Originally aired September 18, 1996
Screenplay by Larry DiTillo
When Cheetor messes up an important mission, he decides to fix it on his own. But soon he is lured into Tarantulas’s net of deceit and torture. – Netflix
Torture! Wow. This show must have been the reason they started rating kids’ TV.
I decided to start including the original air dates in these recaps, and while checking Wikipedia for the info, I noticed that this episode was aired out of production order. It’s listed as Episode 3 but it was actually produced sixth. This is probably as good a time as any to bring up where Beast Wars falls on the serial vs. episodic spectrum and why it makes season one so weird, because despite the prospect of torture, “The Web” is actually a pretty boring episode and I don’t have a lot to say about it.
In TV Land, shows fall into one of two camps: serial or episodic. Serials are like Breaking Bad or 24, with the events of one episode leading directly to the next in one big amorphous story. It’s the de facto format for award-seeking drama.
Conversely, comedy and sci-fi work really well episodically, building laughs or thrills around a core concept and discarding it for a new one next week. Each episode tells a new story and basically pushes a reset button in between.
Ok, now that we’ve defined the terms, I have to confess that it bothers me that TV has turned into a serial-by-default landscape. With serials, you don’t really get “favorite episodes” that explore a clever idea, because what you’re seeing is just a long string of events broken up into hour-long blocks. With shows like Game of Thrones that follow dozens of separate characters, it can feel like watching a story that was thrown in a Cuisinart. And it’s easy to feel like you’re being strung along when shows like The Walking Dead stretch go-nowhere plots over several episodes.
Still, the growing continuity of serials makes them undeniably more alluring, and to that point I’ve always thought that Beast Wars struck a perfect balance with its episodic/serial hybrid format. Every episode tells a self-contained story, but they don’t hit reset, and the continuity grows gradually like a narrative Katamari ball. (The X-Files pulled this trick as well, so maybe it was a mid-’90s thing that got brushed aside when The Sopranos landed.) It means the first season is much more episodic and the final two seasons are much more serial, which is reflected in the air dates: half the episodes of season one are aired out of production order, but none are from seasons two or three.
This brings us back to “The Web,” which kicks off when Rhinox unveils a new comm-link invention to “solve our long-range communication problems.” It’s a classic episodic “try out the new invention” gimmick and also a callback to the first episode, which had Optimus try to call Cheetor on the comm-link only to learn that it didn’t work because of Energon interference. At the time, it seemed incredibly bizarre for the writers to introduce an invention and then immediately invent a plot-excuse for it to not work, but here it comes back as a subtle bit of continuity in an otherwise self-contained story.
The story itself is “Cheetor tries to prove himself, succeeds in proving himself to be an irritating fuckup.” This is a story that Beast Wars pulls out of its bag a few times, and it’s already redundant to the first episode: Cheetor runs into a Predacon far from base, tries to take him out alone, and instead gets his shit wrecked. Here he spots Scorponok salvaging a “mega cannon” and gets a missile in his chest when he tries a citizen’s arrest. Later, he doubles down on stupid by attempting an off-the-books infiltration of the Predacon base, and gets immediately dragged into Tarantulas’ rape basement.
The flipside of the annoying Cheetor plot occurs when Rattrap stumbles into Tarantulas’ dungeon and saves the day. “Rattrap being useful” is another story that Beast Wars likes to reuse, and a much better one. Rattrap is by all accounts the smallest and weakest bot in the mix, so for him to succeed usually requires some cleverness. He gets into a tense cover-based shootout with Tarantulas, and it bears mentioning that cover-based shootouts are one of the best things about this show.
In TV logic, violence done to robots doesn’t count as real violence, which is why the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles cartoon turned the Foot Soldier ninjas into robots. Beast Wars obviously has a full cast of robots, and that means they can actually use lethal force against each other, allowing for situations that would otherwise only be welcome in a rated-R movie. We already saw Cheetor’s mangled corpse after being hit with a missile, so we know that these guys mean business as they gun each other down in the dark. Luckily Rattrap gets the drop on Tarantulas and blows his leg clean off.
Looks like I was way off when I said Optimus’ leg bite was the grisliest thing that would happen in awhile.
Cheetor and Rattrap aren’t much better developed here than they were to begin with, but it’s good to get some spotlight on Tarantulas. He may be the most interesting character in the show, and while he’s painted here more as a creepy Buffalo Bill cannibal than a long-con schemer, he’s very clearly working as a rogue agent towards his own agenda. It’s early days, and at this point any episode with him at its core is worthwhile.
Next episode is #4 both in airdate and production, so I wonder how it will relate to this. Maybe it will feature more of the long-range communication issues alluded to here? If we want to know what the Predacons end up doing with that mega cannon, we have to wait until episode 7, which aired as episode 8!
Side notes:
- Weird questions arise from how or why robots eat. Rattrap is eating an apple core early on, and it’s very odd that Tarantulas wants to eat another Transformer, even if he is a spider.
- Cheetor tries to force a terrible catchphrase: “Ultra gear!” Rhinox and Optimus look suitably uncomfortable.
- The sweeping “helicopter shot” that introduces the episode reminds me of the Navi POV intro to The Ocarina of Time.
- Cheetor’s PTSD dream after getting missile-KO’d is weirdly prophetic. Rattrap appears for a split-second slashing a knife at the camera, which is the same shot as Rattrap cutting him free of the web much later on. Was the sequencing of this episode itself out of order, too?
Beast Wars in review 