Oof, that's some shoddy dialogue. Voice acting too. Even characters like Wheeljack could have been given some quirky voice to match his mannerisms, but instead he really does just sound like some dude.

 

If the first season is all about Bee's memory, I'll not complain at all as long as zero human appears.

 

I feel like they were trying for 'southern genius' instead of... either his original voice or Adam Savage from Mythbusters.

It doesn't quite work

 

What kind of maddeningly nitpicky person seriously gets upset that "Bumblebee shouldn't know about the Ark's logistics!!!" as if Bee weren't standing in the same room as Optimus's command chair where he talks about what's going on to his inner crew. You're literally the xylophone geek from Simpsons.

 

You missed my point, I'm complaining about the fact that we are stuck watching from Bee's perspective in the flashbacks.

 

This appears to be the last of the on demand early release episodes so next episode will actually be new instead of my DVR recording episodes I've already seen.

 

Ha! Wheeljack sure is nuts, I like that. xD Now..this could be small but..should we talk about the fact that Grimlock and Bumblebee were willing to kill and take the energon from those creatures?  Even Optimus said that was wrong but..they kinda were not happy with that call. ^^'

 

im quickly liking the idea of chromia as a central autobot, even if we have barely seen her

 

One thing that crossed my mind about this show earlier...it hasn't really taken a lot of time to establish and develop the characters (aside from maybe Bee and Windblade a little bit). Most of the other shows take a minute to introduce each character and let us figure out what their basic personality is. For example, think back to RID 2015's first couple episodes, where the characters were introduced one-by-one. Here it just kind of feels like we should already know everyone (almost like we've been thrown into the middle of the season). I find myself thinking things like "who exactly is Grimlock in this universe?" quite often. I suppose that's the drawback of 10 minutes episodes, we don't really get a lot of time to breathe and get to know everyone.

 

The way characters are unveiled seems to be by design. We got a smarmy voice in the radio in one episode, then we meet a burly autobot in the battlefield, and later we find out that voice belonged to Grimlock all along. We see a shadowy figure in episode 1, then we meet Optimus and later we get a focus episode that shows what kind of guy he is, etc.

I presume it will be much and the same for everyone, Bee's memories will slowly be pieced together as the audience learns who are these faces popping into episodes as he does too.

 

It's almost as though the writers are putting the audience in Bee's shoes, asking "who the hell are these guys?"

Still not impressed with some of the voice acting, Optimus especially, but Wheeljack was kind of eh. I like Grimlock, though, and I hope the Jekyll/Hyde aspect they came up with for him stays in future incarnations.

I've also got to disagree with Optimus's conclusion at the end of the episode: if the creatures were sapient beings, then sure, Optimus made the right call, but all indications point towards them being animals, and I'm sorry, but a bunch of animals don't measure up against the fate of an entire world (or many worlds, if Megatron gets his way).

 

Wheeljack was great.

Grimlock looked cool but him being smart still confuses me though.

Also I like the allegory OP makes for not taking the Energon from a another race even though it’s theirs. Like it’s setting up the reason why they don’t drain Earth dry even though historically it’s full of it.

 

Animals are sentient beings too you know. Have you been living under a rock for the past 100 years? I thought everyone who thought this way was long dead by now.

I mean sure we still use animals as food and other things but that's because you can't really survive without it. Vegiterians try to claim we can but they actually have to take a shit tone of supliments to make up for the lack of proteins in their diets.

I might also point out that Transformers pretty much view us the same way we look at animals, as lesser developed creatures. Basically going by your logic the only thing they would recognize as sentient would be other robots. We would just be animals to them.

 

Animals are sentient, but not sapient - they aren't on the same level as a human or Transformer (or say a Nebulan). If those aliens had been fully-thinking beings like humans, then Optimus would have been exactly right to leave the Energon be. But to leave it and risk losing the war - and thereby letting Megatron enslave all sapient beings - because of a bunch of bugs is ludicrous. The old motto "freedom is the right of all sentient beings" doesn't refer to animals, it refers to thinking beings like you or me.

As for the "Transformers view us the way we view animals," that's mostly a Decepticon belief that's almost always depicted as abhorrent and a key sign that the person thinking that way is the villain of the piece.

 

That's wrong on most, if not all levels but alright.

 

How so? If they were sapient beings, even on the level of cavemen, then Optimus's call would absolutely have been the right one. But they didn't show any evidence of being anything other than a particularly territorial species of animal.

 

Thought you were just spelling sentient wrong but I see what you're saying now.

Actually cavemen were our more primitive territorial ancestors and also would not be considered sapient.

We are homosapiens, they were homoerectus. Just because they look like us doesn't make them sapient. They were likely no more intelligent than today's apes, maybe even less intelligent than that.

Since you're going by intelligence I guess the Maximals shouldn't have waisted time trying to save those protohumans because after all they were just animals right?

 

If Ratchet fixed Bee's voice box on the Ark then how did Windblade know about it?I guess they could have been communicating with Cybertron but it still seems odd for some reason.

 

Hasbro has uploaded 3 & 4 to YouTube, for those of us who need a free way to watch. I think they're waiting a week or so after each episode airs.

--Moony

 

Episode 4 seemed to go up one day afterward