Visitations
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| "Visitations" | |||||||||
| Original presentation | June 20, 1998 | ||||||||
| Writer | Bob Forward | ||||||||
Mysterious visitors bring mystery, intrigue and bad comedy to the Beast Wars!
Synopsis
Packrat and Onyx Primal, scouting Predacon territory looking for a weird meteorite, stumble upon a strange device. They are suddenly attacked by Fractyl and Vice Grip, who were also looking for this Predacon artifact. During their battle, a "strange figure" appears, swipes the device, and vanishes.
Silverbolt and Rattrap show up and help beat the Predacons. But in comes Antagony, who demands the device. Before she can attack them, though, Megatron flies in. She reacts violently to him, claiming to have searched for him across the cosmos.
Before she can reveal why she searched for Megatron, Optimus Primal arrives on scene, offering peace. Antagony fires on Optimus, Optimus takes her down, and Megatron shoots down Optimus. Antagony takes Waspinator hostage, but accidentally shoots him. Her power fades, and she collapses. Megatron takes her captive.
Featured characters
(Numbers indicate order of appearance.)
| Maximals | Predacons | Humans |
|---|---|---|
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Quotes
"The BS&P will not save you this time, Maximals. For your doom is at hand!"
- —Antagony is truly a formidable foe
Notes
Continuity
- Despite its silly tone, this story set off the much larger Reaching the Omega Point storyline, and tied into the sequel Wreckers storyline as well.
- The story is set during season two of Beast Wars.
- The "shadowy figure" is Apelinq, as revealed in Apelinq's War Journals.
- The Antagony plot was followed up with "Herald", which is not silly in tone at all: Antagony turns up to be a mass murderer and Megatron mind-probes her with some very creepy art.
- The plot device everyone was fighting over, the one Onyx specifically says is "Predacon", turns out in "Apelinq's War Journals" to be a Maximal countervirus for Megatron's transformation virus. That virus wouldn't exist until Beast Machines late next year. I've got a sneaking suspicious this wasn't the original plan.
- Antagony states she's after Megatron but this is not the case in later stories. Since Megatron says here he's wondering her "true mission", she was probably lying. Why she wants the artifact never comes up again.
- 3H members indicated that the story of how Fractyl, Packrat, and the other non-show characters arrived on ancient Earth and why they weren't seen in the show would be later told, but this only happened for Packrat, where a throwaway line in "Betrayal" said he'd been locked up in a stasis pod and shipped offworld for his crimes.
- While Packrat and Fractyl come back in later BotCon stories, Onyx Primal and Vice Grip are never seen again. Dialogue in "Departure" indicates Vice Grip died.
Production
- This tongue-in-cheek Beast Wars story was only presented as a live reading at BotCon '98.
- The cast:
- Music and sound effects were done by Vince DiCola.
- The story is highly satirical, with self-referential and fourth-wall-breaking humor. For instance, at one point David Kaye, reading Megatron, shoots and "kills" audience member Ben Yee, who "dies wallowing in his own gore".
- Scott McNeil's portrayal of Packrat was based on Ed Norton, the Honeymooners character played by Art Carney, to go along with Garry Chalk's Jackie-Gleason-inspired voice for Onyx Primal. This was reportedly a spur-of-the-moment decision, arrived at about a minute before the presentation started.
- When Antagony claims to be Megatron's worst enemy, he assumes she is Raksha. Antagony says that after much searching, she found Megatron via Ben Yee's website.
- Originally, the premise behind the live reading was that of a fanscript contest with the winning script to be read by the attending voice actors. However, the contest was cancelled due to contract issues with Mainframe. However, a short excerpt from the winning script was performed prior to "Visitations" and revolved around a poker game between the Maximals and Predacons. Waspinator proved to be a poor bluffer and stated that he didn't need to draw any additional cards prompting everyone else at the table to fold.
