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Ooh. Total Meltdown is now viewable? That shall give me something else to do in my sick as a dog state. Meantime, Thrill of the Hunt....

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Arcee/Ratchet, huh? Who would have seen that coming?

Yay for flashback episodes! I am a complete sucker for them. And ones that also give me flashbacks to the cartoons I watched as a ten year old via the medium of Susan Blu's voice.... well, let's just say I'm going to have a soft spot for this episode. I suspect that on repeat viewings, Blast from the Past will prove to be better all round, but subjectively, I loved this one.

Arcee continues the G1 tradition of being given virtually nothing to do in any one episode. Not so sure about the pink and black colour scheme (she looks like she's made out of liquorice allsorts). She has to be pink--it's kind of tradition by now, same as Bumblebee's yellow--so why not pink and grey? However hooray for no high heels! Or no high heel, anyway... And also yay for original voices. Judging by Lockdown's words, she also has no interesting weaponry. That's also true of G1, but one suspects that the Autobots might have finished the War a bit more quickly if they'd given their intelligence officers a reasonable chance of defending themselves.... Anyway, so basically, Arcee's the next best thing to her G1 counterpart. I predict that a toy will be designed for her and then cancelled before production.

And then we have that popular sci-fi stereotype of bounty hunters: Lockdown. Who has Lance Henrikson's voice, so he's basically even cooler a character than Prowl. OK, seriously, I didn't have many problems with him. He was suitably menacing, and while I don't think he's going to stand out as one of the greats for me, he'll probably go down well with most viewers. I'm more of a Devcon genial style of bounty hunter fan, myself. The whole trophies idea was rather good--nicely foreshadowed by Ratchet's revulsion at spare parts. It gave him a bit more personality than just blandly handing over his victims to his employers. And I did like that he wasn't a Decepticon. So in this cartoon canon, there are neutrals.

Ultra Magnus is a hardass. But, so far, that's it. Let's hope there's going to be more to him.

Finally, yay for a glimpse of Blitzwing again! Although I suspect I might find the three-faces/three-personalities gag getting old if it has to be shoe-horned in every time he appears. Hopefully they'll tone that down once he's more firmly established. So somebody at least is trying to avenge Megatron instead of capitalising on his death. Interesting....

Other random notes: another heretofore unsuspected use of an electromagnetic pulse. But the ending confused me. Ratchet plainly turned it on Lockdown instead of Arcee, yet it was Arcee whose memories were wiped, while Lockdown seems to remember the encounter well enough to recognise Ratchet and his wounds. Did I miss something here or was it complete plot contrivance?

On Arcee's potential to reappear: can she have a really bad memory from now on? Something amusing? Arcee never gets to be comic relief....

Lockdown knows how to hit Optimus Prime where it hurts. His axe! He is helpless without it!! Oh, wait.... he can do other stuff.

No key! No humans at all, in fact. I'm very glad they've given the key a rest, and it's interesting to see that they can happily do a robots-only episode. Also an episode that's almost totally devoid of humour.

Ratchet's plan to bring down the ship in a massively populated area was a wee bit risky. Thank heavens it managed to fall into that river and apparently cause no damage to the surrounding houses.....

OK, I think that's it from me for now. Off to find Total Meltdown....

MommimusPrime wrote:

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To Ro: I think Lockdown had some memory loss since he says he can't remember faces and names but he never forgets a trophy. From that, I'd say he suffered peripherally from the EMP.

This is possible, except that from the way the animation went, he got the direct blast, and Arcee got the peripheral (it also looked like Ratchet was not expecting her memory to be wiped as completely as it was). It looks like Ratchet and Arcee escape before he regains consciousness, so he would not have had a chance to see Ratchet after the blast or make the connection between him and the EMP. And the implication is definitely that the memories will be lost forever, otherwise there would have been no point in using it on Arcee to erase the codes--it does beg the question, why couldn't Arcee just selectively delete those files rather than take the complete over-write route?

This may be a fault of some over-editing at the end, but as it stands, the confusion at the end of the episode detracts from what is otherwise a very poignant moment. When I realised what the story of the flashbacks was, I thought Arcee was going to be killed off. She lived, but, well. Not a pleasant fate. That's me thinking about it in retrospect though. At the time, I was going: "Huh? He pointed it at Lockdown!"

Also, I said there were no humans, but in fact, I lied. I'd forgotten about the humans in the chase scene, until the couple from the pedestrian crossing also appeared in Total Meltdown (viewing Sumdac's latest prototype with Captain Fanzone). I wonder if these two are going to be recurring characters, or just convenient animation models for extras? More on Total Meltdown later.

Finally, I said Arcee looked like she was made of liquorice allsorts, which probably means nothing to anybody outside of Britain. So here's an example of their packaging complete with mascot. TF:A Arcee and Bertie Basset.... separated at birth?

We don't know a lot about Blitzwing just yet, including how much control he has over those personalities. Based on what we have seen, it appears that two of them are fairly sane (one cool and collected, the other hot-tempered). It's only one that's completely nuts and that only appears to take over for a few seconds at a time. If this is true, he could be a competent enough leader.

Alternatively, he might not be leading anybody; he just had the idea of hiring Lockdown.

I rewatched the episode today, and I still can't figure out what was supposed to have happened at the end--Transformers wikia is describing it as the EMP overloading in the struggle between Lockdown and Ratchet, and it was indeed Arcee who suffered the brunt. I could buy that, but it's a pity it wasn't clearer in the animation. Mommimus, I can see where you're coming from in the 'she's faking it' theory. What I noticed the second time around was that Arcee sounds like an automaton in her last lines. If that's deliberate, are we to assume that she's acting? Or, as it struck me, that her processor was damaged beyond her memory? Ouch. Granted, she should have been a bit dazed anyway by that point, so I could be reading too much into it. I'm assuming she will reappear at some point, but I really really hope we find out what happened to her.

Finally, because I don't think I've mentioned it before, Ratchet was just beautifully done in this episode. He's lovely. So far, this show has been very fair in adding depth to its characters (I think Bumblebee and Prime have had the most casual attention, surprisingly), and it looks like we're going to hit the mid-season point with a solidly established cast--let's hope the plot can follow suit!