This inquiry is related to the Bay sequels. Yes, I know, a story issue or inconsistency in those movies is like a person getting wet from water or the sky being blue in the day. But there's one specific plot hole I wanted to bring up that I find kind of funny.

In Revenge of The Fallen, it's revealed that Megatron was actually sent to Earth by his master, The Fallen, to retrieve the Allspark and use it's knowledge to locate the Matrix of Leadership. The Fallen wanted to use the Matrix to activate his evil sun exploding machine thingy, wipe out mankind, and harvest the energon that would be created in the process. Okay, typical bad guy shenanigans. One problem though: Megatron's a two-time schemer; because it's revealed in Dark of The Moon that near the end of the War for Cybertron, Megatron made a deal with Sentinel Prime, the Autobot's leader at the time and Optimus's mentor, to activate a space bridge that would bring Cybertron to Earth where the Decepticons, working with Sentinel, would enslave mankind and force them to rebuild their war-ravaged home world. That... Would be difficult if Sentinel woke up only to find that mankind, the race they kinda needed for their plan to work, was already vaporized by The Fallen's sun exploding machine.

My assumption would be that Megatron began the plan with The Fallen to eliminate humanity AFTER he presumed Sentinel dead, BUT that doesn't work either. The Fallen's ambition to destroy mankind began back when he had the conflict with his fellow primes as shown in the flashback during RoTF, and that is implied to have happened way before the War for Cybertron, and, ergo, before Megatron's deal with Sentinel. So Megatron was already planning to kill mankind in the name of his master when he made the deal with Sentinel to enslave mankind and make them do their bidding. So... What the hell, man? Did he just decide to throw his eggs in two baskets just in case one failed? Did he not consider how awkward it would be if Sentinel showed up only to find their intended slave labor force was destroyed by The Fallen's Dr. Claw ass machinations? "Thhhhhfft, oooofffff, sorry Sentinel. You took too long to get back to me so I decided to do this other thing instead. "

This is me overthinking the plot of simple, turn-off-your-brain action flicks made for nothing more than making bank at the box office, but it's still something that pops up into my mind frequently when thinking about the Bay sequels, haha. What's ya'll's take on this? I think it's pretty funny either way.

 

Nope, not overthinking it at all, contrary to those who'd piss all over your opinion and question.

You have a very valid question that has no better answer than they screwed the pooch. You, me, and a growing number of the audience do actually care about continuity, but the powers that be clearly do not.
If you haven't seen TLK (but I'm guessing you did), you're in for a treat. You think this is mind-melting continuity stupidity, wait until you get a load of that bullshit.

The problem is, they were all part of a big picture type of storyline, but then each film was treated like it was its own thing so you didn't have to watch the others if you didn't want to. Very much like the original cartoon. Problem is, a staggering 16.7 hours, two-thirds of an entire day.) is consumed by these films. At that point, we want legitimate continuity. The thought that grown-ass adults don't care what happens in movie two compared to movie one, etc. is not only stupid but offensive.

Guess they don't remember the horror stories of the Highlander franchise. It did EXACTLY the same thing, and it was an unmitigated disaster.
-Connor won The Prize in the first movie, it's over and done.

-Highlander II: The Quickening made the mistake of 1.) Trying to make a sequel to a franchise that was completed. 2.) Trying to explain where the Immortals come from, as well as their power. (FYI for anyone who hasn't seen it: The Quickening cut? Aliens from a planet named Zeist. The Renegade (Director's cut)? Superhumans from the distant past in an Atlantis-type world who are mortal *then* but Immortal after coming through time (as a punishment for their sins) *now*. Yes, you read it correctly, yes, it *IS* that stupid.) This one also ended on a firm ending. No more.

-Highlander: The Final Dimension (!): A loose, barely cohesive remake of the first one with Mario Van Peebles as Kane (basically Clancy Brown's The Kurgan) and it's...mystifying in its existence. And...you guessed it, another finale ending.

BUT WAIT...There's more!

-Highlander: Endgame (I shit you not!) This time, the Highlander from the TV series (Duncan) joins forces with his cousin/clanmate Connor in a last-ditch effort to stop Jacob Kell from getting his 666th kill, otherwise he might bring about the worst evil. Again, finale ending.

...and if you act now, ONE MORE!

-Highlander: The Source. DTV, garbage flick that's completely nonsensical and shouldn't have ever been filmed, and most, if not all, Highlander fans shun its existence and pretend it never, ever happened.

All of them tie into the original film and each continues the first film in their own way, each coming to a different ending, kind of like a "Your Own Adventure" book in cinematic form, mind you the first one negated the need for a sequel at all, but I digress.

Remind you of Transformers?

-2007: Megatron wants the Allspark, after being frozen for 10,000 years.
-ROTF: The Fallen and Megatron want The Matrix of Leadership to power the Sun Harvester that was built nearly 20,000 years ago while Megatron was frozen in ice 10,000 years ago.
-DOTM: Somewhere between The Fallen and being frozen in ice for 10,000 years (want to drive that point home), he concocted a plan with the most treasonous bastard this side of Alpha Centauri to build a Space Bridge, thus negating the need for the Allspark, the Sun Harvester, or the Matrix of Leadership, completely.
-AOE: None of that was necessary because they're products from an alien product line and the company wants their recalled items back, so they send a bounty hunter to bring 'em back dead or alive.
-TLK: We meet ONE of said creators, she's utterly worthless (but damn, is Gemma Chan hot, so a pass is made here), and all of it hinges on Merlin's staff and Arthur's sword, thus negating a bunch of negation.

...FFS, my soul hurts just pulling that from memory. Egad.

The powers that be didn't care about the source material, didn't care about the characters, didn't care about the continuity (even in Bumblebee which was a reboot), and didn't care about the audience until now. Even the powers that be finally admit the robots are important and we should be seeing things from their point of view and they need to work on that...18 years later.

 

All good questions. We should be able to have answers (and fun engaging discussions) but we don’t because the Bay films are all about coincidences and retcons.

 

In the comics, the fallen had been off cybertron for (i wanna say thousands?) of years. I think when prime launched the allspark, megatron tried to go after it but was delayed and lost it. The fallen left on his ship (the one we see him on in rotf) and megatron did the war by himself, basically ignoring the fallen but with the corrupting influence already having pushed him over the edge. During this time, he came up with the plan with sentinel, his old pre war mentor. Then the ark was shot down while leaving cybertron. Afterwards during the final days of cybertro s life, megatron picked up a signal from the allspark or something and left to hunt it down. While passing saturn, he found the fallens wrecked ship and reconnected with his old master. With no idea where sentinel was, megatron fell back to the fallens orders and continued to earth where he crashed. When he woke up in 07, he was focused on getting the allspark. When he was resurrected in 09, he continued eith the fallen, not knowing where sentinel was. During the years between rotf and dotm, soyndwave caught him up on everything, including the ark being found on the moon, so with the fallen dead, came up with the plan of tricking prime to ressurect sentinel, now he knew prime has the matrix, and continued with that plan.


So essentially, yeah. He had both plans in his head at the same time, he just kept switching between which of them was active depending on who was available at the time. After all, if they had the allspark charged up and on cybertron, they wouldn't need the slave labour.

 

Through the power of thousands of years between each event, it’s possible to head canon in explanations for how each plan may have started and changed over time (especially given the dramatic setbacks the Fallen, Megatron, and Sentinel all experienced), but ultimately that shouldn’t be necessary to do in order to make it make sense. They really did just make these things up as they went along lol