Speak, Memory: Part 1

« The Transformers: More than Meets the Eye #48 »
"Speak, Memory: Part 1"
Publisher	IDW Publishing
First published	December 23, 2015
Cover date	December 2015
Written by	James Roberts
Pencils by	Hayato Sakamoto
Colors by	Joana Lafuente
Letters by	Tom B. Long & Chris Mowry
Editor	John Barber
Continuity	2005 IDW continuity
Chronology	Current era (2015)

Rung's attempts to help Skids safely recover his lost memories are threatened by the unexpected return of Froid.

Synopsis

This is how Decepticons do conga lines.

In session with Rung, Skids helps the psychotherapist rebuild one of his model kits while trying to recall more of his missing memories. With Rung's aid, he is able to remember the time when an "anti-personal mine" he was attempting to defuse—a landmine built out of a living Transformer—exploded and knocked him offline, allowing him to be captured by a Decepticon "hygiene team" and taken to the legendary Grindcore prison. He recalls the gruesome installation of a transformation-inhibiting "mouth flower", but his memories begin to sputter out just before he can remember the identity of his cellmate. Rung congratulates him on a job well done and calls an end to the session, replacing the completed model kit on his shelf; Skids suggests that he should get some new models, but Rung explains that he only collects models of ships he has served on (justifying his model of the Ark-1 by noting he was recalled from the crew by the Senate at the last minute). Just before Skids leaves, Riptide knocks on the door to inform Rung he has a very unexpected visitor: his old rival, Froid, who Rung believed to be dead! Skids compliments Froid's set of Primal Beads, and leaves the two to get reacquainted.

In the Lost Light medibay, the surprisingly-still-alive Cyclonus receives a report on Tailgate's condition from Velocity, who explains that the little 'bot has been left comatose after his spark sent a wave of energy throughout the ship, which has succeeded in awakening Thunderclash from his own coma. Megatron offers his apologies for lashing out at Tailgate, while Rodimus tells him that they have arrested Getaway and Atomizer for their crimes. Cyclonus is puzzled as to how they learned the pair were responsible, and Rodimus reveals he had Chromedome mnemosurgically obtain the information from the unconscious Tailgate—something that both Megatron and Cyclonus question the ethics of.

A tense conversation between Rung and Froid establishes that the last time they spoke was on the day Sunder, a rogue mnemosurgeon turned serial killer known as the "Tetrahex Ripper", was arrested, along with his brother Sceptre. Fascinated by the case, Froid had been aboard the prison ship taking Sunder to Garrus 6 when the two brothers escaped their cells and took him hostage, fleeing the vessel in a shuttle. The shuttle was destroyed and Sceptre died, but Froid escaped and settled on Scarvix, where he has allegedly become something of a local celebrity. Tiring of his passive-aggressive remarks, Rung demands to know why Froid has come to the Lost Light; Froid requests to look through Rung's case files, but Rung refuses, citing both doctor-patient confidentiality and Froid's tendency toward plagiarism. But Froid doesn't take no for an answer, insinuating he knows a secret about Rung's past that might just come to light if Rung doesn't acquiesce...

Down in the ship's oil reservoir, Skids tries to recall more of his time in Grindcore. With a little effort, he is able to remember that his cellmate was Quark, and recalls how he removed his "mouth flower" thanks to his super-learning abilities. Quark warned him against publicly displaying such skills and told him a little about the prison and how they used to pipe music in, at which point they discovered that the prison's commandant had been listening at the door...

Rung continues to refuse Froid's request and escorts him back to his ship in the shuttle bay, where the two guards Kindle and Fervor are only too happy to see Froid leave. Rung is puzzled by their remarks, but soon discovers the reason behind them: Sunder is a prisoner aboard Froid's ship! Froid delights in explaining that he has been helping Sunder work through the loss of his brother, but Rung fears that Froid is too close to his patient. Froid scoffs at the accusation: who is Rung to talk about such things, given the secret Froid knows about him—the fact that, while serving aboard the Fateful Archetype, Rung became too close to a patient and was disbarred from practising medicine by the ship's tribunal. But then the Archetype was shot down, leaving Rung as the sole survivor, able to pretend the verdict had never been given—something he had once confessed to Froid back when they were still friends. At Froid's instruction, Sunder lifts his head up to look at them, revealing a pair of eyeless sockets; Froid explains that he has removed Sunder's eyes because he is capable of remote mnemosurgery via eye-contact. Sunder feeds on repressed memories, and Froid hasn't just been helping him deal with the loss of his brother... he keeps him fed. With Rung having refused to let Froid see his files so he could select some new victims, Froid intends to make Rung himself Sunder's next meal. Fortunately, Skids arrives at just that moment, having been sent a message by Rung via a remote upload of Skids's case notes. Froid rips the "Primal Beads" from around his neck and tosses them toward Sunder: in truth, they are not beads, but the murderer's plucked-out eyes! Sunder inserts them back into his sockets, and turns his unholy ability against the two Autobots, starting with Skids...

...whose memories race back to Grindcore once again, right where they left off, and the door of his cell opens to reveal that the prison commandant is Tarn!!

Featured characters

(Characters in italic text appear only in flashbacks.)
(Numbers indicate order of appearance.)

Autobots	Decepticons	Others
Rung (1) Skids (2) Heavy Tread (3) Rev-Tone (6) Riptide (15, voice only) Velocity (17) Tailgate (19) Rodimus (20) Megatron (21) Getaway (22) Ultra Magnus (23) Atomizer (24) Sunder (25) Quark (26) Kindle (27) Fervor (28)	Charger (4) Glit (5) Dreadwing/Dreadwind? (see Notes, 7) Wingthing (8) Skyquake (9) Ruckus (10) Octus (11) Take-Off (12) Flywheels (13) Stalker (14) Tarn (29)	Froid (16) Cyclonus (18)

Quotes

"No one loves the moral high ground as much as you. Wouldn't it be awful if you had to vacate it after all this time?"

—Froid threatens Rung

"After his arrest, Sunder took his skills to the next level: remote mnemosurgery. He can access your memories just by looking at you. He says memories have a flavor—the darker the memory, the sweeter the taste. And the sweetest ones are the ones we lock away. The ones we bury."

—Froid

"Look at you all! So young! So thin-winged and bow-legged and blood-warm and new. And me... a mess of angles and frequencies of sour light and brown noise and—oh! The smell of you! You stink of sin. You reek of what you've done—and what you'd do again if only you could overcome the shame of it all."

—Sunder

Notes

Continuity notes

• Skids notes that his capture occurred not long after the oft-mentioned Simanzi Massacre; he is able to recall this fact because he can remember that "the ground still burned [his] feet." Among the many tidbits we've learned about the Simanzi Massacre was that it caused the planet to become superheated, and that it took years for it to cool back down, as recounted by Megatron in issue #27.
• There's a 'bot among the Decepticons at Grindcore who is drawn with the body design of Generation 2 Dreadwing from Drift #1, but colored like Generation 1 Dreadwind. With the similarity of their names, it's very easy to imagine a mix-up happening, but it's impossible to tell whether he's supposed to be the former character mistakenly colored like the latter, or the latter character deliberately sharing a body-type with the former.
• Most of the Decepticons at Grindcore who have previously appeared in present-day stories in IDW continuity are ones who died in those stories. Skyquake and Stalker died in Last Stand of the Wreckers; Ruckus met his end in Stormbringer #3; and Flywheels ate it in More Than Meets the Eye #8. Charger and Take-Off have only appeared previously in the set-in-the-past Drift mini-series as Turmoil's troops, where Dreadwing first appeared (conversely, if he's supposed to be Dreadwind, he's also dead in the present day, as of issue #7 of the 2009-2011 ongoing series). It was also in the Drift mini-series that a corpse that might have been Glit showed up, but that was an Easter-egg reference to Shattered Glass Ravage and might not count for much. Octus and Wingthing have not appeared in the IDW continuity before.
• Grindcore prison makes its first on-panel appearance after being mentioned in several previous issues.
• Flywheels has a set of Primal Beads, in-keeping with the religiosity he showed during his previous appearances in the series.
• The drill attachment that Stalker deploys from his wrist looks like a portable version of the endoscopic claw he'll use to torture Twin Twist in Last Stand of the Wreckers issue 4.
• As pointed out in a footnote, Chromedome discovered Skids's repressed memories and refused to unearth them in issue #8. The one thing Skids learned in that issue was that the song stuck in his head was "The Empyrean Suite", which is about to take on greater meaning...
• The Lost Light now has a subspace hatch in medibay, which is how Skids suggests Rung get some new models sent over. The existence of this hatch was concurrently established by The Transformers Holiday Special, released the same day as this issue.
• Froid's rise in popularity and the accompanying dwindling of Rung's reputation were previously remarked on in the prose story, "Signal to Noise", as was Froid's apparent death.
• Back in issue #41, Nautica related how Rung had made a comment about the authorship of Froid's work "Conflict of Interest: Psychotherapy and Perpetual War" which she interpreted as an inference that Rung had ghost-written it. Given Rung's remark here, it seems much more likely that he was actually implying that Froid had plagiarized it from him.
• We learned that Quark was incarcerated at Grindcore in issue #38.
• Quark tells Skids that music used to be played in Grindcore, at which point Tarn arrives and mentions that is it only played when they have something to celebrate. With these twin revelations, it becomes apparent that the music must be the "The Empyrean Suite", "theme song" of the Decepticon Justice Division, and that his experiences in Grindcore are the reason that Skids had the song in his head. The tune had already implied a connection between Skids and Tarn that issue #39 confirmed...
• Note that Tarn's name is 'censored' in the flashbacks. This is partly to build up his appearance. It's also because he's still using his real name and, as we'll learn in issue #55, Skids actually knows 'Tarn' from back in the day.

Transformers references

• The Transformer in the anti-personal mine is (was!) named Heavy Tread, a name shared by several 'bots. It's hard to know if Roberts had a specific one in mind when he wrote the scene, but Sakamoto has drawn the Micromaster Heavy Tread, though he has a different color scheme to his original toy.
• Glit is a battlefield surgeon so it makes sense for him to show up as part of a POW-roundup squad. He's also supposed to be compassionate to all, so, er, whoops.
• The Decepticons at Grindcore are all wielding the trident weapon that came with the 2010 Terradive toy.
• The prison Garrus 6 follows the naming scheme of the IDW prisons Garrus-1 and Garrus-9 as well as the extra-continuity Garrus-7 and Garrus-16, but with no hyphen.

Real-life references

• This two-parter takes its title from the Vladimir Nabokov novel, Speak, Memory.
• Given that Rung served aboard it, the Fateful Archetype may take its name from the concept of Jungian archetypes.
• Sunder's nickname harkens to the notorious Peter Sutcliffe, the "Yorkshire Ripper".

Errors

• Page 1: "A explosive device" should be "an explosive device." This is fixed in the trade.
• Page 2, panel 2: "And the I remember" should be "And then I remember". Not fixed in the trade.
• In the final panel of page 4, there's a word balloon mix-up, with a conversation clearly meant to be between two people depicted as a three-way conversation. This is fixed in the trade.
• In the last panel of page 5, Skids says "You should treat yourself to some new [model ships]" and Rung, as if answering a question, replies "Because I only collect ships on which I've served". Perhaps Skids was supposed to ask, "Why not treat yourself to some new ones?"
• Both of Cyclonus's horns are intact in this story, when a chunk got blasted off one the climax of the previous issue. We wouldn't normally draw attention to something quite so inconsequential—it's just a product of two artists drawing the two separate issues and choosing to represent the precise extent of Cyclonus's damage differently—but it stands out due to fact previous story points have prominently focused on Cyclonus's horns and his religious stance on replacing body parts. And yeah, it was his original horn that got damaged, not Tailgate's replacement!
• Froid's line to Skids about losing his faith on page 7 is repeated on page 8 in Velocity's dialogue to Cyclonus. This error is absent from the digital edition, and is fixed in the trade.
• Page 9: One of Cyclonus's word balloons has its left edge sliced off. This is fixed in the trade.
• Skids's Matrix tattoo is missing its "handles" on the final page.

Trivia

• According to Roberts, the gold Autobot who Stalker drills a mouth into is named Rev-Tone, a character from Roberts' Eugenesis fan-fiction novel (which Quark's name originates from as well).

Soundtrack

• "Take Back the Days" by East River Pipe
• "You or Your Memory" by the Mountain Goats

Covers (3)

• Regular cover: The battered and bound Skids is led into the horrors of Grindcore, by Alex Milne and Josh Perez
• Subscription cover: Ten gets into body-painting, by Nick Roche and Josh Burcham
• Retailer incentive cover: Ultra Magnus, Swerve, Tailgate, Nightbeat, Getaway, and Velocity, by Alex Milne and Josh Perez; part of a series of variant covers "counting down" to the release of the 50th issues of The Transformers and More than Meets the Eye in February 2016.

• 
  Abandon hope, all ye who enter here.
• 
  Do you want my body, don't you think I'm sexy?
• 
  I smell a traitor in the midst.

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• More than Meets the Eye #49
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Reprints

• The Transformers: More Than Meets the Eye Volume 9 (May 4, 2016) ISBN 1631406159 / ISBN 978-1631406157
  • Collects More than Meets the Eye issues #45–49.
  • Bonus material includes covers of each issue.
  • Trade paperback format.

• Transformers: The Definitive G1 Collection: Volume 66: Speak, Memory (December 25, 2019)
  • Collects More than Meets the Eye issues #43–49.
  • Bonus material includes a one-page article about the Scavengers, a cover gallery and a forward by Simon Furman.
  • Hardcover format.

• The Transformers: The IDW Collection Phase Two: Volume 10 (January 1, 2020) ISBN 1684055849 / ISBN 978-1684055845
  • Collects Windblade (2015) issues #6–7, The Transformers (2012) issues #44–45, Combiner Hunters #1, Sins of the Wreckers issues #1–5, More than Meets the Eye issues #45–47 & #48–49, and The Transformers Holiday Special: Choose Me & The Thirteenth Day of Christmas.
  • Hardcover format.

• 
  More Than Meets the Eye Volume 9 – cover art by Alex Milne and Josh Perez
• 
  The Definitive G1 Collection: Volume 66: Speak, Memory – cover art by Dan Khanna (Getaway) and Hayato Sakamoto (retro)
• 
  The IDW Collection Phase Two: Volume 10 – cover art by Marcelo Matere

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