Fires of the Past
| This article is about the Beast Machines episode. For the Wings of Honor story, see Flames of Yesterday. |
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 Larry, Curly, and Moe. | ||||||
| "Fires of the Past" | ||||||
| Production company | Mainframe Entertainment | |||||
| Airdate | October 2, 1999 | |||||
| Written by | Marv Wolfman | |||||
| Directed by | John Pozer | |||||
| Animation studio | Mainframe Entertainment | |||||
| Continuity | Beast Wars continuity | |||||
Stymied time and again by his Maximal foes, Megatron brings three new Generals online.
Synopsis
A fleet of Vehicon Tank Drones roll towards the Cybertron Archives. A hiding Blackarachnia watches in horror as the tanks open fire, seemingly without provocation, on a statue of Optimus Prime holding a pair of Golden Disks. The tanks continue their barrage on the Archive center itself as Blackarachnia runs back to the rest of the hiding Maximals, who are there searching for clues to what happened to the missing Cybertronian population. Rattrap makes it out of the Archives, revealing that he's found... absolutely nothing. The Archives have been deleted in their entirety.
Optimus Primal howls in rage, while a spying Megatron chuckles to himself that he's starting history over; everything prior to his reign is now simply a rumor. Inside Megatron's control chamber, a Diagnostic Drone assures him that he has been "purged" of whatever organic traces remained in him that caused his outbreak into beast mode in the previous episode. More Tank Drones appear to attack the Maximals, and Optimus orders yet another retreat. During the battle, Blackarachnia is knocked out by a blast and has a vision of a beautiful sunset-lit Amazon forest, falling into a pit, and being saved by a shadowy silhouette of Silverbolt.
In the waking world, Cheetor is carrying the woozy Blackarachnia away from the battle while Optimus draws the majority of the tank fire. Rather than simply taking cover behind a building, he climbs straight up one while dodging more shots, and the accumulated damage causes the building to topple on the Tank Drone fleet, destroying almost all of them while Optimus leaps to safety. (Optimus planned it that way. Seriously.)
Megatron is so enraged at this turn of events that he loses all control and again reverts to his dragon form, disconnecting from the control armor. He becomes further enraged when he realizes he still hasn't been cured of his beastial tendencies and takes it out on the Diagnostic Drone with some fire breath. Collecting himself and returning to robot form, he ponders why his elite army of drones is still unable to capture four rogue Maximals. The only reasonable answer is simply "free will", so, Megatron pulls out three sparks from an enormous bank of stored sparks...
Back at the Maximal hideout, Optimus chews out the rest of the Maximals for their extremely sloppy battle performance. Blackarachnia has another vision of Silverbolt while pretending to listen to Optimus' angry lecture. Afterwards she decides to sneak off to the Central Spaceport, and Rattrap has decided to tag along with her. Before Rattrap can get her to explain why she's out there in the first place, they are attacked by three Vehicons. Unfortunately, these three are no Drones—each Vehicon has a spark of their own! They are Jetstorm, a wisecracking Aero Drone General, Thrust, a smoldering Cycle Drone General, and Tankor, a Tank Drone General, whose only distinguishable personality traits are being very angry and stupid.
The three Vehicons pretty much blow up everything around Rattrap and Blackarachnia, completely outclassing them (as newly-introduced Transformers typically do). Blackarachnia loses concentration, reverts to beast mode and she and Rattrap scurry off. Neither of them yet realize it, but doing so saves them—the Vehicons are unable to detect them on radar while in beast mode. Getting inside the spaceport control building, Blackarachnia accesses the aerospace records, finding the records of the Autobot shuttle they came to Cybertron on. She discovers that the ship was shot down by Cybertron's own automated defense systems and that there were six of them on the ship, though their memories of the missing two Maximals are hazy. Blackarachnia then plans to get to the ship itself to find its own backed-up data files.
The Vehicons again attack, having locked onto Blackarachnia's Maximal signature, and she and Rattrap are again forced to flee, with Blackarachnia heading for the Autobot Shuttle and Rattrap simply heading home (he's had enough of being shot at for one day). Rattrap finds out (by happy accident) that the Vehicons are unable to track him while he is in beast mode. He scuttles off to warn Blackarachnia. Megatron decides to call off the Vehicon attack once he realizes where Blackarachnia is headed, so he can tap into her mind when she accesses the Autobot ship's computer and find the Maximal base through her.
Rattrap warns her of this as well, and the two are forced to destroy the shuttle computer to prevent Megatron from finding out the location of their hideout. The Vehicons resume their attack, and Optimus Primal and Cheetor save the day, Batman-style, by crashing through a skylight and fending off the Vehicons long enough to get out of there before the rest of the Autobot Shuttle blows up. Optimus is, in a word, steamed that his teammates endangered themselves needlessly and got their only chance at easy answers destroyed, but nothing can be done about it now, and they all run back to their hideout.
Featured characters
(Numbers indicate order of appearance.)
| Maximals | Vehicons |
|---|---|
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Quotes
"How is this possible? My battle drones are models of technological perfection. They possess superior firepower and manoeuvrability, and yet they are continually defeated by a small pack of lowly beasts. Why?"
"Free will?"
"Hmm, interesting notion."
- —Megatron and the Diagnostic Drone discuss the recent losses.
"Three mindless drones, shouldn't be a problem."
"Only three things wrong with that little theory: One, we're not drones, two, we're not mindless, and three, problem's my middle name."
- —Blackarachnia is introduced to Jet-Problem-storm and the new Vehicons.
"This is Captain Jetstorm speaking. Please feel free to move about the tarmac, and flee for your miserable little life!"
- —Jetstorm enjoying himself way too much.
"They blew us out of the sky?"
"Yes, stranding all six of us."
"Why, those lousy— six?! Get real, Webs—if there were six of us then why don't we remember the other two?"
- —Blackarachnia and Rattrap learn that their memories have been tampered with more than they realise.
"Well, well, well. Your situation exactly matches your location: TERMINAL!"
- —Jetstorm finding Rattrap and Blackarachnia.
"Now just stick to beast mode and those Vehicon goons will never find us! ...Unless they happen to be standing right here in front of us."
- —Rattrap's plan has one minor flaw.
Notes
Animation and technical errors
* The animators avoid directly showing Megatron's unveiled robot mode out of its control harness—in the previous episode, we barely see him transform, in this episode, any clear shot of it is partially obscured either by fast action or back-lighting. We do, however, see that his "cloak" is made up of his wings that would ordinarily arch out of his back in robot mode. Watching in slow-motion more clearly reveals however that the irregular design of his dragon wing "membranes" completely morphs shape between frames to become the long, even strips that make up his cloak.
- Also, although visible for barely a split-second in the previous episode, we now get a better (albeit still fleeting and incomplete) look at his robot mode mid-transformation, and the fact that in this state Megatron's character model entirely lacks the new metal-plated texture seen on his dragon mode. His barely-glimpsed robot mode under his "cloak" has the same uniform red texture as it did in Beast Wars, and does not match the currently frankensteinian state of his dragon skin when fully transformed.
- After Tankor first transforms into robot mode, the sky texture jumps position between frames, albeit barely noticeably.
- During Primal's little outbreak of temper at the end, the shadow that he casts on Cheetor freezes as soon as he walks out of frame.
- As Optimus transforms back into his beast mode, Cheetor's legs are all messed up, their parts clipping into each other.
Continuity errors
- Optimus Primal seems very insistent on Blackarachnia reverting back to beast mode despite not knowing the reason why she should until much later in the episode.
- Why would a Diagnostic Drone be so grossly inaccurate when he told Megatron that his organic purging was complete? He even chalks up the mistake to "random residual biological—", right before being blasted by Megatron's extremely biological beast mode.
Transformers references
- A giant statue of Optimus Prime holding two Golden Disks stands in front of the Cybertron Archives. Writer Bob Skir claims that neither the statue nor the golden disks in its hands were mentioned the script. However, he suggested that they were either the disks from the Voyager 1 and Voyager 2 probes, or that Optimus won them in the 2,395,989th Annual Cybertronian spelling bee.[1] We're betting on the latter.
- When Blackarachnia logs into the ship's computer, the animation models for Rhinox and Silverbolt's head are briefly seen.
Real-world references
- Jetstorm refers to Rattrap and Blackarachnia as "Beasties", a reference to the Canadian name for Beast Wars.
Trivia
- While Megatron is looking at computer screens, text in the Predacon version of the Cybertronix language appears. Among the messages are such gems as "these flowers taste funny", "we are the mcanimators from mcmainframe", "smoke some ganja", and "if you can read this seek help".
- Though he says it much less frequently than in Beast Wars, this episode marks the first time Megatron utters "Yesssss", though in a much less hammy, more sinister manner than before.
- Tankor, Jetstorm and Thrust's personality traits are the exact opposites of the characters whose sparks they possess. Instead of being kind of dense and chivalrous like Silverbolt, Jetstorm is sarcastic and sociopathic. Instead of being a gentle genius, Tankor's a violent idiot. And Thrust is slick and cool, instead of being... well... Waspinator. Comments by Waspinator and Silverbolt in later episodes would reveal they were aware of what was going on and enjoyed being completely different people, both personas apparently being fantasies of theirs. This didn't seem to apply to Rhinox.
- Since it's already clear that the Maximals are amnesiac, Rattrap's claim that they would remember their missing team members is a little inaccurate (but, then again, they did remember each other on the previous episodes).
Foreign localization
French
- Title: "Les Feux du Passé" ("The Fires of the Past")
- Title: "L'Attaque du Passé" (Canada, "The Attack of the Past")
Japanese
- Title: "Ai no Shirushi" (愛の古傷, "Marks of Love")
- Original airdate: November 13, 2004
Spanish
- Title: "Fuegos del Pasado" ("Fires of the Past")
Home video releases
- DVD
2004 — Super Lifeform Transformers: Beast Wars Returns — Volume 1 (Geneon Entertainment) — Japanese audio only.
2006 — Beast Machines: Transformers — The Complete Series (Rhinomation)
2014 — Transformers: Beast Machines — The Complete Series (Shout! Factory)
2007 — Transformers: Beast Machines — Season One: Volume One (Sony)
2007 — Transformers: Beast Machines — Season One: Volume One — Reformatting (Sony)
2007 — Transformers: Beast Machines — Complete Season One (Sony)
2009 — Transformers: Beast Machines — Intégrale Saison 1 (Sony) — French audio only.
References
- ↑ Q&A from Bigbot's "bobskir.com" (archive copy)
