When I
first started this episode, I had two instant thoughts on the events unfolding
before me. First, I wondered if the
voice of Cliffjumper is Dwayne Johnson (It is) and second I wonder how RC is a
motorcycle and, sure, no one is around, but what if she was in
civilization? How would she account for
driving without a human on her seat?
The
second question does eventually get answered, but I’m getting ahead of
myself. This episode is brok
en into two
parts for me: Act 1 with Cliffjumper and
then Act 2 which is a lot of the Autobots rehashing their origins story.
Cliffjumper
is a muscle car that actually looks a lot like the car that Dwayne Johnson
drove in the movie “Faster”. It also happens to have bull’s horns on the
front of it, which is a nice nod to The Rock.
In fact, Cliffjumper even says something about messing with the bull and
getting the horns. (Sadly, he did not
call anyone a jabroni or ask if you could smell what he was cooking, or other
popular Rock catchphrases)
So
Cliffjumper finds a whole lot of Energon, gets outnumbered by Decepticons and
eventually is taken back to Starscream.
In a somewhat violent stabbing manner (As opposed to the gentle kind)
Starscream stabs and kills Cliffjumper, complete with the blue Energon blood
leaking from where his robot heart would be.
At this
point I’m thinking “Crap The Rock is dead” and “Wow, this is heavy for an
animated series probably aimed at kids”.
Also,
this is all a little less than five minutes into the first episode.
What we
learn as the rest of the episode unfolds is that there are only five Autobots
remaining on Earth: Optimus Prime,
Bumblebee, Ratchet, Bulkhead and RC. RC
is new to me as she is a motorcycle who uses a hologram to give the illusion
that she has a driver.
Three
humans eventually discover the Autobots and are taken to their base to be given
the backstory. I particularly enjoyed
how Optimus said that Megatron “lost his way”.
There
are these sort of generic Decepticons in this series, which remind me a lot of
foot soldiers in the TMNT realm.
Additionally, there is an allusion in this episode to the book/movie “Fight
Club” when the human Jack tells RC something along the lines of “First rule of
Robot Fight Club…”
In the
end, Megatron is shown with the “to be continued” idea enforced. This goes back to my favorite quote of the
episode foreshadowing this:
“If they’re scouting for Energon, they may be
preparing for his return” – Optimus Prime
