A Change to the Agenda

From MediaWiki
Revision as of 16:04, 26 September 2016 by Giggidy (talk | contribs) (Notes)
Jump to navigationJump to search
Beast Wars: Uprising
screen capture comic
"A Change to the Agenda"
Publisher Transformers Collectors' Club
Published in Hasbro Transformers Collectors' Club #70
Continuity Beast Wars: Uprising
Chronology 4 million years ago
Page count 2pp

Megatron successfully kills Optimus Prime. This turns out to be a bad idea.

Synopsis

Following his attack on the slumbering Optimus Prime, Megatron gloats to the Maximals about their impending erasure from history. Blackarachnia responds by activating Teletraan 1, flinging him away from the ship... but not far enough, as in another timeline. This allows Megatron to fire on Optimus Prime again while the Maximals try to save him. The Maximals begin to fade out, but Blackarachnia has a desperate gambit... using her cyber-venom on the original Megatron. Thus is the stage set for the eventual reign of the Builders of Cybertron and the uprising against it.

(Numbers indicate order of appearance.)

Notes

  • The scene shown in this comic follows on from Megatron's speech in "The Agenda" about the Predacons being "slaves" to "archaic energon guzzlers"... which magnificently evokes the Beast Wars: Uprising universe. In a bit of dramatic irony, it seems that Megatron - by killing Optimus Prime - ends up sealing Cybertron's fate as becoming what he described.
    • The irony is undercut somewhat by not including the relevant dialogue in the comic itself, and by the odd choice to cobbled-together a scene of Blackarachnia wounding Megatron.

Contentious continuity

  • As a lot of readers observed when this comic first came out, the idea of a universe that diverges with the deaths of Optimus Prime and Megatron on the arc doesn't really line up with the world shown in prior Beast Wars: Uprising stories:
    • Optimus Prime and Megatron were previously mentioned in "Broken Windshields" in the same breath with Bumblebee, Prowl, Blaster, Starscream, Shockwave, and Soundwave, which is somewhat awkward if they died millions of years before the others.
    • More glaringly, "Micro-Aggressions" made "Galvatron, born of Megatron" a major player in the universe's history during the early 21st century; while it's possible that Unicron used a 4-million-year-old corpse to make his herald, that doesn't particularly read as the original intent.
  • Jim Sorenson, author of the Beast Wars: Uprising text stories, confirmed that this backstory was not in place when he wrote the previous stories.[1] However, he proposed that the killing of Optimus Prime could have spun out hundreds of new universes, with changes going forwards and backwards in time due to various time loops; as such, his interpretation is that this comic doesn't necessarily tie Beast Wars: Uprising stories to a universe where Optimus and Megatron are dead.[2]

Errors

  • Someone made a screen capture comic and published it non-ironically.

References