Transformers: More than Meets the Eye season two discussion

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Skyquake87
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Post by Skyquake87 »

My favourite bit of this issue was Nautica's magical friendship pact. That was aces.



...she's going to die, isn't she? :(

I think that and the Whirl/ Cyclonus stuff was aces. And I loved the ending, plot contrivances and all.

I am also puzzled as to what would make Dominus go undercover ..in the DJD of all things. What had he seen? What made him agree to that? There's an interesting story in that, I'm sure.
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Post by Patapsco »

Red Dave Prime wrote:And another minor point. If dominus is a load bearer to hide his true form, how come in the alt reality when they replace his head they leave him in what must be his armour form?
could have fused him permanently into his armour too. After all, the functionists wouldn't have wanted a pesky loadbearer breaking the Grand Cybertronian Taxonomy would they?
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Post by Red Dave Prime »

OK, Lets do this.
Chromedome and Rewind have brought up that injecting can be lethal [and was even brought up by Sunder relatively recently] but it still doesn't make Chromedome's randomly sudden decline, recuperation, and march to battle any less clunky.
It does and it doesn't. I dont see Chromedome as marching to war at the end, I think he is just more willing to die fighting. It might be a case that Rewind suffers the fate of not letting Dominus live and seeing Chromedome die.
As for the effects of the injecting, I understood this to be that there is only so many times a cybertron can tamper with anothers mind as it costs them some of their own. The countdown part felt quite specific, almost matrix-y, and was probably more down to Chromedome not just infiltrating the pets mind but tryint to restore Dominus - he was in there far longer than normal. I'd imagine Dominus will be the last bot Chromedome injects, which also makes me think he is on the death list.
On the Agent 113/Magnus bit...it is quite possible that they were both unaware of each other.

Possibly due to "secret agent stuff" Dominus/Vos knew that there was a guy inside Magnus and how that worked, but not necessarily who it was.

Similarly, and maybe a bit too conveniently, I don't recall Magnus seeing the Pet in action. Consider this; the DJD are not seen all that often on the frontlines. Their last known footage included Dominus as Vos [seen in Megatron's trial] and First Aid did not recognize Gun-Vos, making it possible that the change in the roster has gone undetected.

Which still makes it a bit too much of a convenient stretch; why take one of your civilization's greatest politician/philosopher/Human rights activist/doctor and have him masquerade as a butcher?

Minimus flat out said it; he was a soldier, so Magnus was a more or less career progression aspect. Another high-profile Cybertronian, Tyrest, went on with more or less his actual "job" and function until he went nuts.
My take is this - Magnus never encounters the pet or sees him so never makes the connection. Ambus Vos obviously looks quite different so Magnus would never suspect.

As for why Ambus is an undercover memeber - I dont think he was an autobot initially. I think he was drawn to the Decepticons promise of rebellion against the status quo. But as the war goes on he sees more cruelty appear on the Decepticon side and the ideals of the cause change. The DJD are the apex of this - an overbearing, sadistic group who insist everyone knows their place in the decepticon hierachy. Almost the same as the autobot council Megatron rebels against (and the rules ambus himself strives against).
Enter Prowl and while Ambus may not be in the DJD to bring down the cons, he might have been there to try and keep the autobots aware of which cons were marked for death and possibly turnable and also to know if any autobots were in danger from them.

@Patapsco - absolutely that is what we have to assume happens but I'm not sure it makes perfect sense. I can live with it though, its a minor quibble on my part.

Megatron being afraid - just throwing it out there, it seems odd he woul now be scared after he was willing to give himself over to Tran and a fate worse than dying on the battlefield. I think he is ore afraid of returning to his old ways
As we head onto flanders field and the inevitable deaths and near deaths that will occur, anyone fancy doing a deathlist of the main characters? If so Just copy and paste below. Bonus TFA Points for getting any right

Rodimus - Safe
Drift - not sure on this. Roberts might like to explore him more but Drift has had lost of focus overall from IDW and I dont think the character has much left. I'm going with dead by issue 56.
Magnus - Safe, but maybe not the armour
Brainstorm - Safe, he's a good background character
Velocity - I think she'll go. We've had nice build up but ratchet being back makes me think that she'll get the bullet
Ratchet - but if she stays than maybe we see Ratchet go. I think roberts might get more fun out of Dr Cox but we'll see.
Nautica - I get why some think she'll be a major casualty but I think she's a great original character and her follow up over losing some of her new super friends seems like the kind of character stuff roberts and his fans would love.
Nightbeat - Dies while uncovering the great mystery of whats in the hollow
Skids - Safe - still has the cybertopia stuff to follow up on
Rewind - Safe - I expect he may get an unpleasant reveal with Overlord though
Chromedome - Dead - was willing to give his life for Rewind to have his true love back. I wouldnt be surprised if he goes down injecting one of the bigger cons
Ten - Dies, while saving....
Swerve - add to the guilt pile Swerve.
Whirl - Safe, by a country mile
Ravage - Safe but may defect to Deathsauras army at the end. He is still a Con after all
Cyclonus - initially I thought he might die but I think he'll survive to the end.
Tailgate - Safe, but I think we'll see the super spark burn out.
Megatron - Safe.
Tarn - I think he'll live to show up one last time. If he is roller, a retribution with Prime would be a good plot as well.
Nickel - Dies, possibly because of something Tarn does and in turn, cause Deathsauras to question Mr. Decepticon Mask. I'll also suggest that if she does stay she becomes part of the crew
Helex, Vos and Tesarus - They're dead jim, all dead.
Overlord - safe - still has a whole new plot to uncover
Deathsauras - Safe, but will lose a few of his crew.

So quite a death toll there. I wouldnt be surprised if the toll is much lower - its one issue and a rake of deaths will mean a lack of impact. Possible the battle runs over 2 issues but that doesnt seem to be Roberts style.
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Post by Knightdramon »

Red Dave Prime wrote:

As for why Ambus is an undercover memeber - I dont think he was an autobot initially. I think he was drawn to the Decepticons promise of rebellion against the status quo. But as the war goes on he sees more cruelty appear on the Decepticon side and the ideals of the cause change. The DJD are the apex of this - an overbearing, sadistic group who insist everyone knows their place in the decepticon hierachy. Almost the same as the autobot council Megatron rebels against (and the rules ambus himself strives against).
Enter Prowl and while Ambus may not be in the DJD to bring down the cons, he might have been there to try and keep the autobots aware of which cons were marked for death and possibly turnable and also to know if any autobots were in danger from them.
Rewind mentions that he and Dominus undertook the rite of Autobrand as soon as they came to the planet after an excursion, so he's an Autobot through and through.

As to the "death" list...this time around I won't give in to the creator's or solicitation's cues on what I should expect.

With very few exceptions the solicitations and both creators [Roberts and Milne, but especially Milne] have been bigging an event too much to the point where after reading, you're like "...so that's it?"

So not paying much attention to the deaths bit :lol:
Few stuff in the UK to trade/sell. Measly sales thread.
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Red Dave Prime
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Post by Red Dave Prime »

Rewind mentions that he and Dominus undertook the rite of Autobrand as soon as they came to the planet after an excursion, so he's an Autobot through and through
Ah yeah, tru dat. Bang goes my theory. Hope the actual explanation is decent (other than Prowl did it)
so not paying much attention to the deaths bit
Come on, be game.
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Post by Patapsco »

Dave, what about Rung?
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Red Dave Prime
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Post by Red Dave Prime »

Holy crap, he really does fade into the background.

No chance of him dying.
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Post by Auntie Slag »

Blimey, after a good few years of speculating about Dominus, its all seemingly done and dusted in a couple of panels! I hope he's not dead. That panel back in issue 17, the eulogy episode where the final bit where Rewind says: "I love you".

But what Chromedome really heard was:

"I love you Domey. Course I'll drop you like a sack of spuds the moment we find my one true love, but for now I love you".

I used to think Chromedome was an arse, but Rewind has really put him through the mill; four million years of it, of waiting for his life to fall apart the moment they find Dominus. This must've been a nice bit of relief.

And now Magnus'll know his brother was in the DJD!

Megatron's definitely got something brewing. Ever since he came to The Lost Light there's been panels of him thinking and 'working' as he says. Back in issue 28; on the first page where Nautica is running up to Brainstorm she says that some nucleon rods have gone missing. Could that be the beginning of Megatron's back-up plan?

And now in this issue Brainstorm has made him a fusion cannon lookalike from a teleportation device! And his body is full of holes, black holes or something. It must be significant that the cannon has been made from this particular bit of Censerre's fortress.
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Post by Auntie Slag »

Two other things I'm interested with this issue:

1) Skids is really off. He's distant with Rung which he has never been, and he seems scared of the impending battle, and I don't think Skids has ever been scared of anything previously. He's beaten everything they've encountered. So I reckon he can only be off if he's remembered his time with Tarn at Grindcore, which may reduce him almost useless in next issue's battle.

2) Chromedome and Ratchet talk about Dominus' domestication, which could have been a serious job. If none of the DJD have the medical/technical nous to perform a task like that, did they hire in someone else? I wonder if there's a backstory connection between Dominus and Spinister, and the latter has had his memory wiped or badly messed up as part of, I dunno, escaping from the DJD?

If Dominus really is dead now, I still feel like he's got connections to people other than Rewind in the whole MTMTE story.
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Post by Unicron »

Auntie Slag wrote:Megatron's definitely got something brewing. Ever since he came to The Lost Light there's been panels of him thinking and 'working' as he says. Back in issue 28; on the first page where Nautica is running up to Brainstorm she says that some nucleon rods have gone missing. Could that be the beginning of Megatron's back-up plan?
The fuel rods were probably part of the whole 'stuff gone missing' thing, like Nightbeat's wall, some of the signs, etc.
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Post by Patapsco »

Well he's definitely building *something*, and he does have part of Brainstorm's time machine
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Post by Auntie Slag »

Unicron wrote:The fuel rods were probably part of the whole 'stuff gone missing' thing, like Nightbeat's wall, some of the signs, etc.
Yeah, that predates the Slaughterhouse arc by quite a bit, but I see what you mean. I just feel like it could equally be little tidbits dropped by Roberts that could tie in to Megatron's plan.

How is he able to hide what he's doing? Magnus was allowed to investigate his quarters when he was searching for his missing datapad (the one that Ten took). So I wonder if its got something to do with Megatron's insides. Whirl lost his arm inside Megatron (Oo-er!), and if Megatron isn't allowed any privacy aboard The Lost Light (which is fair enough considering who he is), he does have these rather large space pockets inside him. I also wonder if this is why he was okay with facing Tarn, because no matter what the outcome he wasn't really in danger of dying wholesale if part of him is elsewhere.

He did say to Ravage once that "This body has no bite", maybe because it doesn't have an awful lot to bite on. But why hasn't Ratchet made a fuss about this?

Off the top of my head that's nucleon rods and an ALL central briefcase, what else has gone missing? Nucleon revives and boosts a Transformer (with side-effects differing from person to person).

I'd say Roberts has done a fantastic job of making Megatron seem worthy and honourable. That's going to sting so badly if he's had a Plan B all this time, which he's made no real bones about keeping secret.
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Post by Skyquake87 »

inflatable dalek wrote:So why does this feel so much "Bigger" and event filled?
RDP got on this before me, but if you look at the most successful parts of the Transformers over the last two decades, its the ones where the focus is on a much smaller cast. For Beast Wars/ Beast Machines, Prime and, to a lesser extent, the LAMs this strong storytelling /characterisation was the necessity of invention as the budget for producing fully CGI shows is always going to eat into what you are able to do and how many characters you can feature. Animated did feature quite a lot of characters, but kept the focus on the main bunch we started with, adding in other characters as supporting cast in a similar vein to grown up telly.

RID has ended up a bit like the old cartoon - a sprawl breaking under its own weight with all the concepts, character, story-arcs and toy promotion it has to fit in.

Transformers is a bit like X-Men in some respects. There's a cast of thousands and you'd need 11 books to properly do it justice. I think IDW have probably got the right set up with 2 main ongoing titles and then smaller satelite mini-series and one-shots, but just aren't thinking clearly about where to balance out the cast and factor in contractual obligation toy pimping. I liked how Marvel made some of the toy concepts central to the stories they were telling*, made it a lot less jarring than garbage like 'here's Starscream now in a new body we have to talk about because he has a new toy on the shelves, even though in ficition, this is a massive waste of resources as he's basically the leader of a refugee camp on a dead planet'.


*Pretenders notwithstanding
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Post by Auntie Slag »

Yeah, this is also true of the Smurfs, the Fraggles, the Ewoks cartoon and Hollyoaks. And big bands like Lindisfarne and Blazin' Squad.
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Post by Patapsco »

Auntie Slag wrote:Blazin' Squad.
:up:
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Skyquake87
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Post by Skyquake87 »

F*** me, Blazin' Squad. They were terrible. What was that song of theirs? 'Crossroads' or something?

I'm also interested with whats up with Skids...he seemed so down, staring off into the middle distance. Mind you, imminent death'll probably do that to you. My reaction would probably be like Swerve's.
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Post by Auntie Slag »

Skyquake87 wrote:My reaction would probably be like Swerve's.
Oh, definitely. His is probably the most realistic reaction out of all of them!
  • So Megatron's got to come up with something.
  • Nightbeat's going to come up with something.
Ultimate Magnus, Ten and Tailgate will soak up a lot of the beatings.
It'd be superb if Rodimus dies, but Drift won't let him. That must be the reason he's returned, because he believes Rodimus must live to see the Knights of Cybertron, so Drift may sacrifice himself to defend Rodimus.

I think out of all of them Skids deserves to take down Tarn, but maybe so does Rewind for what the DJD did to Dominus.

Will the Scavengers be waiting a safe distance away, ready to pick over the battlefield remains, which could be the point where Skids comes face to face with arch-nemesis Misfire!
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Post by Patapsco »

Re: Tailgate - we know he's super powered, but we don't know if he can actually take any form of beating
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Post by Red Dave Prime »

I think (and am prepared to be corrected) but I think that they say he is also invincible. I cant remember if this was the description of tailgates new powers or just a general summary of what powers could potentially manifest.
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Post by Patapsco »

Red Dave Prime wrote:I think (and am prepared to be corrected) but I think that they say he is also invincible. I cant remember if this was the description of tailgates new powers or just a general summary of what powers could potentially manifest.
no, you're right, it was back in #49 when Rodimus gave Megs the medical report on Tailgate. A super outlier with enhanced speed, strength and invulnerability
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