Continuing to go through the season one story bible for Transformers: Beast Machines. Last time we finished looking at the Maximals and today we begin the Predacons’ replacement, the Vehicons.

A hero needs good villains to battle. Sometimes that villain isn’t a living creature but nature or just their own inner demons. Since the Transformers franchise is a war between good and evil those villains have to represent a serious threat to the good bots. Megatron in Beast Wars was a planner, who played the long game and his own troops as often as the Maximals. He was only stopped because Optimus Primal ended up with a good team and they managed to overcome Megatron’s schemes sometimes by luck.

I will give the show credit. A gag at the end with Megatron tied to the Autobot shuttle used to escape back to their present day Cybertron, presumably because Megatron’s dragon body was too big to be put inside and safely secured, to explain how Megatron ended up on Cybertron before the Maximals and take over was actually a good move. There’s still the question of where old Megs got his virus from, but the harder part was parts of Megatron’s eccentricities were missing. No bathtime with rubber ducky, no brushing his dino’s teeth that formed his robot mode hand, no exclamations of “yeeesss” when discussing his plans. Maybe the guide will explain his change in character. We’ll also see how many Vehicons we can fit in before I hit my self-imposed general word limit, so let’s get started.

OUR VILLAINS

MEGATRON

Megatron has evolved from the deliciously evil, decidedly single-minded villain (albeit with a twisted sense of humor) of BEAST WARS into a complex despot with a definite point of view. The key to Megatron is that he honestly believes that his world order, while an extreme solution, is the best for ALL Transformers and ultimately the way to achieving peace.

Megatron started out as a renegade Predacon who instigated the Beast Wars by stealing a sacred and powerful relic from Cybertron. His goal was conquest and restoring the Predacons to their former glory, even to the point of attempting to alter Transformer history. However, since escaping Optimus and returning to Cybertron, Megatron has reassessed his opinions of both Predacons and Maximals. Sure he rattled his sword and made a lot of noise in the Beast Wars, but ultimately he accomplished nothing. In short, Megatron’s through messing with the past. He’s got his sites set on the future.

In Megatron’s thinking, the Transformers’ machine-like purity was forever corrupted by the use of the DNA scanners that allowed Maximals and Predacons to assume the forms of indigenous lifeforms on the planets they explored. The chaos of organic life has crept into the very Sparks of the Transformers, creating nothing but disharmony and conflict. To Megatron, the key to the future lies in the past — returning to the machine-like purity of the original Transformers. Until the chaos of the organic can be cleansed from each and every Transformer Spark, order will be maintained by a single hive-mind intelligence: Megatron’s.

No explanation as to why his view changed though. Was it something he saw in transwarp space? What caused this “revelation” that beast modes were the problem? As the guide itself notes, Megatron just hated being under Maximal rule and wanted the Predacons in charge. You know, now that I think about it I’m not sure why that was the case, either. Was it because Predacons descended from the Decepticons and it was a point of factional pride? Would this be like Confederate descendants wanting to restart the Civil War? At least we can speculate Megatron’s deeper reasoning for putting the Predacons in charge, but why did he suddenly decide both factions were bad and became Overmind from Captain Power & The Soldiers Of The Future?

The fallacy in Megatron’s thinking is that, as Optimus will later discover, the Transformers’ origin may not have been as Machine-Pure as legend would have it.

Megatron achieves his new world order as described in the Backstory above. In Robot Mode, he jacks himself into all the systems that run Cybertron, controlling his Drones and every other aspect of the planet from his Throne Room.

How “machine-pure” was the legend? This is in G1 cartoon continuity, outside of the bits Forward and DiTillo brought in from Simon Furman’s comic run for some reason. That means the Quintesson origin is still intact. The Quintessons built Cybertron and later the pre-Transformers, only gaining transforming during the early Autobot/Decepticon wars long after the Quints were chased off the planet. It’s not that hard to believe they cyberformed a planet, given the Key To Vector Sigma turns organic worlds into machine planets like we saw in the G1 episode of the same name. Other Quintesson experiments were organic in nature, turned into cyborgs by the Quintessons. Did all of that get lost by the Beast Era? It’s like if we forgot what happened in the 1940s even though we have plenty of surviving information, texts, and both audio and visual media of the period.

All that remains for Megatron is to eliminate the last few Maximal stragglers on the planet and achieve the organic purge within his own body, thus eliminating his accursed Beast Mode.

The latter proves to be a rather sticky issue. Even though Megatron has all the collective scientific knowledge of Cybertron at his disposal in the form of his Diagnostic Drone, he still has not been able to eliminate the organic part of himself. To make matters worse, when Megatron grows angry he is unable to suppress his Transformation into his Dragon Beast Mode — an unfortunate side effect from the battery of treatments he’s received.

Again, why? Megatron never had this problem before. He sought the most powerful alternate mode his scanners picked up, the remains of a tyrannosaurus rex, and seemed quite happy with the mutated dragon form he picked up after grabbing his namesake’s spark. We see this change in him but fans have always wondered why it happened since it makes this Megatron seem like a new character, his traditional planning talents only occasionally showing up.

Megatron begins our series at the peak of his triumph. He starts out smug, but with each succeeding episode he grows more and more unhinged as his world order begins to crumble. Megatron’s actions start out as unpleasant but pragmatic necessities (creating his Generals, seeking a cure for his organic state), but as he learns of the fossils and the organic core deep within Cybertron, his actions grow more desperate, to the point where he engages in a deadly escalating struggle with Optimus in the Techno-Organic War. At the end of Season One, rather than admit defeat, Megatron plays a trump card which will destroy all organic life on Cybertron — including Megatron himself!

That’s one aspect of Megatron’s nature that kind of matches up with him. Seasons two and three do see him taking big risks out of desperation, altering history by trying to kill Optimus Prime being the big one, and then taking G1 Megatron’s spark to get his own “optimal” form.

In Season Two, after Optimus restores Cybertron to status quo with the help of the Matrix, Megatron finally achieves his organic purge, creating a Vehicon body for himself. The question remains, however, as to whether Megatron will perform the same purge on all the Cybertronian Sparks, or destroy them so that he might maintain his absolute rule.

I don’t know about a “purge” of his organic parts. More like pulling himself out of his body, but we’ll talk more about that in the season two guide I’m sure.

POWERS/ABILITIES:
Beast Mode – Appears as a giant flying dragon with powerful jaws and claws; can blast fire or ice breath; loses ability to jack into Cybertronian systems and/or control his Drones in Beast Mode.

Robot Mode – Can jack himself into any system on Cybertron through an array of cables; various mounted energy blasters; can create a protective forcefield around himself; produces writhing bands of electricity from his hands to subdue his minions as well as his opponents; dragon-head arm retains fire and ice breath (although he always keeps it hidden under his cloak and rarely, if ever, uses it in Robot Mode).

I don’t remember him ever using it. He does spit out fire when his beast mode takes over but that’s rare. It’s even rarer when we see him outside of his cloak harness that he uses to jack into Cybertron’s systems and control the planet.

VEHICONS

THE GENERALS

Because Megatron is unable to control his Vehicon Drones when he reverts to Beast Mode, Megatron infuses three of them with individual Sparks to serve as independent-thinking commanders over their respective line of Drones.
As a general rule, the Vehicons use their Vehicle Modes for pursuit and long-range combat and their Robot Modes for close combat.

You could have an army of drones but given the small cast you’d want to have villains with personalities to help sell the toys. Oddly the troop building possibilities of the drones were lost in the toys because it took so long to put them out. Also, because I know I’m going to reference this a lot between this and next week’s installment, here’s an old article I wrote that came from my old Transformers fansite, where I go over how the “shell programs” of the Vehicon generals actually made sense for the sparks Megatorn used. I just re-read it as a refresher to myself. With that, let’s get to the first general.

JETSTORM

A high-tech flying machine Vehicon, Jetstorm is a fast-talking, hotshot Top Gun pilot personality with a mean attitude and a twisted sense of humor. He’ll spend as much time taunting his opponent as blasting him. Full of enthusiasm and par-tay animal exuberance, Jetstorm just plain loves his job. His ego and overconfidence are often his downfall. When the three Vehicon Generals are together, Jetstorm acts as the de facto leader, simply because he’s got the biggest mouth.

There were fans who loved Jetstorm because of his personality. I’m sure they were upset he wasn’t Waspinator instead.

Jetstorm is no less a chatterbox around Megatron, but his bravado tends to turn to furious back-pedaling around his boss. Jetstorm is the first to scheme behind Megatron’s back — and the first to blame it on someone else when he gets caught.

Jetstorm tries to take advantage of the dim-witted Tankorr, hustling him into doing his dirty work, but he’s usually foiled by Tankorr’s single-minded stupidity or his puppy-dog loyalty to Megatron.

I don’t remember seeing that. Given that Jetstorm’s dirty work was just shoot the technorganics he didn’t seem to mind doing it or sending his drones after them.

Fiercely competitive, Jetstorm and Thrust don’t trust each other. Jetstorm will often try to trip up Thrust to gain favor with Megatron, but these plans generally backfire on him. Jetstorm’s suspicions really come to a head when he catches Thrust fraternizing with the enemy in the person of Black Arachnia.

Black Arachnia will eventually come to understand that Jetstorm, not Thrust, was once Silverbolt, her long lost love. Jetstorm wants no part of returning to his former life and fights Black Arachnia all the harder. In Season Two, Black Arachnia will ultimately restore Silverbolt, but his experiences will leave him a shell of his former noble self. Ironically, it will be up to Black Arachnia to teach Silverbolt how to be noble once again.

Silverbolt being “rewritten” into Jetstorm does make sense. I theorized in my old article, “The Making Of A Vehicon General”, that Silverbot believed in his noble values but that might have caused him to repress more violent urges, to let go of his self-imposed blockades and just go crazy. While Megatron corrupted that deep-seeded urge for his own methods with his shell program, Silverbolt still did things he regretted when finally restored.

POWERS/ABILITIES:

Vehicle Mode – various energy blasters; can drop plasma bombs ala bomber plane; speed, flight, maneuverability of an F-18, with one fatal flaw: he can’t land and he can’t stop; needs to Transform to Robot Mode to hover.

Robot Mode – can hover in midair; never touches the ground, unless knocked out; energy blasters in arms; hands and arms allow for close combat.

He could, however, make his cockpit look around like a head in vehicle mode, which was interesting and something the toy did as well. As far as close combat, we rarely saw it happen but I think he did once or twice. Otherwise he just attacked from the air, where only two Maximals could potentially get to him. And one of them was a kid.

It will push the count up a bit but Thrust’s is kind of short and after the game of musical sparks the previous guide gave us and how they’re tied together via Blackarachnia’s quest to restore her boyfriend I want to get him in here as well.

THRUST

Thrust is a deadly Motorcycle Vehicon with a brooding James Dean/Marlon Brando personality. The strong, silent type, he’s a Vehicon of few words and rarely speaks above a Clint Eastwood whisper. Thrust rarely initiates a conversation. He’s the master of the understated comeback.

Thrust is the only one of the three Generals not intimidated by Megatron. He always knows just the right thing to say when the boss is about to melt him down into scrap metal.

This proved valuable when he was revealed to be Waspinator, because after that everybody abused him. It’s like Thrust was only good when he was intimidating, something he somehow lost just because of what he had been. Even the writers seemed to think less of him after that, and this was a shame for Thrust as a separate persona as well as messing up Waspinator’s happy ending from the previous show.

There’s something mysterious about Thrust. He always seems to know more than he’s letting on. We get the sense that he’s biding his time. Whether he knows that Megatron will no longer need his Generals if they succeed in destroying the Maximals, or whether he has designs to overthrow Megatron, or whether he has dome other dark purpose up his sleeve, he’s not saying.

It’s precisely this mystery that draws Black Arachnia to Thrust in the first place. He’s such a blank slate that whether or not he’s actually returning her affections is anyone’s guess. Black Arachnia suspects that Thrust has the Spark of her long lost love Silverbolt, but will discover by the end of Season One that he actually hold’s Waspinator’s Spark. (How Waspinator found his way from Prehistoric Earth back to Cybertron is anyone’s guess but, considering he had millions of years to do so, it’s not inconceivable.) Once Black Arachnia makes this discovery, she restores Thrust’s personality immediately. She has no interest in going there and neither does he.

Even the guide wasn’t completely sure how Waspinator got back to Cybertron outside of taking the long way home. Cybertronians are a long lived mechanical species so it’s not inconceivable I guess, but apparently he didn’t even try to help his past self. Maybe he saw how things went wrong every time Megatron tried to mess with time? He also seemed to remember his spark extraction and whether he had a thing for Blackarachnia or not I suspect his own pain was not something he could watch in others since Waspinator quit being evil back on prehistoric Earth and quit the Predacons. On the other hand, finally being cool, respected (if not feared), and actually good at being evil might have appealed to Waspinator enough that his shell program was the easiest to put together until Obsidian and Strika next season.

POWERS/ABILITIES:

Vehicle Mode – Speed and maneuverability of a motorcycle; can pop a wheelie and fire energy pulses by spinning his front wheel; can blast fire/exhaust out of his tailpipes; wheels can kick up a lot of dust and dirt.

Robot Mode – one arm is a rapid-fire energy pulse weapon, the other a grappling hook; both arms have claws that can be used for close combat.

Like with Rattrap the show never acknowledged Jetstorm and Thrust had feet. Jetstorm hated not being in the air and the uniwheel did make Thrust a bit more intimidating (unlike the big bot at the start of Revenge Of The Fallen that ran through a city and was somehow explained away), so neither of them needed feet in the show. Rattrap could have used his. though.

Next time we’ll check out Tankor, the drone armies of the generals, and everybody’s favorite drone.