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
Silverbolt (3) Rattrap (5) Cheetor (6) Optimus Primal (7) Rhinox (8)	Megatron (1) Blackarachnia (2) Inferno (9)	Optimus Prime (4)	Megatron (10)

Notes

Continuity notes

• This comic follows directly on from the end of the Beast Wars episode, "The Agenda (Part III)". The first page is a recreation of the opening scenes of "Optimal Situation", complete with cribbed dialogue. The comic is made up almost entirely of screncaps from those two episodes, with some being reinterpreted (for example, the shot used of Megatron and Inferno aiming comes from later in the episode, outside the Ark, firing upon the newly upgraded Optimal Optimus, while the shot of the Maximals being "erased" is taken during the middle of the "fadeout" effect used to represent history shifting). The only other episode used for screencaps is a shot of the original Megatron from "Master Blaster", which covers up the shoulder of Beast Wars Megatron with a speech bubble to hide his silhouette and repurposes his head for Blackarachnia.
• Blackarachnia's line of dialogue has her refer to Teletraan I as "Teletron", with an offscreen Rattrap telling her it's pronounced "Teletraan", recreating a gag from "Nemesis Part 2".

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 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 awkward if they died millions of years before the others. Jesse Wittenrich argues that they were still war heroes for millions of years on Cybertron before they wound up on Earth.
  • "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 read as the original intent.
• Jim Sorenson, author of the Beast Wars: Uprising text stories, noted that this backstory was not in place when he wrote previous stories. 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 was that this comic didn't necessarily tie Beast Wars: Uprising stories to a universe where Optimus and Megatron are dead. Co-writer David Bishop didn't like giving the setting an origin as a "darkest timeline" (one where Optimus is way dead), implying it was 'wrong' and needed 'fixing' through plot activity.
• 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.

Other trivia

• 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", evoking the state of the Beast Wars: Uprising incarnation of Cybertron, intended to show the irony of how Megatron's actions resulted in the very Cybertron he wanted to prevent.
  • The irony is undercut 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 hoped to show how, in the later (and already planned) Uprising stories, Megatron's altered self helps to actually undo a world of oppression. This didn't come off like he'd hoped ("the screen cap comic style ended up hampering the concept far more than expected").