Last Light (issue)

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« The Transformers: More than Meets the Eye #57 »
« Titans Return »
"Last Light"
Publisher IDW Publishing
First published September 28, 2016
Cover date September 2016
Written by James Roberts
Pencils by Priscilla Tramontano
Colors by Joana Lafuente
Letters by Chris Mowry
Editor John Barber and Carlos Guzman
Continuity IDW continuity
Chronology Current era (2016)

While Red Alert struggles to overcome Sentinel Prime's brainwashing, Fortress Maximus finds a new way to live up to his name in order to stop Sentinel fleet of reanimated Titans.

Synopsis

On Lost Light launch day, Red Alert personally reviews every applicant who wants aboard the vessel. After begrudgingly letting Brainstorm on despite his being exempt from a bag check, Red is approached by Swerve, who instructs him to look at the datapad in his hand. On the screen, Red reads the words: "THIS NEVER HAPPENED"...

In the present day, within a Titan on Luna 1, Red Alert—suddenly in the thrall of Sentinel Prime—grapples with Fortress Maximus while Sentinel gloats over the reanimation of the many other Titans in the moon's graveyard, thanks to the efforts of a reluctant Sovereign. Realizing nobody is listening to his ranting, Sentinel turns and notes with some distaste the way Cerebros is cradling Prowl's body. Cerebros keeps Sentinel talking; first, the Prime explains how he survived his seeming death by detaching his true Titan Master form from his larger body, then details how he has been slipping in and out of hibernation beneath Kaon for millennia as he has slowly attuned himself to the Titans, granting him the control that—through Sovereign—he now has over them. Using the quantum foam of Luna 1's engines, Sentinel plans to supercharge the Titan's space bridge, opening it wide enough so that the rest of the giants can travel through and raze Cybertron in accordance with his wishes. His monologue complete, Sentinel prepares to do away with Cerebros and Fort Max, but is suddenly laid low when the silent Prowl, back on his feet, smashes a M.A.R.B. across his back. Prowl, Cerebros, and Max escape on the remaining M.A.R.B.s, but Sentinel is content to let them go, certain they cannot interfere with his scheme.

Years earlier, Red Alert searches Rewind and Chromedome's quarters aboard the Lost Light, over Rewind's protestations. In a hidden compartment, Red finds a set of data disks Rewind had secreted away. Rewind takes the disks, and, urging Red to not "give in," lays them out in a familiar five-point pattern...

Prowl awakes back in Fort Max's facility, and reacts with some degree of anger upon learning that Cerebros had used his new brain implant—slipped into Prowl's head as he was cradling him—to take control of Prowl's body and strike Sentinel. While Prowl has been out, Fortress Maximus has conceived a plan: transform the base, constructed by Tyrest from the parts of many different Titans, into robot mode. Unfortunately, the manual release switch for the base's transformation cog is stuck... but Prowl's sharply-honed table-flipping skills soon prove exactly what are needed to force it free. The base transforms, and, using Cerebros's implant, Fort Max is able to take direct control of it, flying it into the sky to block the other Titans' path to the giant space bridge. While Max and his Titan fight to keep Sentinel's Titans from going through, Prowl and Cerebros board their M.A.R.B.s to strafe Sentinel as he stands by the moon's thrusters. Sentinel quickly shoots them out of the sky, whereupon Red Alert appears behind the fallen Prowl, and presses his gun barrel into the back of his former ally's neck...

Years before, back on the Lost Light, Red Alert talks with Rung about his fear that he may have been brainwashed into being a sleeper agent by the establishment. Though reluctant to indulge what he believes to be a paranoid fantasy, Rung suggests that they exploit Red's fear of and resistance to the very concept by seeding his subconscious mind with triggers that, should he ever be "activated," will alert him to the fact he is not himself. These triggers take the form of "continuity errors" in Red's memory... things that never happened, conversations that never took place. Looking around the room, Red realizes that Rung's shelves are filled with model Titans instead of model ships... and that the room's portholes have moved to take on the form of the five-point pattern—a mnemosurgery scar—that he has been seeing everywhere...

At the sight of the mnemosurgery scar on the back of Prowl's own neck, Red breaks free of his conditioning and turns his gun on Sentinel, blasting his Titan Master self clean off his host body's shoulders. Unfazed, the tiny Sentinel stalks towards Red, explaining he was just one of a group of brainwashed sleeper agents from before the war, chosen from the ranks of Sentinel's informants to serve as his personal militia if the time ever came. But just as Sentinel begins to reassert control over Red, forcing him to aim his gun at his own head, Beak comes swooping onto the scene, and knocks Sentinel over the edge of the nearest thruster, sending him on a mile-and-a-half-deep plummet into oblivion. Given that Red's mind is freed, and the space bridge portal automatically shuts, everyone is left to assume Sentinel has perished. Unfortunately, Fortress Maximus was unable to prevent most of the Titans from getting through—but Sovereign reveals that he has been able to grant Cybertron a reprieve, redirecting the bridge so that it deposited the Titans into deep space. The giants are still heading for the Transformers' homeworld—now, it will just take them longer to get there.

Prowl takes Sovereign back to Earth, then returns to Luna 1 for a sabbatical, joining Cerebros and Red Alert—his mind calmer now that Sentinel's presence on the moon is no longer causing his nightmares—in scrubbing their Titan-base's T-cog. Fortress Maximus is grateful for the company now that all the Roboids and Outrigger have left, and apologizes to Cerebros for doubting him and his implant. Red and Max lament the loss of their friends on the Lost Light; Prowl sympathizes as best he can, equating the loss with fear of change, and of endings. Just then, a buzzer goes off, alerting Red to the fact that a scanner he has searching for the Lost Light has found something. Alas, that something turns out to just be some gibberish background data. Fort Max wonders if there could be a hidden message within it, but Red refuses to indulge his own worst instincts. "Sometimes," he tells Max, "you just have to stop."

Characters in italic text appear only as part of Red Alert's memories.
(Numbers indicate order of appearance.)

Autobots Others

Quotes

"[Prowl] was an obstacle. I could have crushed the Decepticons long before Kaon, but he seemed to think it his job to rein me in. Caution, caution, caution. 'Consider this, consider that...' Every conversation, a lecture on collateral damage. He blunted me—and it's taken me four million years to recover my edge."

—Sentinel Prime


"Er—don't you need a permit?"
"A permit?"
"A search permit. Y'know—something you have to show me before you go through all my stuff?"
"You're welcome to complain to Ultra Magnus. You'll have to give it four weeks, mind."
"Four week to process the complaint?"
"Four weeks to fill out the form."

—Rewind and Red Alert


"I think we need a Plan P."
"You mean a Plan B."
"I know what I mean."

—Prowl and Cerebros


"Go on, Red Alert... pull the trigger. You'll make a mess, but don't worry. I don't mind getting dirty."

—Sentinel Prime


"I miss all of them. All the crew. Well, most of them. At least half of them. A good ten, fifteen percent."

—Red Alert

Notes

Continuity notes

  • Red Alert's first flashback is to the events of issue #1. Panels 2-4 recreate panels 3-5 from page 11 of that issue. As an early clue that things are not what they appear, multiple characters are seen in the queue waiting to board the Lost Light who were not (and/or could not) have been there, including Impactor (at that time, out in space running missions with Guzzle), Ambulon, First Aid (both stationed on the planet Messatine), and Ironfist (deeeead).
  • The disappearance of Sentinel's head from his corpse was noted in the Titans Return one-shot that began this storyline. It's made clear that in this issue that this happened because Sentinel, in his true form of Infinitus, simply disconnected when nobody was looking.
  • Red's second flashback is to a previously-unseen scene that we nonetheless knew about: him finding Rewind's "snuff film" discs, set between issue #5 and #6, which we saw the direct aftermath of in Spotlight: Trailcutter.
  • Red refers to being a warden in Translucentica Heights, and notes that Chromedome and Prowl can verify this; they met him while he was working this job in flashbacks shown in issue #10.
  • Prowl recalls being "brainwashed" and "shadowplayed"; the latter was perpetrated by Chromedome (as seen in issue #14, in a scene set during #1), which opened the door for the former, carried out by Bombshell in Robots in Disguise #4.
  • Previously, in issue #20, it was implied that it was just the space bridge portal which Tyrest built that had been pieced together from bits of other Titans' bridges. Turns out this issue that the base itself was a patchwork Titan, made of bits of others.
  • Prowl's ability to flip the switch is, of course, a gag based on his history of table-flipping, going back to issue #1. His pose here mirrors the panel from that issue of him tossing his desk.

Transformers references

  • Transformation cogs are referred to with the abbreviation "T-Cog" in this issue, taken from the Transformers: Prime cartoon.
  • Though the mechanics of the process are, by necessity of the story, quite different, Fortress Maximus controlling a giant Titan body via a link provided by Cerebros is an adaptation of his Titans Return action figure, and of the classic depiction of the character in Generation 1 media, where Cerebros actually forms the head of the giant Fortress Maximus robot.
  • Buried amongst the alphanumeric gibberish code is a dedication to mark the end of the series: "MTMTE 2012-2016."

Errors

  • Red's second flashback doesn't fit with what we knew of the scene: Red's words in issue #5 ("I can hear Rewind begging Chromedome to help him look for some missing data disks—he won't find them.") clearly implied he found and took the discs without Rewind's knowledge. Of course, the scene is supposed to be marked with "continuity errors" for Red to spot, but this one feels more like a genuine goof than a hint that the scene is playing out "wrongly."

Other trivia

Soundtrack

Covers (3)

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