A Change to the Agenda
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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
Four million years ago, on prehistoric Earth, the Predacon Megatron has shot legendary Autobot leader Optimus Prime, causing a timestorm that engulfs the Earth, threatening to erase the Maximals from history. As he gloats, however, his former underling Blackarachnia, herself a former Maximal protoform, uses her connection to Teletraan I to activate the Ark's security grid, sending Megatron flying back. She and Silverbolt go to put Prime on auxiliary life support, as the other Maximals arrive to survey the damage. Knowing that they won't be able to repair the damage to Prime if his spark remains in his body, the Autobot's descendant, Maximal commander Optimus Primal, prepares to transfer his ancestor's lifeforce into his body. And normally, this timeline would follow that route-but this timeline has splintered. Megatron, having remained closer to the Ark than in most timelines, enters the Ark and fires upon Prime, extinguishing his spark. Primal and the others quickly begin to fade, but Blackarachnia, managing to hold on for a bit longer, hatches a plan. Finding the stasis locked body of the original Decepticon leader, Megatron, she uses her cyber venom to try and at least incapacitate him, knowing that though she won't be able to bring Prime back, she can at least offer the Autobots an opportunity to stop the Decepticons before its too late. Megatron, too, begins to feel the effects of the timestorm, and lets out one last "noooo," as the universe course corrects. Cybertron is now populated with the embittered remains of the two factions presiding over their descendants, who have begun an uprising against them.
Featured characters
(Numbers indicate order of appearance.)
| Maximals | Predacons | Autobots | Decepticons |
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Notes
- The scene shown in this comic follows on from Megatron's speech in "The Agenda (Part III)" 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 (as it pertains not to the events of the specific episode in question but to events that transpired in the episode after that one), and by the odd choice to cobble-together a scene of Blackarachnia wounding the original Megatron.
- Jesse Wittenrich has said this was indeed the idea and that, in the later (and already planned) Uprising stories, his altered self helps to really undo a world of oppression. This didn't come off like he'd hoped because bloody photostrips ("the screen cap comic style ended up hampering the concept far more than expected."). [1]
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.[2] 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.[3] David Bishop, the co-writer, would later say that he didn't like that this gave the setting an origin as a "darkest timeline" (one where Optimus is way dead) as that would imply it was 'wrong' and needed 'fixing' through plot activity.[4]
- Since this story was published, "Derailment" would confirm that Optimus Prime was eventually brought back as a Triple-Threat Master.
Errors
- Someone made a screen capture comic and unironically published it.
