A Change to the Agenda
From MediaWiki
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| "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.
Featured characters
(Numbers indicate order of appearance.)
| Maximals and Autobots | Predacons and Decepticons |
|---|---|
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Notes
- For a comic whose sole purpose seems to be setting up an origin for a universe, it certainly botches the job thoroughly.
- 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 Ark 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]
- Since this story was published, "Derailment" would confirm that Optimus Prime was eventually brought back as a Headmaster and later as "Triple-Threat Prime".
- On the Megatron front, in "Not All Megatrons", Leatherhide refers to Megatron perishing centuries before the Grand Uprising of the 24th century. Later, "Coalescence" (a story set in a different universe by a different author) apparently contradicts this when Depth Charge mentions that Megatron went offline while in stasis on the Ark. Given that Depth Charge would be operating from hearsay from before his creation and Leatherhide was alive in this timeframe, any attempts to handwave this come down to some form of unreliable narrator on Depth Charge's part, though in real life it seems clear that this is simply an error.
Errors
- Someone made a screen capture comic and published it non-ironically.
