odd questions. We've already seen in "The Key to Vector Sigma" that some Transformers can be remote-controlled even if they're not alive. Can't Megatron just hook up Brawl to a Stunticon-style remote control and get him to combine with the others into Bruticus that way? Even if the Stunticons are different technology somehow, you'd think Bruticus could still exist with one leg. We've seen that Devastator can still combine without Scavenger ("Desertion of the Dinobots" part 1) or Hook ("The Core") and we'll see later that Defensor can exist without First Aid ("The Ultimate Weapon"). On the other hand, Superion seemingly cannot be formed at all without Fireflight ("Aerial Assault") and Predaking cannot exist if Headstrong doesn't participate ("Nightmare Planet"). The rules are all so arbitrary. Honestly, this would have been a great time to introduce the Scramble City concept into the show. Brawl is out of action, so let's get Wildrider or Breakdown or somebody to serve as a pinch hitter. The story premise seems perfect to incorporate the idea. Despite this, it seems Hasbro was very specific about not wanting to play up the interchangeable aspect of the toys, since it was never used in any of the American media at all.
This is a Toei-animated episode, and while it's a budget installment that is generally merely proficient most of the time, there are a few moments when the animation really shines. One of them is the brief scene when Megatron orders the newly-rebuilt Combaticons to transform to Bruticus, and again when he chastizes Swindle following the botched transformation—the extra layer of shading used is easily on par with anything from The Transformers: the Movie. It's a shame the animators were so rushed that they didn't have time to do this for the weekday episodes more often.
So, then we cut to what seems like the beginning of a whole 'nother episode. At the local high school, a Mr. Robbins is holding a science class where he prepares to demonstrate the functionality of a low-wattage laser beam. When the laser rips right through a stack of books and then through the classroom window, he immediately suspects the class troublemakers Roland and Martin as likely culprits (and both of them are cackling hysterically over the prank, which is practically the same as admitting to doing it). I used to have a lot of trouble telling them apart (my brain refuses to process incidental human characters), but I believe Martin is the one in the brown coat with the popped collar, and Roland is the one in red suspenders who looks a little like Chandler Bing from Friends. Science class ends 26 seconds after it's begun (seriously), and their science teacher (voiced by Dan "Bumblebee" Gilvezan) is tired of their antics and gives them an ultimatum——either take first prize in the upcoming science fair or fail the class. To sweeten the deal, he elects a bright student named Elise Presser to assist them, which Martin and Roland are none too happy about.
Elise enthusiastically pledges her assistance, but the boys are less than welcoming. Elise is voiced by Samantha Newark, better known as the title character from the Jem! cartoon (she also played Ariel, the pre-Elita One, from "War Dawn"). She was cast late enough in the game that she does not get an on-screen voice credit in this series, but her voice is very distinctive and very easily recognized. Interestingly, Roland is voiced by Michael Sheehan, who played opposite Newark as Jem's love interest, Rio. (Perhaps as an homage to the Jem! actors, or perhaps as a happy concidence, two background students in the classroom have the same character design as Jerrica Benton, the alter-ego for Jem, and her sister Kimber. They're colored differently, but the outfits and hairstyles are a perfect match.) Martin is voiced by Townsend Coleman, his first role in Transformers, and would later perform Rewind in season three (but of course he gained much greater notoriety as Michaelangelo in the original Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles cartoon).
A fire has broken out inside a nearby building, prompting a couple of window washers to cry for help. The Protectobots are conveniently in town and rush to the rescue. "Stay calm! We're coming up for you!" says one of them, but it's not any of their regular voice performers. (Several of them had dialogue in "The Revenge of Bruticus," and Hot Spot gets other lines in this episode, so this would have to be First Aid by default. In later episodes, First Aid is performed by Michael Bell, so it's possible his role was recast by the time of "Surprise Party," his next appearance after this episode.)
"What the heck are THOSE things?!" asks Martin, who has apparently been living on Earth for two years without having heard that gigantic alien robots had crashed on the planet. It's possible he recognizes that they are Transformers but doesn't recognize the specific Protectobots since they're relatively new characters, but his specific dialogue doesn't support that (he says "what are those things," not "who are those guys"). Also, the appearance of the Protectobots goes completely unexplained in the show. This show is either really good at crafting character origin stories, or it totally ignores them entirely. We can infer that the Protectobots were probably not created by the Autobots on Earth ("The Key to Vector Sigma" establishes that there's no way to give them personalities without Vector Sigma, and its activation key was destroyed in that episode) but if they came from Cybertron, that story has never been told and it feels like a major oversight.
"Some liquid nitrogen oughta cool things off around here!" proclaims Groove, sounding exactly like Trailbreaker but breaking out an Ironhide move——retracting his hand and replacing it with a funnel so he can douse the flames. "And what you can't reach, I can!" promises Hot Spot, sounding nothing like he will in later episodes. Blades creates a gust of wind that causes the window washers to fall from their scaffolding, and Streetwise is down below waiting to catch them. A bit of a risky rescue, but I guess if it works, it works. In the aftermath of the rescue effort, Martin and Roland, who are still faced with the problem of needing to win the science fair, are inspired to construct a robot of their own.
Elise Presser talks a lot. She's babbling when they're digging through the junkyard looking for serviceable robot parts, babbling again when they stumble upon Brawl's personality component and decide to incorporate it into their project's design, and still babbling once they've broken into the school after hours and facing possible expulsion if they're caught. I'm not sure what purpose is served by their unauthorized presence on school grounds——surely they could use its facilities during the day, after school is over? It adds an unnesessary layer of tension just for the sake of being there. Martin describes the invention as a biotronic operational telecommunicator, which seems like a forced excuse to shorten its name to "B.O.T." It's really not an especially inspired name.
There is, of course, the usual hand-waving involved with episodes of this nature, and we're expected to swallow that these kids, who evidently have no industrial assembly experience, managed conveniently off-screen to do all the necessary cutting and welding and soldering and programming to assemble this robotic creation. (Of course, the thin possibility does exist that this robot never would have worked at all without Brawl's personality component inside it. If you take what you see in "Starscream's Brigade" at face value, all Starscream had to do was install personality components inside non-living Earth vehicles and they were immediately transformed into Transformers. It's possible B.O.T. was the same way.) The actual design of B.O.T. bothers me, since he doesn't really look like he's made from random junk at all. He's fat and ugly, but he's also perfectly symmetrical and his design is very polished. Also, somebody apparently misunderstood the script and colored him to make him look like he's made from Combaticon parts (he's Vortex grey and Brawl green and Swindle tan), despite the fact that all the Combaticon parts were ostensibly recovered by Swindle, except for Brawl's brain.
Martin tries to get B.O.T. to parrot back his name, but the robot's speech synthesizer spits it back out all garbled. (I freely admit that I have no idea who the voice actor is for B.O.T., since he only speaks one word and it's difficult to pin down a performer based on such a limited sample.) I think the storytelling reason for this was so that after Elise gets some funny readings off the personality component and gets the bright idea to plug it into the robot just to see what happens, Brawl is unable to communicate who he is or what's happened to him. All the kids know is that B.O.T. suddenly gets very, very violent. It's understandable, given that Brawl suddenly went from his homemade Transformer body (which wasn't all that great to begin with, if Blast Off's comments in "Starscream's Brigade" are accurate) into an even crappier homemade body. "You must have made him angry when you said he was no good!" Martin accuses Roland, referencing a scene that never happened. "It's a miracle we survived that blast," replies Roland, apropos of nothing. (Okay, not really. But at this point, he might as well have.)
"Maybe I wired the box in wrong? What do you think?" Elise asks. I've read that sometimes people, women in particular, tend to require validation for their remarks, which is why Elise peppers her speech with qualifiers like "don't you think?" in a very stereotypical fashion. It gets annoying so fast. Her character is designed like like Velma from Scooby-Doo (short hair, freckles, glasses) which is usually visual shorthand for the "smart" character, but in practice she acts more like Shaggy and Scooby, questioning every move the boys make and expressing trepidation at every turn. The kids resolve to shut down their runaway creation, who is busy destroying the school science lab. Cut to commercial. Finally.
Elise tries reasoning with B.O.T., and he seems to be responding until Martin arrives with the modified laser from their 26-second science class and blasts B.O.T. Still a Decepticon at heart, he goes into full retreat mode. Elise chastizes him for chasing the robot away, since the kids have no way of stopping or catching him. Recalling the rescue mission from earlier, the kids decide to reach out to the Protectobots. Martin points out that they may be difficult to contact (and Elise points out that it's not like they advertise in the Yellow Pages), Roland replies, "We'll let the computer do the walking!" and proceeds to connect a phone handset to the computer (which is how early computer telephony integration actually worked back then). It occurs to me that this is a really outdated reference that makes zero sense if you don't remember, or haven't seen, the old Yellow Pages commercials that proclaimed, "Let your fingers do the walking!" Of course, that in and of itself doesn't make much sense either. Finally, ten minutes into the episode, the regular ol' Autobots finally show up.
It's adults who were writing this show, of course, so when they made pop culture references, it was frequently a reference to something they enjoyed growing up—which means it was positively ancient history to the kids actually watching this show. For instance, the names for Roland and Martin were likely inspired by the comedy duo Dan Rowan and Dick Martin, whose variety program called Laugh-In was popular from the late 1960's to early 1970's. Likewise, the source of the distress call intercepted by Gears is identified by name as the Benajim Franklin Pierce High School. This is actually the given name of Alan Alda's character from the 1970's M*A*S*H television series, which made its debut before most kids watching this cartoon had even been born.
So, Optimus Prime elects to send Ironhide, Gears, and Bumblebee to investigate the distress call. One can only assume it's a slow day at Autobot Headquarters and there isn't anything else important going on. Actually, the specific Autobots that Prime chose for the mission is highly telling. Ironhide is old and obsolete; Gears just sits there and complains about everything; and Bumblebee is, well, Bumblebee. Clearly, Optimus does not consider this an emergency. Back at the junkyard, Swindle has a fun and sinister moment, the sounds of the bomb inside his head still ticking away, where he promises that the yard attendant will be "the first man IN the moon" if he doesn't recover the personality component. The attendant suggests "maybe those kids took it!" and Swindle proceeds to ignore this remark and continues digging through the junk.
At the school, Ironhide's group arrives (and they all transform very strangely... Gears' legs sprout from the front of his truck mode, with his headlights forming his knees, while Bumblebee's vehicle hood forms his pelvis). It must be a Saturday, because it's morning now but class is not in session. Their arrival prompts the kids to proclaim, "You're not the Protectobots!" This actually raises an interesting point. Hasbro specifically mandated that the final ten episodes of the season be saved to showcase the newest 1986 product line. Why were characters that we've been seeing since the pilot episode dispatched to solve this problem? I guess it's nice that the old standbys aren't being completely forgotten.
The problem is that all three Autobots seem particularly inept in dealing with this situation. "We came all the way out here for THAT hunk of junk?!" balks Gears after they find B.O.T. in the cafeteria. Oddly, all three Autobots seem to fit through the doors inside the school easily. (Maybe this would make sense if they were all Mini Autobots, but it makes no sense that Ironhide can traipse around inside the school freely.) It's probably not even worth mentioning that the voice for Gears continues to fluctuate; Don Messick seemed to regard his characterizations for Gears and Ratchet as largely interchangeable, as they both took turns regularly vacillating between Papa Smurf and Ranger Smith.
So, Gears gets creamed with a vat of creamed corn and gets his own laser blasts reflected by a huge, metal shield-like thing... I don't even know what would be in the cafeteria that would be that big, but B.O.T. finds it and uses it. Ironhide blasts a volley of molten lead, but all B.O.T. has to do is leap up and grab a light fixture, allowing the lead to collapse the flooring beneath Ironhide and trap him. The Autobots are not having a good day. Granted, this is a Combaticon they're dealing with, but he's still stuck inside a jerry-rigged wind-up toy thrown together by some snot-nosed kids. The Autobots try to follow B.O.T. through a door but can't even open it. "I don't get it! This is just a wooden door!" exclaims Gears. Turns out B.O.T. has got it barricaded with some furniture on the other side, but it still strains credibility that Gears can't bust through. He's got the force of a 4X4 truck behind him, for crying out loud.
B.R.A.W.L. (Brain Relegated to an Antiquated Walking Loser... see, I can do it too!) retreats into a run-down, abandoned building, and the Autobots and the kids pursue. Ironhide stops them and tells them to stay behind because it's about to get hairy. "He's 30 floor up!" says Bumblebee, after looking up at an elevator that only has 12 floor indicator lights. Ironhide wedges a piece of wood between the elevator doors, which I guess is supposed to stop the elevator from operating. Martin grows impatient and so he and Roland drag Elise into the spooky, condemned building. Like, as in they literally grab her hands and force her to follow. I wonder why this place isn't boarded up? This is seriously turning into an episode of Scooby-Doo, and Elise even looks the part. All we're missing at this point is the talking dog.
Roland grabs the broomstick that's wedged between the doors, recalling the elevator to the first floor so they can board it. Roland is still dragging Elise by the hand. How romantic. Meanwhile, the Autobots are taking the stairs, because obviously gigantic robots who turn into cars and trucks can easily navigate a human-sized staircase. Ironhide orders them to just randomly fire up the stairwell. "He's got to be up there somewhere!" is his reasoning, and then he orders them to cease fire a moment later. "If he's up there, we hit 'im!" he declares. Instead, though, we find Swindle at the top of the stairs, going tik-tik-tik-tik and training his weapons on the Autobots. Ruh-roh, Raggy! After this goofy, Kremzeek-style romp through half the episode, to suddenly be confronted by an actual Decepticon warrior is pretty damn terrifying. Also, the fact that he now sounds like Tick-Tick Croc from Peter Pan makes him a little more menacing.
The elevator stops and Roland climbs through the ceiling hatch to find out what's going on. B.O.T. is up there, yanking on elevator cables and ripping them in half. Cut to commercial again! Fortunately (or not so fortunately, depending on who you're rooting for, I guess), Swindle zaps B.O.T. from off-screen and draws him away with a tractor beam. (Maybe he borrowed Drag Strip's gravito-gun.) As the Autobots climb out from the rubble that Swindle apparently buried them in off-camera, they and the kids chase Swindle out of the building, but he transforms and drives away with Brawl's personality component safely recovered. The kids wonder whether they've seen this specific Transformer before. "That's Swindle, a Combaticon! They're Decepticons!" Bumblebee proclaims. "This is sure getting complicated," quips Roland. "We should have just taken the 'F' in Science," Martin agrees. This is the closest this episode gets to being genuinely funny, but it still manages to miss the mark.
Apparently the Autobots just leave the school at this point, not bothering to repair the damage done, not insisting that the kids dismantle this killer robot that was running loose through the city, etc. With Swindle gone and B.O.T. having been reduced to a docile state, apparently the emergency, such as it was, is over. Not even a public service announcement about staying away from abandoned buildings, because knowing is half the battle.
Finally, we're back at Decepticon Headquarters and we can put all this Hanna-Barbera nonsense behind us. Soundwave restores Brawl's personality component, and all is right with the world. Swindle is standing there with his hands clasped together and grinning lasciviously, but Megatron warns him that if he ever tries anything like this in the future, he'll be melted down into scrap tutonium, whatever that is. It's not a known alloy, so it must be a Cybertronic metal. We know this isn't quite right, since the Combaticons were built from World War II vehicles (which were likely built out of iron alloys), but it's an idle threat, not a 26-second science lecture. (We'll see that Swindle will continue his devious ways, trying to pull a fast one over on Galvatron in "The Ultimate Weapon.") The Combaticon combine into Bruticus. "Soon, we'll control the oceans!" explodes Megatron, and it almost seems like a non-sequitur at this point.
You would think that we'd seen the last of the high school kids by this point, but they're still determined to get into as much trouble as possible. They realize the "funny component" is missing from B.O.T.'s head and conclude that this is what made him go berserk. Somehow, they're able to use the printouts that they got off Brawl's brain to track the signal and determine where it ended up. I'm not sure how this makes sense, but the kids pile into the Mystery Machine and go to work. Well, actually, it's just Elise's red convertible, which is interesting for a couple of reason. One, it's just a modified version of Bumblebee's vehicle-mode animation model, which means that it's built like a Penny Racer and has the back of Bumblebee's head visible on the trunk. Two, the car is colored tan-and-purple, just like Swindle, in one scene.
Somehow, Elise has rewired the speech synthesizer for B.O.T. (you know, the speech synthesizer that could not produce a single intelligible word) and rigged it to receive transmissions. I guess it's still hooked up to Brawl's brain on some level, so this means the kids can eavesdrop on the Decepticons at their base. There's a lot of hand waving required to understand this episode. They hear Megatron talking about how he wants to test-fire the orbit disruptor weapon on Autobot Headquarters, because this is just what he does when he tests out new weapons. Also, using the lightning bug against the Autobot base in "Cosmic Rust" didn't quite pan out, so you can't blame him for wanting to try again.
The kids make their way to the volcano to warn the Autobots. "Only Defensor can stand against Bruticus," offers Optimus Prime, and on the surface it seems like another one of his famous non sequiturs, at least until you remember that Bruticus is going to be piloting the orbit disruptor. Of course, this raises some questions. Superion fought Bruticus and won in "Aerial Assault," so obviously Defensor's not the only one who can stand against him. And what about Omega Supreme? This episode is deliberately and willfully forgetting about all the other combiners and combiner-sized robots. Nonetheless, it's time to contact the Protectobots, who (like the Combaticons) have their own headquarters somewhere in the city. They respond immediately, with the entire side of the building flipping up like a gigantic garage door to allow them an expedient egress.
The Decepticons have arrived at the Autobot base. If the orbit disruptor is so big that only Bruticus can operate it, then how did they transport it from their underwater base? Shrug. Cartoon logic. Anyway, the Combaticons combine together, and it's the same animated sequence used earlier, only flipped——which means that Vortex incorrectly forms the right arm and Blast Off forms the left. The Autobots spring out of the woodwork and open fire. Bruticus is standing there, blocking the laser blasts with his arms, but uncertain what action to take. Again, this is directly from his tech specs (or, more accurately, his TRANSFORMERS UNIVERSE profile, as no toy tech specs were ever printed for him in America) which mention that he cannot take initiative and he tends to look confused during battle if nobody tells him what to do. "Your stupid warrior is just standing there!" points out Starscream, conveniently forgetting that Bruticus is actually HIS stupid warrior. Megatron tells them to separate, and there's a moment when Onslaught is still colored like Bruticus, with one green leg and one yellow one.
The ensuing battle just isn't choreographed very well. Some fight scenes make sense, and are fun to watch, but this just isn't. Ironhide seems to have developed a rivalry with Swindle (he's best buddies with Slingshot, now, so I guess he's got to have somebody to hate), but Swindle easily knocks him down with a laser blast. Onslaught transforms, Bumblebee warns Prime, Prime gets blasted anyway. Wheeljack emits a gyro-inhibitor burst from his ear. Starscream launches into the sky and Streetwise takes him down. "Hey, Screamer, your pilot's license just expired!" he quips. Megatron transforms into gun mode, but Hot Spot shoots before Megatron can, and Megatron is knocked on his back. Brawl falls on top of him, just because. This ain't a fight, it's a farce.
Inside the base, the high school kids are still determined to interfere as much as humanly possible, so they use Teletraan-I to control B.O.T. remotely, sending him out into the fray towards the orbit disruptor. Back on the battlefield, the Protectobots combine into Defensor and he erects a forcefield, providing momentary cover for the Autobots. (Leader-1 used this gimmick all the time on Challenge of the GoBots. By this point, it was neither new nor interesting.) It expires 17 seconds later, almost as long as a science class at BFP High School, and Megatron takes his shot, immediately knocking Defensor back into the Protectobots. What good are these combiner modes even for if none of them can take a single shot to the chest?
Bruticus is ordered to shoot the orbit disruptor, but instead, it starts taking seemingly random potshots at Starscream and Soundwave, sending them hurtling into space (and presumably out of orbit). It's little B.O.T. down at the bottom of the weapon, operating the tiny, auxiliary human-sized controls for the thing. If this weapon had itty bitty controls all this time, why go to all the trouble to recover the parts for Bruticus? Why not just let Rumble or Frenzy work the thing instead? Anyway, Elise arranges for B.O.T. to hit the conveniently-marked "overload" switch on the weapon. Poor little B.O.T. waves at them an instant before it explodes, as if to wave good-bye, or perhaps as a futile, desperate plea to stop making him kill himself. Regardless, he's blown to bits along with the orbit dusruptor. Bruticus is sent hurtling into the sky, and possibly out of Earth's orbit as well. "I would have gotten away with it, too, if it weren't for you kids and your stupid 'bot!" he shouts. Okay, not really. We don't see the Decepticons retreat, so it's possible they're all blown into space. Maybe the reason the next story takes place in 2005 was because it took 20 years for the Decepticons to find their way back into the solar system.
As our episode mercifully closes, Optimus gives the kids a perfuctory thank-you and Bumblebee offers an equally perfunctory sorry-your-robot-done-got-blowed-up. "Let's just say he 'bot' the big one," Martin offers. "Aw, let's not," counters Chandler. Elise is all ready to do this whole thing over again, asking the Autobots if they have any spare parts laying around so the kids can build B.O.T. mk II. Roland and Martin respond to this by whipping out a roll of duct tape, gagging Elise, and forcibly carrying her away. The Autobots just stand there in stunned silence. And this, my friends, is how season two of Transformes ends. Not with a bang, not with a whimper, but with the muffled cries of a young woman with her mouth taped shut. Hee hee hee! Scooby-Dooby-Doooooooo!
I've mentioned this before, but under the rules for the Writer's Guild of America, any incidental characters created by a spec writer provide them with royalties if those characters are used again in future episodes. I'm certain Earl Kress created the trio of Elise and Martin and Roland with the intent of using them again, had the format for the show not undergone a dramatic shift for the third season. Of course, with no project to present for the science fair, we can at least take solace in the knowledge that Roland and Martin were likely expelled for breaking into the school, and probably got blamed for all the damage that B.O.T. and Ironhide did to the school property. We can only hope that Elise got herself some therapy.
This is a really anti-climactic end for the season. It's such a preposterous story premise, does very little to showcase the new toys (both Defensor and Bruticus are such wimps that neither of them can take a single shot before breaking into pieces), and the high school kids take up way too much screen time. I think it's the worst episode of the entire series. Even "Carnage in C-Minor" had parts that I liked and enjoyed. This was just a pointless, terrible, pointless episode.
Shockingly, somebody actually thought this episode was significant enough to bring back in the 1990's and format it for airing as part of the Transformers: Generation 2 cartoon series. One supposes they were screening episodes, saw the Combaticons at the very beginning, and greenlit the episode based on that alone. (This would also explain episodes like "Fight or Flee," which features the Aerialbots for the first minute or so of the episode.) You can tell the episode was damaged, though, because in the G2 version, the music (but not the dialogue) would cut out frequently. In the scene that shows us the Protectobot base and Streetwise proclaims "The Autobots need us!" the music channel is especially bad.
Also, I may actually have to make an action figure of B.O.T. some day, just 'coz.
Zob (gonna go wash the taste of this episode out of my mouth... with bleach)
Our episode begins with the Combaticons terrorizing the streets of a major metropolitan community, arriving and transforming to vehicle mode. There's an odd scene where Swindle and Brawl both choose the same spot to touch down in vehicle mode, and there's a moment of contention as they vie for the space. "You two-faced pipsqueak! Stay behind me!" Brawl says gruffly, and the matter is settled. This scene seems to be written specifically to show that Brawl is an asshole. (This part was actually cut from the Sci-Fi Channel version. Brawl must have been helping with the syndication edits that day.)
Vortex the helicopter and Blast Off the space shuttle roll along on the ground with the rest of them for no adequately explored reason. This show has always been largely blind to scale—showcasing the relative sizes between the toys far more readily than demonstrating the difference in size of the real-life vehicles these guys turn into. Blast Off is drawn slightly larger than the others, which looks wrong on some levels since he's not the guy who forms the main body of Bruticus. We're visually accustomed to the team leaders being the biggest, regardless of scale. Combining into Bruticus is exactly what they do, in fact.
Bruticus doesn't even get a line of dialogue before he looks up, ostensibly at his Autobot foe, before he's quite literally blasted to bits. Something about the toy-driven nature of this show tells us this cannot possibly be real. Surely it's a dream sequence, or a fake Bruticus, or something along those lines. Characters simply didn't die on this show up to this point. We see now that it was Defensor who delivered the killing shot, making his first appearance in the series. (The Protectobots previously appeared in "The Revenge of Bruticus," marking their first episode, but did not combine together.) Autobot weapons are rarely this powerful.
Remarkably, it seems that Swindle, and Swindle alone, has managed to survive the destruction of the other Combaticons. Maybe he saw the blast coming and, being the self-serving jackanapes that he is, separated from Bruticus a mere instant before the others were blasted to pieces. There are some unfortunate coloring choices here as Swindle emerges from underneath a yellow-colored block that could only be the right leg for Bruticus——the component that Swindle forms and the only part of Bruticus that is this color. This is almost as egregious a mistake as Defensor and Hot Spot appearing alongside each other in "Carnage in C-Minor."
"Call sanitation. There's junk all over the street!" Defensor quips to the nearby humans, seemingly oblivious to Swindle's survival. Defensor does not help clean up the mess, nor does he check to confirm whether any Combaticons have survived—he is content to simply walk away. He's voiced in this episode, and subsequent installments, by Chris Latta, using the same voice he provided for G.I. Joe characters like Gung-Ho (and occasionally Wheeljack, when Sparkplug was in the same scene and he was trying to differentiate the sound of the two characters). Swindle resolves to start picking up the pieces of his comrades, muttering something about a need for spare parts.
He arrives at his destination where a lookout spots him. "A jeep just went by with no driver. Should I dust it?" he inquires over a walkie-talkie. The whole driverless car schtick is no longer a surprise; the lookout (voiced by Don Messick) immediately recognizes him as a Transformer. Swindle meets with a foreign national whom he addresses as El Presidente (voiced by Roger C. Carmel), and seems to be making a deal for new components in exchange for payment. Good ol' Swindle, always thinking of his buddies. We'll see eventually that this simply does not pan out, however.
Elsewhere, the Decepticons are testing a device called the orbit disruptor, which Megatron plans to use to just push the Moon out of Earth's orbit. This is phase one of a plan which will allow the Decepticons to control the movement of the tides themselves, using a second, unnamed device, ostensibly developed by Soundwave. The weapon is so large that apparently Bruticus is the only Decepticon capable of operating it. (Why not, say, Devastator or Menasor? This is not addressed. Maybe they're off on another mission somewhere.) Megatron's developed a visual simulation of what it will look like, and Starscream chastizes him in his usual tired manner for wasting his time.
Back on foreign soil, the deal with El Presidente has taken a different turn. Suddenly, Swindle's trade partner is asking for the computer systems and weapons from the Combaticons' remains, dismissing the rest of the parts as worthless and sending them to the junkyard. He gives the empty, deactivated head of Brawl a kick for good measure——and if there's any life left in Brawl, you can bet he remembers this later and is not happy about it. (Brawl's head seems incredibly small, especially compared to how large the disembodied Transformer heads were during the creation of the Headmasters in "The Rebirth.")
By the time Skywarp has been dispatched to retrieve the Combaticons at their headquarters, there's no sign of them anywhere. Apparently, the Autobot and Decepticon bases are so crammed full of new characters that they need to live off on their own. Skywarp, by the way, has adopted a very different dialect than most of his previous episodes. Frank Welker's voice delivery is closer to Bigtime Beagle from DuckTales than the Skywarp voice used for any of his previous episodes. Even as recently as "War Dawn" Skywarp sounded perfectly normal, but for some reason, Welker developed a completely different characterization for what would be Skywarp's final speaking role. This is arguably the only moment in which Skywarp is "useless without Megatron's supervision" as per his Hasbro tech specs. He discovers what seems to be a trail of Combaticon pieces, but is clueless how to proceed until Megatron finally prompts him to "follow the trail, dummy!"
Skywarp has recruited Starscream for assistance and they discover Swindle in the city dump, unloading the remains of the Combaticons. Starscream doesn't seem particularly concerned that the Combaticons that he, himself, created have been reduced to scrap metal, but he does recognize that Swindle is up to his usual dirty tricks and they capture him for a forcible relocation back to base. Swindle presents his case before Megatron, claiming the situation isn't really his fault——"this greed is built into my personality component!" This is a character moment, so it's hard to say whether Swindle is misrepresenting the facts for his own benefit or whether this is genuinely true (and, by extension, true that none of the Transformers can really change). Everything we've seen so far, in episodes like "Changing Gears" or "The Secret of Omega Supreme," suggests that a forcible reprogramming, either permanent or temporary, is the only way to really affect the behavior of any Autobots or Decepticons.
Megatron is not sympathetic to Swindle's situation, and arranges for Soundwave to install a bomb inside Swindle's head module. They give him fifteen hours to recover the parts and rebuild Bruticus before it goes boom. (Why 15 and not 12 or 24? Because the Decepticons were built by the Quintessons and they like to do things by fives, that's why.)
What follows is a montage of Swindle going back to all the places where he'd sold off some slightly-used Combaticon surplus and recovering it, but not actually bothering to offer any refunds. For all we know, this may have been the impetus for the Arabian country whose officials he angered to revamp their political structure into something far more socialist and xenophobic, like Carbombya. One can only speculate. We know he's sold parts to the land of Hyrule, because one guy there asks for his Rupees back. Wait, no. It was rubles, my bad. (In Soviet Russia, refund asks for you!)
Swindle manages to reassemble the other Combaticons in record time, looking exactly as they did before. None of them seem terribly upset over the whole ordeal with getting sold for scrap, but it's also possible he just hasn't told them about that part. The big problem here, as evidenced by the fact that Swindle has to drag Brawl across the room, is that the Combaticons cannot combine together any longer. They try to, and get part of the way there, but the sequence is automatically aborted before any of them can connect together. Brawl's personality component is still missing, a fact that Swindle had been hoping could be overlooked. "I didn't think it would matter," he says derisively. The implication is that Brawl's personality is so offensive, as seen in the opening scene from this episode, that Swindle felt like he was better off without it. Suffice to say, Megatron disagrees. (A close examination of the scene reveals that Brawl actually does begin to transform, which probably shouldn't happen if there is no life force inside his body.)
This raises a lot of odd questions. We've already seen in "The Key to Vector Sigma" that some Transformers can be remote-controlled even if they're not alive. Can't Megatron just hook up Brawl to a Stunticon-style remote control and get him to combine with the others into Bruticus that way? Even if the Stunticons are different technology somehow, you'd think Bruticus could still exist with one leg. We've seen that Devastator can still combine without Scavenger ("Desertion of the Dinobots" part 1) or Hook ("The Core") and we'll see later that Defensor can exist without First Aid ("The Ultimate Weapon"). On the other hand, Superion seemingly cannot be formed at all without Fireflight ("Aerial Assault") and Predaking cannot exist if Headstrong doesn't participate ("Nightmare Planet"). The rules are all so arbitrary. Honestly, this would have been a great time to introduce the Scramble City concept into the show. Brawl is out of action, so let's get Wildrider or Breakdown or somebody to serve as a pinch hitter. The story premise seems perfect to incorporate the idea. Despite this, it seems Hasbro was very specific about not wanting to play up the interchangeable aspect of the toys, since it was never used in any of the American media at all.
This is a Toei-animated episode, and while it's a budget installment that is generally merely proficient most of the time, there are a few moments when the animation really shines. One of them is the brief scene when Megatron orders the newly-rebuilt Combaticons to transform to Bruticus, and again when he chastizes Swindle following the botched transformation—the extra layer of shading used is easily on par with anything from The Transformers: the Movie. It's a shame the animators were so rushed that they didn't have time to do this for the weekday episodes more often.
So, then we cut to what seems like the beginning of a whole 'nother episode. At the local high school, a Mr. Robbins is holding a science class where he prepares to demonstrate the functionality of a low-wattage laser beam. When the laser rips right through a stack of books and then through the classroom window, he immediately suspects the class troublemakers Roland and Martin as likely culprits (and both of them are cackling hysterically over the prank, which is practically the same as admitting to doing it). I used to have a lot of trouble telling them apart (my brain refuses to process incidental human characters), but I believe Martin is the one in the brown coat with the popped collar, and Roland is the one in red suspenders who looks a little like Chandler Bing from Friends. Science class ends 26 seconds after it's begun (seriously), and their science teacher (voiced by Dan "Bumblebee" Gilvezan) is tired of their antics and gives them an ultimatum——either take first prize in the upcoming science fair or fail the class. To sweeten the deal, he elects a bright student named Elise Presser to assist them, which Martin and Roland are none too happy about.
Elise enthusiastically pledges her assistance, but the boys are less than welcoming. Elise is voiced by Samantha Newark, better known as the title character from the Jem! cartoon (she also played Ariel, the pre-Elita One, from "War Dawn"). She was cast late enough in the game that she does not get an on-screen voice credit in this series, but her voice is very distinctive and very easily recognized. Interestingly, Roland is voiced by Michael Sheehan, who played opposite Newark as Jem's love interest, Rio. (Perhaps as an homage to the Jem! actors, or perhaps as a happy concidence, two background students in the classroom have the same character design as Jerrica Benton, the alter-ego for Jem, and her sister Kimber. They're colored differently, but the outfits and hairstyles are a perfect match.) Martin is voiced by Townsend Coleman, his first role in Transformers, and would later perform Rewind in season three (but of course he gained much greater notoriety as Michaelangelo in the original Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles cartoon).
A fire has broken out inside a nearby building, prompting a couple of window washers to cry for help. The Protectobots are conveniently in town and rush to the rescue. "Stay calm! We're coming up for you!" says one of them, but it's not any of their regular voice performers. (Several of them had dialogue in "The Revenge of Bruticus," and Hot Spot gets other lines in this episode, so this would have to be First Aid by default. In later episodes, First Aid is performed by Michael Bell, so it's possible his role was recast by the time of "Surprise Party," his next appearance after this episode.)
"What the heck are THOSE things?!" asks Martin, who has apparently been living on Earth for two years without having heard that gigantic alien robots had crashed on the planet. It's possible he recognizes that they are Transformers but doesn't recognize the specific Protectobots since they're relatively new characters, but his specific dialogue doesn't support that (he says "what are those things," not "who are those guys"). Also, the appearance of the Protectobots goes completely unexplained in the show. This show is either really good at crafting character origin stories, or it totally ignores them entirely. We can infer that the Protectobots were probably not created by the Autobots on Earth ("The Key to Vector Sigma" establishes that there's no way to give them personalities without Vector Sigma, and its activation key was destroyed in that episode) but if they came from Cybertron, that story has never been told and it feels like a major oversight.
"Some liquid nitrogen oughta cool things off around here!" proclaims Groove, sounding exactly like Trailbreaker but breaking out an Ironhide move——retracting his hand and replacing it with a funnel so he can douse the flames. "And what you can't reach, I can!" promises Hot Spot, sounding nothing like he will in later episodes. Blades creates a gust of wind that causes the window washers to fall from their scaffolding, and Streetwise is down below waiting to catch them. A bit of a risky rescue, but I guess if it works, it works. In the aftermath of the rescue effort, Martin and Roland, who are still faced with the problem of needing to win the science fair, are inspired to construct a robot of their own.
Elise Presser talks a lot. She's babbling when they're digging through the junkyard looking for serviceable robot parts, babbling again when they stumble upon Brawl's personality component and decide to incorporate it into their project's design, and still babbling once they've broken into the school after hours and facing possible expulsion if they're caught. I'm not sure what purpose is served by their unauthorized presence on school grounds——surely they could use its facilities during the day, after school is over? It adds an unnesessary layer of tension just for the sake of being there. Martin describes the invention as a biotronic operational telecommunicator, which seems like a forced excuse to shorten its name to "B.O.T." It's really not an especially inspired name.
There is, of course, the usual hand-waving involved with episodes of this nature, and we're expected to swallow that these kids, who evidently have no industrial assembly experience, managed conveniently off-screen to do all the necessary cutting and welding and soldering and programming to assemble this robotic creation. (Of course, the thin possibility does exist that this robot never would have worked at all without Brawl's personality component inside it. If you take what you see in "Starscream's Brigade" at face value, all Starscream had to do was install personality components inside non-living Earth vehicles and they were immediately transformed into Transformers. It's possible B.O.T. was the same way.) The actual design of B.O.T. bothers me, since he doesn't really look like he's made from random junk at all. He's fat and ugly, but he's also perfectly symmetrical and his design is very polished. Also, somebody apparently misunderstood the script and colored him to make him look like he's made from Combaticon parts (he's Vortex grey and Brawl green and Swindle tan), despite the fact that all the Combaticon parts were ostensibly recovered by Swindle, except for Brawl's brain.
Martin tries to get B.O.T. to parrot back his name, but the robot's speech synthesizer spits it back out all garbled. (I freely admit that I have no idea who the voice actor is for B.O.T., since he only speaks one word and it's difficult to pin down a performer based on such a limited sample.) I think the storytelling reason for this was so that after Elise gets some funny readings off the personality component and gets the bright idea to plug it into the robot just to see what happens, Brawl is unable to communicate who he is or what's happened to him. All the kids know is that B.O.T. suddenly gets very, very violent. It's understandable, given that Brawl suddenly went from his homemade Transformer body (which wasn't all that great to begin with, if Blast Off's comments in "Starscream's Brigade" are accurate) into an even crappier homemade body. "You must have made him angry when you said he was no good!" Martin accuses Roland, referencing a scene that never happened. "It's a miracle we survived that blast," replies Roland, apropos of nothing. (Okay, not really. But at this point, he might as well have.)
"Maybe I wired the box in wrong? What do you think?" Elise asks. I've read that sometimes people, women in particular, tend to require validation for their remarks, which is why Elise peppers her speech with qualifiers like "don't you think?" in a very stereotypical fashion. It gets annoying so fast. Her character is designed like like Velma from Scooby-Doo (short hair, freckles, glasses) which is usually visual shorthand for the "smart" character, but in practice she acts more like Shaggy and Scooby, questioning every move the boys make and expressing trepidation at every turn. The kids resolve to shut down their runaway creation, who is busy destroying the school science lab. Cut to commercial. Finally.
Elise tries reasoning with B.O.T., and he seems to be responding until Martin arrives with the modified laser from their 26-second science class and blasts B.O.T. Still a Decepticon at heart, he goes into full retreat mode. Elise chastizes him for chasing the robot away, since the kids have no way of stopping or catching him. Recalling the rescue mission from earlier, the kids decide to reach out to the Protectobots. Martin points out that they may be difficult to contact (and Elise points out that it's not like they advertise in the Yellow Pages), Roland replies, "We'll let the computer do the walking!" and proceeds to connect a phone handset to the computer (which is how early computer telephony integration actually worked back then). It occurs to me that this is a really outdated reference that makes zero sense if you don't remember, or haven't seen, the old Yellow Pages commercials that proclaimed, "Let your fingers do the walking!" Of course, that in and of itself doesn't make much sense either. Finally, ten minutes into the episode, the regular ol' Autobots finally show up.
It's adults who were writing this show, of course, so when they made pop culture references, it was frequently a reference to something they enjoyed growing up—which means it was positively ancient history to the kids actually watching this show. For instance, the names for Roland and Martin were likely inspired by the comedy duo Dan Rowan and Dick Martin, whose variety program called Laugh-In was popular from the late 1960's to early 1970's. Likewise, the source of the distress call intercepted by Gears is identified by name as the Benajim Franklin Pierce High School. This is actually the given name of Alan Alda's character from the 1970's M*A*S*H television series, which made its debut before most kids watching this cartoon had even been born.
So, Optimus Prime elects to send Ironhide, Gears, and Bumblebee to investigate the distress call. One can only assume it's a slow day at Autobot Headquarters and there isn't anything else important going on. Actually, the specific Autobots that Prime chose for the mission is highly telling. Ironhide is old and obsolete; Gears just sits there and complains about everything; and Bumblebee is, well, Bumblebee. Clearly, Optimus does not consider this an emergency. Back at the junkyard, Swindle has a fun and sinister moment, the sounds of the bomb inside his head still ticking away, where he promises that the yard attendant will be "the first man IN the moon" if he doesn't recover the personality component. The attendant suggests "maybe those kids took it!" and Swindle proceeds to ignore this remark and continues digging through the junk.
At the school, Ironhide's group arrives (and they all transform very strangely... Gears' legs sprout from the front of his truck mode, with his headlights forming his knees, while Bumblebee's vehicle hood forms his pelvis). It must be a Saturday, because it's morning now but class is not in session. Their arrival prompts the kids to proclaim, "You're not the Protectobots!" This actually raises an interesting point. Hasbro specifically mandated that the final ten episodes of the season be saved to showcase the newest 1986 product line. Why were characters that we've been seeing since the pilot episode dispatched to solve this problem? I guess it's nice that the old standbys aren't being completely forgotten.
The problem is that all three Autobots seem particularly inept in dealing with this situation. "We came all the way out here for THAT hunk of junk?!" balks Gears after they find B.O.T. in the cafeteria. Oddly, all three Autobots seem to fit through the doors inside the school easily. (Maybe this would make sense if they were all Mini Autobots, but it makes no sense that Ironhide can traipse around inside the school freely.) It's probably not even worth mentioning that the voice for Gears continues to fluctuate; Don Messick seemed to regard his characterizations for Gears and Ratchet as largely interchangeable, as they both took turns regularly vacillating between Papa Smurf and Ranger Smith.
So, Gears gets creamed with a vat of creamed corn and gets his own laser blasts reflected by a huge, metal shield-like thing... I don't even know what would be in the cafeteria that would be that big, but B.O.T. finds it and uses it. Ironhide blasts a volley of molten lead, but all B.O.T. has to do is leap up and grab a light fixture, allowing the lead to collapse the flooring beneath Ironhide and trap him. The Autobots are not having a good day. Granted, this is a Combaticon they're dealing with, but he's still stuck inside a jerry-rigged wind-up toy thrown together by some snot-nosed kids. The Autobots try to follow B.O.T. through a door but can't even open it. "I don't get it! This is just a wooden door!" exclaims Gears. Turns out B.O.T. has got it barricaded with some furniture on the other side, but it still strains credibility that Gears can't bust through. He's got the force of a 4X4 truck behind him, for crying out loud.
B.R.A.W.L. (Brain Relegated to an Antiquated Walking Loser... see, I can do it too!) retreats into a run-down, abandoned building, and the Autobots and the kids pursue. Ironhide stops them and tells them to stay behind because it's about to get hairy. "He's 30 floor up!" says Bumblebee, after looking up at an elevator that only has 12 floor indicator lights. Ironhide wedges a piece of wood between the elevator doors, which I guess is supposed to stop the elevator from operating. Martin grows impatient and so he and Roland drag Elise into the spooky, condemned building. Like, as in they literally grab her hands and force her to follow. I wonder why this place isn't boarded up? This is seriously turning into an episode of Scooby-Doo, and Elise even looks the part. All we're missing at this point is the talking dog.
Roland grabs the broomstick that's wedged between the doors, recalling the elevator to the first floor so they can board it. Roland is still dragging Elise by the hand. How romantic. Meanwhile, the Autobots are taking the stairs, because obviously gigantic robots who turn into cars and trucks can easily navigate a human-sized staircase. Ironhide orders them to just randomly fire up the stairwell. "He's got to be up there somewhere!" is his reasoning, and then he orders them to cease fire a moment later. "If he's up there, we hit 'im!" he declares. Instead, though, we find Swindle at the top of the stairs, going tik-tik-tik-tik and training his weapons on the Autobots. Ruh-roh, Raggy! After this goofy, Kremzeek-style romp through half the episode, to suddenly be confronted by an actual Decepticon warrior is pretty damn terrifying. Also, the fact that he now sounds like Tick-Tick Croc from Peter Pan makes him a little more menacing.
The elevator stops and Roland climbs through the ceiling hatch to find out what's going on. B.O.T. is up there, yanking on elevator cables and ripping them in half. Cut to commercial again! Fortunately (or not so fortunately, depending on who you're rooting for, I guess), Swindle zaps B.O.T. from off-screen and draws him away with a tractor beam. (Maybe he borrowed Drag Strip's gravito-gun.) As the Autobots climb out from the rubble that Swindle apparently buried them in off-camera, they and the kids chase Swindle out of the building, but he transforms and drives away with Brawl's personality component safely recovered. The kids wonder whether they've seen this specific Transformer before. "That's Swindle, a Combaticon! They're Decepticons!" Bumblebee proclaims. "This is sure getting complicated," quips Roland. "We should have just taken the 'F' in Science," Martin agrees. This is the closest this episode gets to being genuinely funny, but it still manages to miss the mark.
Apparently the Autobots just leave the school at this point, not bothering to repair the damage done, not insisting that the kids dismantle this killer robot that was running loose through the city, etc. With Swindle gone and B.O.T. having been reduced to a docile state, apparently the emergency, such as it was, is over. Not even a public service announcement about staying away from abandoned buildings, because knowing is half the battle.
Finally, we're back at Decepticon Headquarters and we can put all this Hanna-Barbera nonsense behind us. Soundwave restores Brawl's personality component, and all is right with the world. Swindle is standing there with his hands clasped together and grinning lasciviously, but Megatron warns him that if he ever tries anything like this in the future, he'll be melted down into scrap tutonium, whatever that is. It's not a known alloy, so it must be a Cybertronic metal. We know this isn't quite right, since the Combaticons were built from World War II vehicles (which were likely built out of iron alloys), but it's an idle threat, not a 26-second science lecture. (We'll see that Swindle will continue his devious ways, trying to pull a fast one over on Galvatron in "The Ultimate Weapon.") The Combaticon combine into Bruticus. "Soon, we'll control the oceans!" explodes Megatron, and it almost seems like a non-sequitur at this point.
You would think that we'd seen the last of the high school kids by this point, but they're still determined to get into as much trouble as possible. They realize the "funny component" is missing from B.O.T.'s head and conclude that this is what made him go berserk. Somehow, they're able to use the printouts that they got off Brawl's brain to track the signal and determine where it ended up. I'm not sure how this makes sense, but the kids pile into the Mystery Machine and go to work. Well, actually, it's just Elise's red convertible, which is interesting for a couple of reason. One, it's just a modified version of Bumblebee's vehicle-mode animation model, which means that it's built like a Penny Racer and has the back of Bumblebee's head visible on the trunk. Two, the car is colored tan-and-purple, just like Swindle, in one scene.
Somehow, Elise has rewired the speech synthesizer for B.O.T. (you know, the speech synthesizer that could not produce a single intelligible word) and rigged it to receive transmissions. I guess it's still hooked up to Brawl's brain on some level, so this means the kids can eavesdrop on the Decepticons at their base. There's a lot of hand waving required to understand this episode. They hear Megatron talking about how he wants to test-fire the orbit disruptor weapon on Autobot Headquarters, because this is just what he does when he tests out new weapons. Also, using the lightning bug against the Autobot base in "Cosmic Rust" didn't quite pan out, so you can't blame him for wanting to try again.
The kids make their way to the volcano to warn the Autobots. "Only Defensor can stand against Bruticus," offers Optimus Prime, and on the surface it seems like another one of his famous non sequiturs, at least until you remember that Bruticus is going to be piloting the orbit disruptor. Of course, this raises some questions. Superion fought Bruticus and won in "Aerial Assault," so obviously Defensor's not the only one who can stand against him. And what about Omega Supreme? This episode is deliberately and willfully forgetting about all the other combiners and combiner-sized robots. Nonetheless, it's time to contact the Protectobots, who (like the Combaticons) have their own headquarters somewhere in the city. They respond immediately, with the entire side of the building flipping up like a gigantic garage door to allow them an expedient egress.
The Decepticons have arrived at the Autobot base. If the orbit disruptor is so big that only Bruticus can operate it, then how did they transport it from their underwater base? Shrug. Cartoon logic. Anyway, the Combaticons combine together, and it's the same animated sequence used earlier, only flipped——which means that Vortex incorrectly forms the right arm and Blast Off forms the left. The Autobots spring out of the woodwork and open fire. Bruticus is standing there, blocking the laser blasts with his arms, but uncertain what action to take. Again, this is directly from his tech specs (or, more accurately, his TRANSFORMERS UNIVERSE profile, as no toy tech specs were ever printed for him in America) which mention that he cannot take initiative and he tends to look confused during battle if nobody tells him what to do. "Your stupid warrior is just standing there!" points out Starscream, conveniently forgetting that Bruticus is actually HIS stupid warrior. Megatron tells them to separate, and there's a moment when Onslaught is still colored like Bruticus, with one green leg and one yellow one.
The ensuing battle just isn't choreographed very well. Some fight scenes make sense, and are fun to watch, but this just isn't. Ironhide seems to have developed a rivalry with Swindle (he's best buddies with Slingshot, now, so I guess he's got to have somebody to hate), but Swindle easily knocks him down with a laser blast. Onslaught transforms, Bumblebee warns Prime, Prime gets blasted anyway. Wheeljack emits a gyro-inhibitor burst from his ear. Starscream launches into the sky and Streetwise takes him down. "Hey, Screamer, your pilot's license just expired!" he quips. Megatron transforms into gun mode, but Hot Spot shoots before Megatron can, and Megatron is knocked on his back. Brawl falls on top of him, just because. This ain't a fight, it's a farce.
Inside the base, the high school kids are still determined to interfere as much as humanly possible, so they use Teletraan-I to control B.O.T. remotely, sending him out into the fray towards the orbit disruptor. Back on the battlefield, the Protectobots combine into Defensor and he erects a forcefield, providing momentary cover for the Autobots. (Leader-1 used this gimmick all the time on Challenge of the GoBots. By this point, it was neither new nor interesting.) It expires 17 seconds later, almost as long as a science class at BFP High School, and Megatron takes his shot, immediately knocking Defensor back into the Protectobots. What good are these combiner modes even for if none of them can take a single shot to the chest?
Bruticus is ordered to shoot the orbit disruptor, but instead, it starts taking seemingly random potshots at Starscream and Soundwave, sending them hurtling into space (and presumably out of orbit). It's little B.O.T. down at the bottom of the weapon, operating the tiny, auxiliary human-sized controls for the thing. If this weapon had itty bitty controls all this time, why go to all the trouble to recover the parts for Bruticus? Why not just let Rumble or Frenzy work the thing instead? Anyway, Elise arranges for B.O.T. to hit the conveniently-marked "overload" switch on the weapon. Poor little B.O.T. waves at them an instant before it explodes, as if to wave good-bye, or perhaps as a futile, desperate plea to stop making him kill himself. Regardless, he's blown to bits along with the orbit dusruptor. Bruticus is sent hurtling into the sky, and possibly out of Earth's orbit as well. "I would have gotten away with it, too, if it weren't for you kids and your stupid 'bot!" he shouts. Okay, not really. We don't see the Decepticons retreat, so it's possible they're all blown into space. Maybe the reason the next story takes place in 2005 was because it took 20 years for the Decepticons to find their way back into the solar system.
As our episode mercifully closes, Optimus gives the kids a perfuctory thank-you and Bumblebee offers an equally perfunctory sorry-your-robot-done-got-blowed-up. "Let's just say he 'bot' the big one," Martin offers. "Aw, let's not," counters Chandler. Elise is all ready to do this whole thing over again, asking the Autobots if they have any spare parts laying around so the kids can build B.O.T. mk II. Roland and Martin respond to this by whipping out a roll of duct tape, gagging Elise, and forcibly carrying her away. The Autobots just stand there in stunned silence. And this, my friends, is how season two of Transformes ends. Not with a bang, not with a whimper, but with the muffled cries of a young woman with her mouth taped shut. Hee hee hee! Scooby-Dooby-Doooooooo!
I've mentioned this before, but under the rules for the Writer's Guild of America, any incidental characters created by a spec writer provide them with royalties if those characters are used again in future episodes. I'm certain Earl Kress created the trio of Elise and Martin and Roland with the intent of using them again, had the format for the show not undergone a dramatic shift for the third season. Of course, with no project to present for the science fair, we can at least take solace in the knowledge that Roland and Martin were likely expelled for breaking into the school, and probably got blamed for all the damage that B.O.T. and Ironhide did to the school property. We can only hope that Elise got herself some therapy.
This is a really anti-climactic end for the season. It's such a preposterous story premise, does very little to showcase the new toys (both Defensor and Bruticus are such wimps that neither of them can take a single shot before breaking into pieces), and the high school kids take up way too much screen time. I think it's the worst episode of the entire series. Even "Carnage in C-Minor" had parts that I liked and enjoyed. This was just a pointless, terrible, pointless episode.
Shockingly, somebody actually thought this episode was significant enough to bring back in the 1990's and format it for airing as part of the Transformers: Generation 2 cartoon series. One supposes they were screening episodes, saw the Combaticons at the very beginning, and greenlit the episode based on that alone. (This would also explain episodes like "Fight or Flee," which features the Aerialbots for the first minute or so of the episode.) You can tell the episode was damaged, though, because in the G2 version, the music (but not the dialogue) would cut out frequently. In the scene that shows us the Protectobot base and Streetwise proclaims "The Autobots need us!" the music channel is especially bad.
Also, I may actually have to make an action figure of B.O.T. some day, just 'coz.
Zob (gonna go wash the taste of this episode out of my mouth... with bleach)
Gustavo Wombat, of the Seattle Wombats
Sep 17, 2016, 8:46:35 PM9/17/16
to
On Thursday, September 15, 2016 at 3:14:02 PM UTC-7, Zobovor wrote:
> Our episode begins with the Combaticons terrorizing the streets of a major metropolitan community, arriving and transforming to vehicle mode.
There was probably some kind of reason for the Combaticons arriving, but we are never given any of it. I like to think that the secret (to the audience) mission was more exciting than the episode.
> Our episode begins with the Combaticons terrorizing the streets of a major metropolitan community, arriving and transforming to vehicle mode.
> Vortex the helicopter and Blast Off the space shuttle roll along on the ground with the rest of them for no adequately explored reason.
> This show has always been largely blind to scale—showcasing the relative sizes between the toys far more readily than demonstrating the difference in size of the real-life vehicles these guys turn into. Blast Off is drawn slightly larger than the others, which looks wrong on some levels since he's not the guy who forms the main body of Bruticus. We're visually accustomed to the team leaders being the biggest, regardless of scale. Combining into Bruticus is exactly what they do, in fact.
> Bruticus doesn't even get a line of dialogue before he looks up, ostensibly at his Autobot foe, before he's quite literally blasted to bits. Something about the toy-driven nature of this show tells us this cannot possibly be real. Surely it's a dream sequence, or a fake Bruticus, or something along those lines. Characters simply didn't die on this show up to this point. We see now that it was Defensor who delivered the killing shot, making his first appearance in the series. (The Protectobots previously appeared in "The Revenge of Bruticus," marking their first episode, but did not combine together.) Autobot weapons are rarely this powerful.
> Remarkably, it seems that Swindle, and Swindle alone, has managed to survive the destruction of the other Combaticons. Maybe he saw the blast coming and, being the self-serving jackanapes that he is, separated from Bruticus a mere instant before the others were blasted to pieces. There are some unfortunate coloring choices here as Swindle emerges from underneath a yellow-colored block that could only be the right leg for Bruticus——the component that Swindle forms and the only part of Bruticus that is this color. This is almost as egregious a mistake as Defensor and Hot Spot appearing alongside each other in "Carnage in C-Minor."
This would explain how Menasaur doesn't seem to really be formed from his parts on the show, and how sometimes there can be a subspace screwup and a Transformer can be next to the combined form they become.
> "Call sanitation. There's junk all over the street!" Defensor quips to the nearby humans, seemingly oblivious to Swindle's survival. Defensor does not help clean up the mess, nor does he check to confirm whether any Combaticons have survived—he is content to simply walk away.
> He arrives at his destination where a lookout spots him. "A jeep just went by with no driver. Should I dust it?" he inquires over a walkie-talkie. The whole driverless car schtick is no longer a surprise; the lookout (voiced by Don Messick) immediately recognizes him as a Transformer.
> Elsewhere, the Decepticons are testing a device called the orbit disruptor, which Megatron plans to use to just push the Moon out of Earth's orbit. This is phase one of a plan which will allow the Decepticons to control the movement of the tides themselves, using a second, unnamed device, ostensibly developed by Soundwave.
> The weapon is so large that apparently Bruticus is the only Decepticon capable of operating it. (Why not, say, Devastator or Menasor? This is not addressed. Maybe they're off on another mission somewhere.) Megatron's developed a visual simulation of what it will look like, and Starscream chastizes him in his usual tired manner for wasting his time.
Or perhaps the mockups were before they discovered that the Orbital Calculator could not be made smaller. Or the Destabilization Enhancer...
I do believe that Megatron is upset at the thought of losing Bruticus forever, though, rather than just losing this plan.
> Back on foreign soil, the deal with El Presidente has taken a different turn.
> By the time Skywarp has been dispatched to retrieve the Combaticons at their headquarters, there's no sign of them anywhere. Apparently, the Autobot and Decepticon bases are so crammed full of new characters that they need to live off on their own.
> Skywarp has recruited Starscream for assistance and they discover Swindle in the city dump, unloading the remains of the Combaticons. Starscream doesn't seem particularly concerned that the Combaticons that he, himself, created have been reduced to scrap metal, but he does recognize that Swindle is up to his usual dirty tricks and they capture him for a forcible relocation back to base.
> Swindle presents his case before Megatron, claiming the situation isn't really his fault——"this greed is built into my personality component!" This is a character moment, so it's hard to say whether Swindle is misrepresenting the facts for his own benefit or whether this is genuinely true (and, by extension, true that none of the Transformers can really change). Everything we've seen so far, in episodes like "Changing Gears" or "The Secret of Omega Supreme," suggests that a forcible reprogramming, either permanent or temporary, is the only way to really affect the behavior of any Autobots or Decepticons.
The Aerialbots are the only Transformers we see in G1 that show any growth, and Optimus had to specifically request this when they were created.
> Megatron is not sympathetic to Swindle's situation, and arranges for Soundwave to install a bomb inside Swindle's head module. They give him fifteen hours to recover the parts and rebuild Bruticus before it goes boom. (Why 15 and not 12 or 24? Because the Decepticons were built by the Quintessons and they like to do things by fives, that's why.)
> What follows is a montage of Swindle going back to all the places where he'd sold off some slightly-used Combaticon surplus and recovering it, but not actually bothering to offer any refunds. For all we know, this may have been the impetus for the Arabian country whose officials he angered to revamp their political structure into something far more socialist and xenophobic, like Carbombya. One can only speculate.
It's one of those stories that happens in the background in Transformers, where we see just brief glimpses of, like whatever happened to the beings living on Titan.
> Swindle manages to reassemble the other Combaticons in record time, looking exactly as they did before. None of them seem terribly upset over the whole ordeal with getting sold for scrap, but it's also possible he just hasn't told them about that part.
> The big problem here, as evidenced by the fact that Swindle has to drag Brawl across the room, is that the Combaticons cannot combine together any longer. They try to, and get part of the way there, but the sequence is automatically aborted before any of them can connect together. Brawl's personality component is still missing, a fact that Swindle had been hoping could be overlooked. "I didn't think it would matter," he says derisively. The implication is that Brawl's personality is so offensive, as seen in the opening scene from this episode, that Swindle felt like he was better off without it.
> This raises a lot of odd questions. We've already seen in "The Key to Vector Sigma" that some Transformers can be remote-controlled even if they're not alive. Can't Megatron just hook up Brawl to a Stunticon-style remote control and get him to combine with the others into Bruticus that way?
> Even if the Stunticons are different technology somehow, you'd think Bruticus could still exist with one leg. We've seen that Devastator can still combine without Scavenger ("Desertion of the Dinobots" part 1) or Hook ("The Core") and we'll see later that Defensor can exist without First Aid ("The Ultimate Weapon").
When creating the Aerialbots, Optimus Prime referred to six, so either the corpse of Alpha Trion awoke after they left and went off to have adventures, or Superion has his own personality.
> On the other hand, Superion seemingly cannot be formed at all without Fireflight ("Aerial Assault") and Predaking cannot exist if Headstrong doesn't participate ("Nightmare Planet"). The rules are all so arbitrary.
> Honestly, this would have been a great time to introduce the Scramble City concept into the show. Brawl is out of action, so let's get Wildrider or Breakdown or somebody to serve as a pinch hitter. The story premise seems perfect to incorporate the idea. Despite this, it seems Hasbro was very specific about not wanting to play up the interchangeable aspect of the toys, since it was never used in any of the American media at all.
> So, then we cut to what seems like the beginning of a whole 'nother episode. At the local high school, a Mr. Robbins is holding a science class where he prepares to demonstrate the functionality of a low-wattage laser beam. When the laser rips right through a stack of books and then through the classroom window, he immediately suspects the class troublemakers Roland and Martin as likely culprits (and both of them are cackling hysterically over the prank, which is practically the same as admitting to doing it).
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8qRZvlZZ0DY
> I used to have a lot of trouble telling them apart (my brain refuses to process incidental human characters), but I believe Martin is the one in the brown coat with the popped collar, and Roland is the one in red suspenders who looks a little like Chandler Bing from Friends.
>Science class ends 26 seconds after it's begun (seriously), and their science teacher (voiced by Dan "Bumblebee" Gilvezan) is tired of their antics and gives them an ultimatum——either take first prize in the upcoming science fair or fail the class. To sweeten the deal, he elects a bright student named Elise Presser to assist them, which Martin and Roland are none too happy about.
> A fire has broken out inside a nearby building, prompting a couple of window washers to cry for help.
> "What the heck are THOSE things?!" asks Martin, who has apparently been living on Earth for two years without having heard that gigantic alien robots had crashed on the planet.
> Also, the appearance of the Protectobots goes completely unexplained in the show. This show is either really good at crafting character origin stories, or it totally ignores them entirely. We can infer that the Protectobots were probably not created by the Autobots on Earth ("The Key to Vector Sigma" establishes that there's no way to give them personalities without Vector Sigma, and its activation key was destroyed in that episode) but if they came from Cybertron, that story has never been told and it feels like a major oversight.
> "Some liquid nitrogen oughta cool things off around here!" proclaims Groove, sounding exactly like Trailbreaker but breaking out an Ironhide move——retracting his hand and replacing it with a funnel so he can douse the flames. "And what you can't reach, I can!" promises Hot Spot, sounding nothing like he will in later episodes. Blades creates a gust of wind that causes the window washers to fall from their scaffolding, and Streetwise is down below waiting to catch them. A bit of a risky rescue, but I guess if it works, it works. In the aftermath of the rescue effort, Martin and Roland, who are still faced with the problem of needing to win the science fair, are inspired to construct a robot of their own.
> Elise Presser talks a lot. She's babbling when they're digging through the junkyard looking for serviceable robot parts, babbling again when they stumble upon Brawl's personality component and decide to incorporate it into their project's design, and still babbling once they've broken into the school after hours and facing possible expulsion if they're caught.
> I'm not sure what purpose is served by their unauthorized presence on school grounds——surely they could use its facilities during the day, after school is over?
It adds an unnesessary layer of tension just for the sake of being there. Martin describes the invention as a biotronic operational telecommunicator, which seems like a forced excuse to shorten its name to "B.O.T." It's really not an especially inspired name.
Bulbous Orb of Technology?
> There is, of course, the usual hand-waving involved with episodes of this nature, and we're expected to swallow that these kids, who evidently have no industrial assembly experience, managed conveniently off-screen to do all the necessary cutting and welding and soldering and programming to assemble this robotic creation.
> (Of course, the thin possibility does exist that this robot never would have worked at all without Brawl's personality component inside it. If you take what you see in "Starscream's Brigade" at face value, all Starscream had to do was install personality components inside non-living Earth vehicles and they were immediately transformed into Transformers. It's possible B.O.T. was the same way.) The actual design of B.O.T. bothers me, since he doesn't really look like he's made from random junk at all. He's fat and ugly, but he's also perfectly symmetrical and his design is very polished.
> "Maybe I wired the box in wrong? What do you think?" Elise asks. I've read that sometimes people, women in particular, tend to require validation for their remarks, which is why Elise peppers her speech with qualifiers like "don't you think?" in a very stereotypical fashion. It gets annoying so fast.
> Her character is designed like like Velma from Scooby-Doo (short hair, freckles, glasses) which is usually visual shorthand for the "smart" character, but in practice she acts more like Shaggy and Scooby, questioning every move the boys make and expressing trepidation at every turn.
> Elise tries reasoning with B.O.T., and he seems to be responding until Martin arrives with the modified laser from their 26-second science class and blasts B.O.T. Still a Decepticon at heart, he goes into full retreat mode.
> It's adults who were writing this show, of course, so when they made pop culture references, it was frequently a reference to something they enjoyed growing up—which means it was positively ancient history to the kids actually watching this show. For instance, the names for Roland and Martin were likely inspired by the comedy duo Dan Rowan and Dick Martin, whose variety program called Laugh-In was popular from the late 1960's to early 1970's.
> Likewise, the source of the distress call intercepted by Gears is identified by name as the Benajim Franklin Pierce High School. This is actually the given name of Alan Alda's character from the 1970's M*A*S*H television series, which made its debut before most kids watching this cartoon had even been born.
> So, Optimus Prime elects to send Ironhide, Gears, and Bumblebee to investigate the distress call. One can only assume it's a slow day at Autobot Headquarters and there isn't anything else important going on. Actually, the specific Autobots that Prime chose for the mission is highly telling. Ironhide is old and obsolete; Gears just sits there and complains about everything; and Bumblebee is, well, Bumblebee. Clearly, Optimus does not consider this an emergency.
> Back at the junkyard, Swindle has a fun and sinister moment, the sounds of the bomb inside his head still ticking away, where he promises that the yard attendant will be "the first man IN the moon" if he doesn't recover the personality component. The attendant suggests "maybe those kids took it!" and Swindle proceeds to ignore this remark and continues digging through the junk.
> At the school, Ironhide's group arrives (and they all transform very strangely... Gears' legs sprout from the front of his truck mode, with his headlights forming his knees, while Bumblebee's vehicle hood forms his pelvis). It must be a Saturday, because it's morning now but class is not in session. Their arrival prompts the kids to proclaim, "You're not the Protectobots!" This actually raises an interesting point. Hasbro specifically mandated that the final ten episodes of the season be saved to showcase the newest 1986 product line. Why were characters that we've been seeing since the pilot episode dispatched to solve this problem? I guess it's nice that the old standbys aren't being completely forgotten.
> The problem is that all three Autobots seem particularly inept in dealing with this situation. "We came all the way out here for THAT hunk of junk?!" balks Gears after they find B.O.T. in the cafeteria. Oddly, all three Autobots seem to fit through the doors inside the school easily. (Maybe this would make sense if they were all Mini Autobots, but it makes no sense that Ironhide can traipse around inside the school freely.)
> So, Gears gets creamed with a vat of creamed corn and gets his own laser blasts reflected by a huge, metal shield-like thing... I don't even know what would be in the cafeteria that would be that big, but B.O.T. finds it and uses it.
> Ironhide blasts a volley of molten lead, but all B.O.T. has to do is leap up and grab a light fixture, allowing the lead to collapse the flooring beneath Ironhide and trap him.
> The Autobots are not having a good day. Granted, this is a Combaticon they're dealing with, but he's still stuck inside a jerry-rigged wind-up toy thrown together by some snot-nosed kids. The Autobots try to follow B.O.T. through a door but can't even open it. "I don't get it! This is just a wooden door!" exclaims Gears. Turns out B.O.T. has got it barricaded with some furniture on the other side, but it still strains credibility that Gears can't bust through. He's got the force of a 4X4 truck behind him, for crying out loud.
> B.R.A.W.L. (Brain Relegated to an Antiquated Walking Loser... see, I can do it too!) retreats into a run-down, abandoned building, and the Autobots and the kids pursue.
> Ironhide stops them and tells them to stay behind because it's about to get hairy. "He's 30 floor up!" says Bumblebee, after looking up at an elevator that only has 12 floor indicator lights.
> Ironhide wedges a piece of wood between the elevator doors, which I guess is supposed to stop the elevator from operating. Martin grows impatient and so he and Roland drag Elise into the spooky, condemned building. Like, as in they literally grab her hands and force her to follow. I wonder why this place isn't boarded up? This is seriously turning into an episode of Scooby-Doo, and Elise even looks the part. All we're missing at this point is the talking dog.
> Roland grabs the broomstick that's wedged between the doors, recalling the elevator to the first floor so they can board it. Roland is still dragging Elise by the hand. How romantic. Meanwhile, the Autobots are taking the stairs, because obviously gigantic robots who turn into cars and trucks can easily navigate a human-sized staircase.
> Ironhide orders them to just randomly fire up the stairwell. "He's got to be up there somewhere!" is his reasoning, and then he orders them to cease fire a moment later.
"If he's up there, we hit 'im!" he declares.
> Instead, though, we find Swindle at the top of the stairs, going tik-tik-tik-tik and training his weapons on the Autobots. Ruh-roh, Raggy! After this goofy, Kremzeek-style romp through half the episode, to suddenly be confronted by an actual Decepticon warrior is pretty damn terrifying. Also, the fact that he now sounds like Tick-Tick Croc from Peter Pan makes him a little more menacing.
> Apparently the Autobots just leave the school at this point, not bothering to repair the damage done, not insisting that the kids dismantle this killer robot that was running loose through the city, etc. With Swindle gone and B.O.T. having been reduced to a docile state, apparently the emergency, such as it was, is over. Not even a public service announcement about staying away from abandoned buildings, because knowing is half the battle.
> You would think that we'd seen the last of the high school kids by this point, but they're still determined to get into as much trouble as possible. They realize the "funny component" is missing from B.O.T.'s head and conclude that this is what made him go berserk. Somehow, they're able to use the printouts that they got off Brawl's brain to track the signal and determine where it ended up. I'm not sure how this makes sense, but the kids pile into the Mystery Machine and go to work. Well, actually, it's just Elise's red convertible, which is interesting for a couple of reason. One, it's just a modified version of Bumblebee's vehicle-mode animation model, which means that it's built like a Penny Racer and has the back of Bumblebee's head visible on the trunk. Two, the car is colored tan-and-purple, just like Swindle, in one scene.
> Somehow, Elise has rewired the speech synthesizer for B.O.T. (you know, the speech synthesizer that could not produce a single intelligible word) and rigged it to receive transmissions. I guess it's still hooked up to Brawl's brain on some level, so this means the kids can eavesdrop on the Decepticons at their base. There's a lot of hand waving required to understand this episode. They hear Megatron talking about how he wants to test-fire the orbit disruptor weapon on Autobot Headquarters, because this is just what he does when he tests out new weapons. Also, using the lightning bug against the Autobot base in "Cosmic Rust" didn't quite pan out, so you can't blame him for wanting to try again.
> The kids make their way to the volcano to warn the Autobots. "Only Defensor can stand against Bruticus," offers Optimus Prime, and on the surface it seems like another one of his famous non sequiturs, at least until you remember that Bruticus is going to be piloting the orbit disruptor. Of course, this raises some questions. Superion fought Bruticus and won in "Aerial Assault," so obviously Defensor's not the only one who can stand against him. And what about Omega Supreme? This episode is deliberately and willfully forgetting about all the other combiners and combiner-sized robots.
However, given that Defensor took Bruticus down with a single shot, Optimus might be onto something here.
> Nonetheless, it's time to contact the Protectobots, who (like the Combaticons) have their own headquarters somewhere in the city. They respond immediately, with the entire side of the building flipping up like a gigantic garage door to allow them an expedient egress
"Your stupid warrior is just standing there!" points out Starscream, conveniently forgetting that Bruticus is actually HIS stupid warrior. Megatron tells them to separate, and there's a moment when Onslaught is still colored like Bruticus, with one green leg and one yellow one.
> As our episode mercifully closes, Optimus gives the kids a perfuctory thank-you and Bumblebee offers an equally perfunctory sorry-your-robot-done-got-blowed-up. "Let's just say he 'bot' the big one," Martin offers. "Aw, let's not," counters Chandler. Elise is all ready to do this whole thing over again, asking the Autobots if they have any spare parts laying around so the kids can build B.O.T. mk II. Roland and Martin respond to this by whipping out a roll of duct tape, gagging Elise, and forcibly carrying her away. The Autobots just stand there in stunned silence. And this, my friends, is how season two of Transformes ends. Not with a bang, not with a whimper, but with the muffled cries of a young woman with her mouth taped shut. Hee hee hee! Scooby-Dooby-Doooooooo!
> I've mentioned this before, but under the rules for the Writer's Guild of America, any incidental characters created by a spec writer provide them with royalties if those characters are used again in future episodes. I'm certain Earl Kress created the trio of Elise and Martin and Roland with the intent of using them again, had the format for the show not undergone a dramatic shift for the third season.
> Of course, with no project to present for the science fair, we can at least take solace in the knowledge that Roland and Martin were likely expelled for breaking into the school, and probably got blamed for all the damage that B.O.T. and Ironhide did to the school property. We can only hope that Elise got herself some therapy.
I don't like Spike -- he's too agreeable and doesn't create any drama. Elise has a lot more depth than Spike or Carly.
> This is a really anti-climactic end for the season. It's such a preposterous story premise, does very little to showcase the new toys (both Defensor and Bruticus are such wimps that neither of them can take a single shot before breaking into pieces), and the high school kids take up way too much screen time. I think it's the worst episode of the entire series. Even "Carnage in C-Minor" had parts that I liked and enjoyed. This was just a pointless, terrible, pointless episode.
Zobovor
Sep 17, 2016, 11:28:55 PM9/17/16
to
On Saturday, September 17, 2016 at 6:46:35 PM UTC-6, Gustavo Wombat, of the Seattle Wombats wrote:
> There was probably some kind of reason for the Combaticons arriving, but we
> are never given any of it. I like to think that the secret (to the audience)
> mission was more exciting than the episode.
Maybe they were supposed to level the entire city so that they would have a staging base for the orbit disruptor. Depending on the position of the Moon relative to the Earth, they would have to have a direct line-of-sight position from which to fire.
> There was probably some kind of reason for the Combaticons arriving, but we
> are never given any of it. I like to think that the secret (to the audience)
> mission was more exciting than the episode.
That would certainly be reason enough for Defensor to set weapons to "kill" instead of "stun." It would also explain why he's so pissed off at Bruticus in "The Burden Hardest to Bear." NO MORE, BRUTICUS! NO MORE HARM WILL COME TO THE HUMANS, BITCH!
> Perhaps the combiners send the bodies of all the robots who form it off to
> subspace, and pull their combined form out of subspace. We think we see them
> combine, but really, they just balance near each other and to the swap.
> This would explain how Menasaur doesn't seem to really be formed from his
> parts on the show, and how sometimes there can be a subspace screwup and a
> Transformer can be next to the combined form they become.
> Do we ever see the moon in Season 3? Did they return to this plan during the
> twenty year gap?
Didn't Omega Supreme land on the Moon in "The Big Broadcast of 2006"? Or am I imagining things?
> Megatron prepared mockups, and they had Swindle using the device while
> straddling Blastoff.
> Didn't the Stunticons live separate too? I think that had Season 3 been just
> more Season 2, they would have explored the transformers factions a bit more
> with subteam loyalties.
> The Aerialbots are the only Transformers we see in G1 that show any growth,
> and Optimus had to specifically request this when they were created.
> If you had sold your coworkers for spare parts, and were then forced to
> reassemble them, would you tell them? Of course not.
> How many laser cores did Starscream take? Does Bruticus have his own, or is
> his personality a combination of the Combaticons?
Optimus Prime's line about six Aerialbots being created does suggest Superion got his own life force from Vector Sigma. On the other hand, the Constructicons were pre-existing robots on Cybertron, and Megatron gave them the combined mode without using Vector Sigma at all.
Even if Bruticus doesn't have his own life force, he must have his own mind. We know that Megatron reprogrammed Bruticus for complete obedience in "The Revenge of Bruticus," but Swindle betrays Megatron in the very next episode. Therefore, the reprogramming didn't affect Swindle.
> Well, if you can combine them in any pattern, do you really need to hunt down
> all the Combaticons when you can just use Wildrider?
> It just now occurred to me that this is a reference to Rowan and Martin's
> Laugh-In, the 1960's comedy extravaganza, which once featured Richard Nixon.
> I think I have figured this out -- the teacher moonlights as a serious actor
> at a porn studio, and got his class and a script mixed up.
>> "What the heck are THOSE things?!" asks Martin, who has apparently been
>> living on Earth for two years without having heard that gigantic alien
>> robots had crashed on the planet.
>
> I'm pretty sure Martin has been living on Earth for more than two years...
> We do not see the window washers walk away. They are dead.
> I think it is less a need for validation than that she babbles. Why would she
> want validation from Roland and Martin?
> I like to think of this as a spotlight episode for Brawl.
BLAST OFF: Look, it's the Autobots!
ONSLAUGHT: Combaticons, prepare for battle!
VORTEX: I sure hope the Autobots didn't bring any high school kids with them!BRAWL: Shut up.
SWINDLE: Yeah, we might have to stuff them into an elevator or something.
BRAWL: SHUT UP!
VORTEX: Hey, Brawl, maybe you should throw some creamed corn at 'em.
BRAWL: SHUT UP SHUT UP SHUT UP!!!
>> "If he's up there, we hit 'im!" he declares.
>>
> To be fair, Ironhide is drunk.
> However, given that Defensor took Bruticus down with a single shot, Optimus
> might be onto something here.
> I really like the Protectobots having their own base. I have no idea why
> though.
> I don't want to know what the boys do with her after gagging her and dragging
> her away.
> I liked Elise. The boys are horrible, but Elise was great.
> I don't like Spike -- he's too agreeable and doesn't create any drama. Elise
> has a lot more depth than Spike or Carly.
> I could only watch it closely in five minute intervals without getting so
> bored I had to go do something else.
Maybe "Chaos"? That's kind of like a ghost story...
Zob (me, Grimlock, heard that Chaos monster live on planet Dread!)
Gustavo Wombat, of the Seattle Wombats
Sep 18, 2016, 7:53:17 PM9/18/16
to
On Saturday, September 17, 2016 at 8:28:55 PM UTC-7, Zobovor wrote:
> On Saturday, September 17, 2016 at 6:46:35 PM UTC-6, Gustavo Wombat, of the Seattle Wombats wrote:
>
> > There was probably some kind of reason for the Combaticons arriving, but we
> > are never given any of it. I like to think that the secret (to the audience)
> > mission was more exciting than the episode.
>
> Maybe they were supposed to level the entire city so that they would have a staging base for the orbit disruptor. Depending on the position of the Moon relative to the Earth, they would have to have a direct line-of-sight position from which to fire.
No, no, you saw the simulation -- it was to be fired from space. You even forced me to rewatch the simulation, so I would see that it was Bruticus riding Astrotrain.
> On Saturday, September 17, 2016 at 6:46:35 PM UTC-6, Gustavo Wombat, of the Seattle Wombats wrote:
>
> > There was probably some kind of reason for the Combaticons arriving, but we
> > are never given any of it. I like to think that the secret (to the audience)
> > mission was more exciting than the episode.
>
> Maybe they were supposed to level the entire city so that they would have a staging base for the orbit disruptor. Depending on the position of the Moon relative to the Earth, they would have to have a direct line-of-sight position from which to fire.
> > Perhaps the combiners send the bodies of all the robots who form it off to
> > subspace, and pull their combined form out of subspace. We think we see them
> > combine, but really, they just balance near each other and to the swap.
>
> That reminds me of the early fan theories that Soundwave and Megatron didn't actually shrink, but that when they "transformed" they were really swapping their entire bodies out with smaller forms that they tucked away inside subspace. Feels messy to me. I want to believe that Transformers actually transform, not that they're doing sleight-of-hand magic tricks.
> > This would explain how Menasaur doesn't seem to really be formed from his
> > parts on the show, and how sometimes there can be a subspace screwup and a
> > Transformer can be next to the combined form they become.
>
> Does this relate somehow to Tiny Bruticus from "Surprise Party"?
> > Do we ever see the moon in Season 3? Did they return to this plan during the
> > twenty year gap?
>
> Aw, geez. You know I don't pay attention to backgrounds!
>
> Didn't Omega Supreme land on the Moon in "The Big Broadcast of 2006"? Or am I imagining things?
> > Megatron prepared mockups, and they had Swindle using the device while
> > straddling Blastoff.
>
> In the simulation, it looked like Bruticus using the weapon to me, not Swindle. Whatever he's riding on, it's purple. Maybe it was Astrotrain?
I don't know why the controls of this thing have to be so large that only Bruticus can operate it. Why not have Astrotrain operate it, though a few wires?
Perhaps Megatron doesn't trust Astrotrain, after Triple Takeover, and does trust his reprogramming of Bruticus? But, still, why not give it a Megatron sized cockpit?
> > Didn't the Stunticons live separate too? I think that had Season 3 been just
> > more Season 2, they would have explored the transformers factions a bit more
> > with subteam loyalties.
>
> We see that Megatron has to get Soundwave to call up the Stunticons and ask them for help in "Starscream's Brigade" because they're not at the undersea base. It's sort of implied that they don't live there.
> > The Aerialbots are the only Transformers we see in G1 that show any growth,
> > and Optimus had to specifically request this when they were created.
>
> Well, it sort of makes sense that the default setting is "robots who can't grow beyond their original programming," given their origins as Quintesson consumer products.
It is possible that Optimus got the idea of the Aerialbots having the capacity to grow from being around humans, but then we need some rationale for why the Transformers rebelled against the Quintessons that doesn't involve them growing past their programming to be slaves.
Did all the Transformers with the capacity for growth leave during the Great War, after discovering that their growth-inhibited brethren were hell bent on destroying the planet in never ending war? That would explain why the third season Autobots had a greater range of personalities.
We're watching the emotionally stunted dead-enders of Transformers society, aren't we? I really wish that didn't explain just about everything.
> That's a really good question.
> >> "What the heck are THOSE things?!" asks Martin, who has apparently been
> >> living on Earth for two years without having heard that gigantic alien
> >> robots had crashed on the planet.
> >
> > I'm pretty sure Martin has been living on Earth for more than two years...
>
> You can't prove it!
Also, if you look at the students, they are weird as hell high school students. Some wear suits, some have gray hair, they all appear to be in their thirties or older, other than Roland and Martin.
> > We do not see the window washers walk away. They are dead.
>
> You had one job, Streetwise.
> > I like to think of this as a spotlight episode for Brawl.
>
> I bet Brawl got teased about this for years.
>
> BLAST OFF: Look, it's the Autobots!
> ONSLAUGHT: Combaticons, prepare for battle!
> VORTEX: I sure hope the Autobots didn't bring any high school kids with them!BRAWL: Shut up.
> SWINDLE: Yeah, we might have to stuff them into an elevator or something.
> BRAWL: SHUT UP!
> VORTEX: Hey, Brawl, maybe you should throw some creamed corn at 'em.
> BRAWL: SHUT UP SHUT UP SHUT UP!!!
ONSLAUGHT: ...
> > However, given that Defensor took Bruticus down with a single shot, Optimus
> > might be onto something here.
>
> I think this is further evidence that the Autobots are capable of using lethal force against the Decepticons, but they usually choose not to.
> > I really like the Protectobots having their own base. I have no idea why
> > though.
>
> If the season had continued, they could have done episodes about just the Protectobots, sequestered from the rest of the group and having their own little adventures.
> > I liked Elise. The boys are horrible, but Elise was great.
>
> I've really grown to like her a lot more just in the course of this discussion.
>
> > I don't like Spike -- he's too agreeable and doesn't create any drama. Elise
> > has a lot more depth than Spike or Carly.
>
> I wonder what high school Spike went to, if at all? Secondary to that, I wonder why we never saw Spike in school at any point?
This also explains why they only go by obviously fake names.
> > I could only watch it closely in five minute intervals without getting so
> > bored I had to go do something else.
>
> We really need to do a good episode next. I was trying to come up with something Hallowe'en-themed for October, but we've already done the obvious ones ("Hoist Goes Hollywood" and "Nightmare Planet") and I don't really think "The Face of the Nijika" is a good episode.
>
> Maybe "Chaos"? That's kind of like a ghost story...
"Doesn't that make you a coward?" Daniel asked.
"You don't get to be my age without learning when to run away, lad," Kup said. "You and Hot Rod are brave... how long do you think you will live, kid, fifty more years? seventy or eighty at the outside?"
Daniel began to cry.
"I'm millions of years old, lad. That's older than you will ever be."
---
I think we've done "Dark Awakening" and "Ghost In The Machine"
Maybe some Beast Wars? "Possession", "Bad Spark" and "Feral Scream" all have horror elements. Beast Machines? "Spark of Darkness"
Zobovor
Sep 18, 2016, 9:29:48 PM9/18/16
to
On Sunday, September 18, 2016 at 5:53:17 PM UTC-6, Gustavo Wombat, of the Seattle Wombats wrote:
>> Maybe they were supposed to level the entire city so that they would have a
>> staging base for the orbit disruptor.
>
>> Maybe they were supposed to level the entire city so that they would have a
>> staging base for the orbit disruptor.
>
> No, no, you saw the simulation -- it was to be fired from space.
Well, then, maybe they needed to level the city in order to build a launching pad to get the thing into space.
(You've got to give me SOMETHING. I am trying SO HARD here.)
> Except, weren't there countless generations of Transformers since then? Alpha
> Trion dates from that period, but he's really, really old. I assume that
> everyone else was built since then, and dragged down to Vector Sigma to get
> life.
I guess it could just be the Transformers' faulty long-term memories coming into play again. It just seems like actually getting to Vector Sigma is so difficult, and fraught with danger and peril, that it's not a very efficient means of creating new Transformers. They have to descend deep into the planet, fight centurion droids, etc. And yet, it's very likely that between the Autobots and Decepticons, they must have made dozens of trips. Autobots from The Transformers: the Movie probably left Cybertron before the Ark launched, or else Prime would have taken Ultra Magnus, Springer, etc. with him on board. Then there are wayward Autobots from colonies on Paradron and Junkion. Then there are the older Autobots/Decepticons like Ironhide and Thundercracker and Blitzwing. Then there are the younger Autobots/Decepticons like Sideswipe and Bumblebee and Rumble (assuming the characters act their age, of course... in the comics, Hot Rod is specifically stated to be the same age as everybody else).
Did Megatron just keep stealing the key to Vector Sigma over and over every time he needed to create more troops?
> Maybe some Beast Wars? "Possession", "Bad Spark" and "Feral Scream" all have
> horror elements.
Zob (not a G1 episode, but still a G1 episode!)
Gustavo Wombat
Sep 18, 2016, 11:44:40 PM9/18/16
to
Zobovor <zm...@aol.com> wrote:
> On Sunday, September 18, 2016 at 5:53:17 PM UTC-6, Gustavo Wombat, of the
> Seattle Wombats wrote:
>
>>> Maybe they were supposed to level the entire city so that they would have a
>>> staging base for the orbit disruptor.
>>
>> No, no, you saw the simulation -- it was to be fired from space.
>
> Well, then, maybe they needed to level the city in order to build a
> launching pad to get the thing into space.
>
> (You've got to give me SOMETHING. I am trying SO HARD here.)
I think the only way it makes sense is if there is some reason we don't
> On Sunday, September 18, 2016 at 5:53:17 PM UTC-6, Gustavo Wombat, of the
> Seattle Wombats wrote:
>
>>> Maybe they were supposed to level the entire city so that they would have a
>>> staging base for the orbit disruptor.
>>
>> No, no, you saw the simulation -- it was to be fired from space.
>
> Well, then, maybe they needed to level the city in order to build a
> launching pad to get the thing into space.
>
> (You've got to give me SOMETHING. I am trying SO HARD here.)
know. But, there's a lot about the episode that makes no sense -- they need
Bruticus to fire the weapon, but there are also BOT-sized controls...
Bruticus was trying to lure the Protectobots into a trap, but got taken
down before the trap was sprung? Also, there's a trap in the city...
- Vector Sigma can give anything life
- Quintessons can apparently still build Beastie Transformers (Predacons
and Terrorcons, sometimes)
- Wheeljack can create very stupid Transformers
- You can stick the power of Unicron in them (hi Technobots! you're
secretly evil)
- Primacron's assistant created the beasts, even the ones we know have
other origins.
There might have been engineer types better than Wheeljack creating
Transformers until they stopped, but there was no evidence of that ever
presented. I like the idea of Transformers just being constructed by
various engineerbots a lot more than a singular origin, but the closest we
have to evidence of that is that no one finds the origins of the Technobots
and the Dinobots to be all that terrifying.
BW complicates matters by creating sparks, and making those the mystical
things that require a non-engineer origin. G1 has Starscream's ghost, and
Seaspray being transmogrified, and Rodimus, Ultra Magnus and Arcee having
their souls sucked out and put into humanoid blobs.
It all points to Transformers having an origin that isn't just "connect
this wire to that one". Except the Dinobots, who would probably blow up if
they stepped into the pool of transmogrification.
(Unless the Dinobots got damaged laser cores salvaged from dead bodies in
the Ark, and all Wheeljack did was build bodies for them and try to fix the
laser cores).
Unless there is some other mechanism that was just never mentioned, I would
assume Transformers were generally created by Vector Sigma. It also means
there were no native Paradronians.
Assuming there was only one key to Vector Sigma, I think that Megatron had
it for some time, but lacked the energy to support a larger army. It was
then stolen by Alpha Trion, who used it to set the guards to attack
Decepticons.
The Decepticons know Alpha Trion has the key, and they know where he is,
but they don't act on this, until Megatron has been sending back energy and
shows up with robots to give life to. Then they grab it. Why wait all that
time? I have no idea, but the script is clear that the Decepticons knew
where it was.
Megatron then uses the key to set the guards to attack Autobots.
So the adventure we see has the guards attacking everyone.
Alternate theory to creation -- Vector Sigma captures sparks from the spark
dimension and then traps them in laser cores. There have been other ways to
do this with varying degrees of success -- Wheeljack could only catch the
slow ones.
Another theory -- there is no one Transformers origin. What we think of as
a single race is a bunch of beings that share some technology and some
design elements, but are wildly different. Starscream has a spark and a
ghost, but Ironhide might not. Skorponok is just a guy in a suit.
Powermaster Optimus Prime is a wooden puppet! By the time BW rolls around,
all the non-sparked Transformers "species" are extinct, except for the
diagnostic drone.
Consider the episode "Transmutate" -- the test of worthiness to Megatron
was not whether Transmutate had a spark, but whether she could transform.
Would he have accepted a non-sparked Transformer? It's what he tried to
create in BM, after all. (And why did he not copy the programming of the
diagnostic drone? Why bother giving his generals sparks?)
>> Maybe some Beast Wars? "Possession", "Bad Spark" and "Feral Scream" all have
>> horror elements.
>
> I really like "Possession." We can do that one.
a fine episode, lots of sparky goodness and ghosts, but it's not really
scary is it?
> Zob (not a G1 episode, but still a G1 episode!)
makes sense to do "Posession" first.
--
I wish I was a mole in the ground.
Zobovor
Sep 24, 2016, 2:15:44 PM9/24/16
to
On Sunday, September 18, 2016 at 9:44:40 PM UTC-6, Gustavo Wombat, of the Seattle Wombats wrote:
> Fine. I guess "Bad Spark" is really a sequel to "Posession" anyway, so it
> makes sense to do "Posession" first.
I would not be opposed to doing a double-feature. Either that, or we can just do one in October and one in November. (We already did "Aerial Assault" last year, and I can't think of any other episodes that have giant turkeys in them.)
> Fine. I guess "Bad Spark" is really a sequel to "Posession" anyway, so it
> makes sense to do "Posession" first.
Zob
Gustavo Wombat
Sep 24, 2016, 3:23:32 PM9/24/16
to
thanksgiving episode in there.
Just "Posession" -- I'm traveling a bit in October, and don't want to
overcommit.
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