S1:E12 “Victory”

Originally aired November 1, 1996
Screenplay by Wendy Reardon

An explosion at the Predacon base leaves no survivors, and the Maximals assume victory. However, Dinobot makes a discovery that changes everything. – Netflix

They should have called this one “Ronin,” to better play off the theme of what the hell Dinobot is supposed to do once Megatron’s dead. Ronin, as all Robert DeNiro fans know, were former samurai who became driftless when their master died. In Dinobot’s case, he becomes rudderless in a more Inigo Montoya sense: once Megatron is dead, he no longer has a reason to stick it out with the Maximals. As Rattrap puts it in this episode: “He’s only with us cuz he knew we’d win, not because he believed in what we stood for. He’s a soldier—with the enemy gone, who else is he gonna fight?”

The satisfying answer for Dinobot fans is “the entire goddamn planet.” Yes, with the Beast Wars abruptly over, Dinobot chooses to stay behind on prehistoric Earth and become a global warlord.  But clearly he doesn’t follow through, or else we never would have made it far enough as a civilization to invent Transformers!

Obviously, Beast Wars loves to yank little kids’ chains, and the whole idea that the Beast Wars are over is a lame psycheout. We join the bots in media res, with a lot of exciting developments already in motion. At some point between episodes, Rattrap managed to sneak into the Predacon base and set up a nanny-cam, and now the Maximals all sit around watching the thing like it’s Big Brother. But it turns out that Terrorsaur tripped over the camera’s cable—which speaks volumes about Rattrap’s shoddy workmanship–and the Predacons turned the tables on their voyeurs by staging an elaborate ruse. The ruse goes like this: they attempt an Energon refinement experiment, and when it fails it pisses everyone off so much that they try to kill Megatron and blow up the base in the process.

The Maximals buy it, and I would, too, because these guys really set a low benchmark for teamwork. Everyone on the Maximal side seems bummed out in a kind of 4th-wall reflection of how disappointed the kids watching would be to realize their favorite show was ending anticlimactically after only a dozen episodes. They decide to loot the Predacon base for spaceship parts so they can journey home, but everything is very somber, like the first act of Alien. They shuffle around the Predacons’ desolate ship speaking in hushed tones, and Dinobot seems especially on-edge. Rattrap’s breaking point comes when Dinobot no longer engages in the antagonistic Johnny Storm/Ben Grimm dynamic that Rattrap had become emotionally-invested in.

Cheetor finds a way to get the catatonic Dinobot’s blood flowing again, by dangling Tarantulas’ spider legs over his shoulder in a horror-movie gotcha moment. And it’s enough of a shock to Dinobot’s sense of decency that he busts out his first of many Hamlet quotes.

Alas, poor Tarantulas. I knew him, Cheetor! This is the leg that stalked so many victims. That it should come to this…

Cheetor gets a rare zinger in when he asks if Dinobot needs a hug, and maybe that’s what pushes him over the edge. When they get back to base, Dinobot announces he’s done with this crew, but he’s very classy about it. Optimus is also very classy about Dinobot’s intentions of going on a global military conquest. So it’s a very positive goodbye all around.

I checked the clock, and it’s only around 8:30 into the episode by the time Dinobot struts across a field, lord of all he surveys, and happens to see every single Predacon hiding in a hobbit hole in the ground. The entire rest of the episode is dedicated to an extended action sequence, with Dinobot trying to haul ass back to the soon-launching Axalon and the Predacons pursuing with intent to kill.

It doesn’t really make sense, though, because when we see the Predacons all tucked underground, Megatron does some exposition about their plan which details how they found the spy cam, how they faked their own deaths, and what the goal was from there. I just assumed the goal was to get the Maximals off the planet so the Predacons could go about their business of fucking up Earth unimpeded, which would make it a nice little twist of fate for Dinobot to only discover them because he was so bummed about their fake deaths. But it turns out it’s actually a much more complicated plan with no clear upside, which is a situation that the Beast Wars writers seem oddly talented at creating. I can’t tell if this is supposed to be a running joke, like Megatron is a robot that has its Master Plan programming gimped so it keeps coming up with terrible Dr. Evil-style schemes, or if this is unintentional.

The meat of it is that Megatron tricked the Maximals into plundering his own base for parts so they could leave the planet—which is what Megatron wants, or at least what he should want. But instead, he’s going to wait for the “right moment to attack,” like, thinking it’s easier to attack a ship when it’s taking off than when it’s not. He doesn’t explain why this is better than attacking it normally, or what they plan to get out of it, so it seems like a meager amount of leverage at huge cost and risk. And obviously, the Maximals are launching their ship at this very moment, so without Dinobot’s accidental prompting they would have missed the window entirely. I have to ask, why not just ambush the Maximals while they were in your base?

Anyway, the ship starts to take off, but Optimus opts to muster the troops for a quick extraction mission for the outnumbered and very quickly getting shot in the butt Dinobot. Actually, he tries to go alone, but Cheetor decides to jump in to help (he doesn’t help). It’s actually a rather long debate over whether there’s time for Cheetor to join, which seems to defeat the purpose. Tigatron tries to join as well, possibly as a way to get off the ship so he can go live in the jungle instead of journeying to a robot planet that will terrify his every waking moment, but Rhinox shouts him down.

Optimus flies out with a riot shield and grabs Dinobot, whose Spock-like response to being rescued is “This is tactically unsound.” Sure is! With Cheetor being fucking garbage at providing cover fire, Optimus takes a hit and has to swap to Beast Mode when he goes all Energon-tingly. Cheetor also gets shot, and barely manages to crawl onto the ship’s landing bay just as it starts to lift off. But Tigatron, the only guy who doesn’t even live on base, thinks fast and sets the ship’s autoguns on, which kills every single pursuing Predacon.

Optimus limps back to the ship and throws Dinobot’s body onto the lift, and then makes something like a 50-foot vertical leap to grab Cheetor by the hand. All’s well until Scorponok shoots a missile that (embarrassingly for him) doesn’t explode and take all three bots with it, but just knocks Optimus’ hand free. Optimus drops to the ground in dramatic slo-mo, but come on. He could swap back to robot mode for the matter of seconds it would take to get safely on the ship. Instead he plops onto the ground like a loser, and it’s funny because it looks exactly like a gorilla falling out of a plane.

Megatron, perhaps using the unspoken advantage of attacking a flying ship, grabs onto a dangling wire and stows aboard like the queen from Aliens. Once aboard, he smashes the flight controls and blasts every single Maximal on the bridge, other than Rattrap. Why doesn’t he shoot Rattrap? He keeps gloating about how he’s about to kill Rattrap but he doesn’t do it. Maybe he has something personal against Rattrap from when Rattrap tased him while pretending to be Terrorsaur’s partner, or maybe he’s upset about the nanny cam thing. In any event, he instead opts to crush Rattrap in his T-Rex jaws, which gives time for Rhinox to wake up and punch him. Rhinox is very good at punching Megatron.

The Axalon starts crashing, but Optimus wakes up and remembers he has rockets, and I shit you not, a full on Superman pastiche takes place. “Wait, down in the sky… is it a bird?” Dinobot says. “Maybe a plane!” Rhinox answers. Now how in the fuck would there be a plane, Rhinox? How in the fuck? Nevermind that pointing out a bird in this situation is ridiculous. But how would there even possibly be a goddamn plane, dude?

A royalty-free version of the Superman theme plays as Optimus somehow manages to wrangle the entire ship down with his tiny rockets. I guess the trick is the animators were able to show a ton of white stuff coming out of his rockets, like they’re just magically shooting out a ton of propellant now, and it’s enough to land the ship. Makes me wonder where all that oomph was a few minutes earlier.

I do want to say, between the counterintelligence ruse, Dinobot’s post-bellum blues, and Rhinox punching out Megatron in the nick of time, this episode is awfully liberal about borrowing from previous episodes. And the briefly-aloft Axalon is basically a perfect metaphor for the trajectory this episode takes: from the bittersweet death of one’s enemies peppered with Shakespeare to a pulled-out-of-the-ass feat of cartoon physics, set against a fake Superman theme.

Side Notes

• When Optimus maximizes it has a weird Windows bootup sound.
• Rattrap is angry that Dinobot ruined their journey home. “You want me to show you how velociraptors got extinct?” Did Rattrap just let on that he knows they’re in the past?
• Even though it would have ruined the “surprise” that the Predacon mutiny was a hoax, I would have loved if the whole thing was an appropriately poorly-acted affair with silly Wes Anderson effects.
• Rattrap scores some good digs at Optimus this time: “scrape ape” and “wimp chimp.”
• When the ship takes off, there’s a cool Fight Club effect that shows the warp core starting up. The animators and directors seem to be having fun with the freedom of CG.
• Speaking of David Fincher, it’s possible some moment in this episode perfectly mirrored Alien3 and readers were waiting for me to go for the hat-trick, but I’m sorry, I didn’t see that one.
• Dinobot should know that Tarantulas only got his spider-legs once they came to Earth, and the only victim he stalked since then was Cheetor. Kind of dick to mention to Cheetor as if it’s sad that he’s gone.