by Sabrblade » Mon Aug 03, 2015 8:52 am
- Motto: "Can't do a job halfway. What's worth doing is worth doing well, I say."
- Weapon: Saber Blade
The Blurr (& Salvage) Trilogy is arguably one of the most mature stories of any TF cartoon ever made, and deals with the age old concept of "the rambunctious youngster needs to learn how to follow the rules while the leader tries to mentor him" that we've seen before with Cheetor in Beast Wars, Side Burn and Wedge in RiD 2001, Hot Shot in Armada, Ironhide in Energon, Hot Shot again in Cybertron, Bumblebee in Animated, Smokescreen in Prime, and Sideswipe in RID 2015.
The big difference with how it was handled with Blurr in Rescue Bots compared to all those other examples is that, while all of those other youngsters would get into trouble, get bailed out by their leaders, learn their lesson by the episode's end, and then repeat the cycle in other episodes, the situation with Blurr spanned three whole episodes instead of being done all in one, meaning that Blurr did not learn a thing by the end of the first episode, which actually ended on a solemn conclusion with almost no one willing to ever trust Blurr ever again. After all, what Blurr had done to put himself on everyone's bad side was the following.
Back when he and Salvage first came Earth way back in the past, their ship had crashed on what would in the present be known as Wayward Island. At the time they arrived on Earth, cave people were still around, so this was way back in prehistoric times. A meteor storm was going on at the time and Salvage tried to save the humans. However, one of the cavemen was missing from the rest and Blurr took off, promising to locate and bring back the missing caveman. When Blurr didn't come back, Salvage had to get the other humans to safety without the missing one, and then went to look for both the missing one and Blurr. Salvage found the missing caveman all alone, with Blurr nowhere in sight. Salvage took the caveman back to the cave where his ship was located, and that's where he found Blurr, who was then trying to get the ship working so he could get off the planet and leave Salvage behind. Enraged that Blurr had both deceived him and attempted to leave abandon him, Salvage went at Blurr and two fought, eventually being forced into the ship's stasis pods when the meteors started hitting the cave. The remained in their pods for some ten thousand years before being discovered by the Rescue Team in the present.
Thus, when the history of Blurr and Salvage was later made known by the episode's conclusion, virtually no one on the team was willing to forgive Blurr after learning that he tried to leave Salvage for dead.
And by the second episode, they still don't trust him, only working with him out of obligation, meaning that Heatwave, unlike every Optimus that ever mentored a troublemaking youngster, did not want to have anything to do with Blurr nor even believed that Blurr had the potential to get better at cooperating.
Not helping matters was that Blurr himself simply did not care about saving lives or working with a team. He was not a Rescue Bot and never wanted to be. He was just a regular Autobot who felt like he was being forced into a profession he never wanted any part of, only going along with it in the first place because Optimus Prime himself assigned him to it. But even though he did try to get used to his new life for Optimus's sake, he was still more prone to ignoring orders and endangering lives more than otherwise. He just really did not care at all about doing what he was told, and after overhearing Heatwave talking to Chief about wanting Optimus to reassign Blurr to a different team, Blurr took the opportunity to do everyone a favor and just leave on his own... by stealing the Sigma (the ship owned by Heatwave's team) to leave Earth altogether.
In many regards, this is the most realistic portrayal of the youngster/leader relationship ever seen in a TF cartoon, as real teenagers do not always learn their lessons so easily and those who don't respect authority tend to regularly make life hard for the authority figures who are trying to guide and mentor them. Compared to Cheetor and his ilk, Blurr was much more difficult and defiant than all of those others of his kind, causing way more grief and frustration for the team and never learning anything or even wanting to make amends for anything after two whole episodes. And even stole the Sigma, leaving the team defenseless from what was to come next.
The third episode showed that Blurr's committing "grand theft spaceship" had even greater consequences than expected. Of all the times that the traitor could have stolen the ship, he just had to do it right as solar flare activity was getting underway, which included a Coronal Mass Ejection that both knocked out all power on Griffin Rock but also took out a space satellite that was headed for Earth. For Griffin Rock. Without the Sigma, the team had no way of stopping the satellite, meaning that the renegade Blurr (whom they knew wouldn't care to come back and save them) was their only hope for survival.
It took Blurr's own conscience to convince him to go back and save everyone. Recall that I said "almost" and "virtually" no one on the team wanted to trust him, meaning that there were still one or two who did. Specifically, Cody, Boulder, and Salvage still believed in him. Remembering how, despite his not getting along at all with most of the team at, Cody still wanted to believe in Blurr, Blurr felt that even though he didn't like those guys that didn't mean he wanted them all killed. So he turned the ship around to go after the satellite and be the hero they needed him to be. And it sure wasn't easy since the ship had to both catch up to the fast-falling satellite and blast it at a dangerously close distance (since the ship's laser hadn't been properly installed before Blurr stole the ship) that could have taken out the Sigma as well, and all before impacting the ground. So it was a near suicidal rescue.
After blowing up the satellite, Blurr brought the ship back down and owned up for his misdeeds. So it took a really critical situation that would have killed many (which he'd have been partly responsible for) to open his eyes and show him just how important both being a Rescue Bot and selflessly saving lives really are, as well as how much he really is needed and can make a difference as a Rescue Bot.
"When there's gold feathers, punch behind you!!"Shadowman wrote:This is Sabrblade we're talking about. His ability to store trivial information about TV shows is downright superhuman.
Caelus wrote:My wife pointed out something interesting about the prehistoric Predacons. I said that everyone was complaining because transforming for them mostly consisted of them just standing up-right. She essentially said, 'So? That's what our ancestors did.'
