Golden Disk (Voyager)
| The name or term "Golden Disk" refers to more than one character or idea. For a list of other meanings, see Golden Disk (disambiguation). |
- The Voyager Golden Disk is an artifact from the Beast Wars portion of the Generation 1 continuity family.
The Golden Disk from the Voyager probe is a recurring object throughout the Beast Wars. It plays a major role in the escalation of the conflict between the Maximals and the Predacons and leads to the death of a major character. It is eventually destroyed, but the Predacon leader, Megatron, recovers one of the shards and uses it to escape capture at the hands of a Cybertronian government agent.
Major appearances by episode
Season One
The Predacons steal the Golden Disk from the Cybertron archives. Megatron claims that the disk holds the location of a vast store of energon, with which the Predacon commander believes he can reignite the Great War against the Maximals.
Season Two
Dinobot breaks into the Predacon base and steals the Golden Disk. He then climbs to a high peak where he pontificates to himself about the potential power the wielder of the Golden Disk could hold, and the potential danger that comes with it. He eventually decides that the most prudent thing to do with an item of infinite power is to shove it under a large rock.
Dinobot rejoins the Predacon ranks, and then, to prove his loyalty to Megatron, he leads Megatron to the location of the Golden Disk and presents it to him. Shortly afterwards, Dinobot defects to the Maximals once again, but Megatron escapes with the Golden Disk.
Dinobot notices that the pattern the Predacon's have been setting up their new jamming towers in matches the shape and layout of the symbols on the Golden Disk. Not long afterwards, Megatron does so, discovering through the images contained in the Disk that he has the power to alter the timeline. The Predacons attack the valley from which humanity's ancestors will emerge, but Dinobot launches a one-man berserker attack on the Predacons, single-handedly defeating them and shattering the Golden Disk with his last bit of energy.
Megatron is captured by Covert Agent Ravage for violations of the Pax Cybertronia, but reveals that he still possesses a lone fragment of the Golden Disk, which contains a message encoded by the original Megatron. He plays it for Ravage, convincing the former Decepticon to release and join forces with him.
Origins
Within Beast Wars
Sometime within roughly a decade of when the Transformers aboard the Ark awoke in the eruption of Mount Saint Hilary (possibly earlier, possibly later) the humans of planet Earth launched a spacecraft to study the outer planets in their solar system. Attached to this spacecraft was a gold disk which contained information about Earth. The Decepticon leader, Megatron, at some point encoded an additional message on the disk.
(Megatron is shown writing to the disk in a mildly abstract sequence that makes it difficult to pin down. He may have intercepted the space probe in interplanetary space, or he may have done his work before the probe was launched.)
Megatron's message was even more of a "message in a bottle" than the disk itself, although the complete message was never revealed. He orders any Decepticons who might, in the future, come across the message to use transwarp technology to achieve some particular end -- exactly what, however, is unrevealed because the disk was destroyed before the message was ever played on-camera. BW Megatron plays only a surviving fragment of the message for Ravage. Presumably, the rest of the message indicates the location of the Ark and asks that future Decepticons use transwarp to travel through time and rewrite history, much as BW Megatron hopes to do when he attempts to destroy Optimus Prime.
At some point between G1 Megatron adding his message to the disk and the beginning of the Beast Wars series, the spacecraft holding the disk -- or perhaps only the disk -- fell into the hands of the Transformers. BW Megatron is said to have stolen the disk from the Cybertron Archives, where it was seemingly considered a precious artifact, even though the general population of Maximals had no idea what it really was (and even some Predacons - like the reformatted Decepticon Ravage - didn't have a clue). The Maximal Elders were presumably aware of the Disk's origin.
The nature of the connection between the Golden Disk and the mysteriously similar Alien Disk is completely unknown.
The real Golden Disk
The Golden Disk that appears in Beast Wars is based on a real object: In 1977, NASA launched two spacecraft called Voyager 1 and Voyager 2, which flew by our planetary system's four gas giants. (Jupiter and Saturn were visited by both craft, Uranus and Neptune only by Voyager 2.) The Pioneer 10 and 11 spacecraft which preceded them had carried copies of a plaque depicting human beings and showing the location of Earth with respect to several highly-visible pulsars. For the Voyager mission, a more sophisticated message was composed.
The "disk" consists of a cover or canister -- on which a set of pictograms are found -- and a phonograph record inside the canister. The record, titled "The Sounds of Earth", has a "data" portion and a sound portion. In the data portion are over a hundred encoded images including photographs of the Earth and its lifeforms, as well as drawings of human biology and reproduction. The audio portion includes sounds of natural environments on Earth, wildlife, human voices, and music. The pictograms on the record's cover explain how to play the disc and decode the images.
As portrayed in Beast Wars, the Golden Disk seems to be an amalgam of the cover and the record itself. It appears to be at least a few centimeters thick and has the cover's pictograms on one side, but the record grooves and title "The Sounds of Earth" on the other. The indication is that the cover is one-sided, and we are seeing the record through the empty rear, as later episodes would present the disc in its real-life, thin, record form.
