And with that, the abomination that is Machinima's Combiner Wars comes to its long-awaited end. And BOY was it terrible.
Remember that scene in ROTF where Sam "dies", goes to the Transformer afterlife, gets "wisdom" from the Primes, and comes back to life? Remember how so many critics, both official and on YouTube, felt so royally confused by that scene because of how it far out of nowhere it seemed to come? I now know how those people all felt by that scene as Windblade goes though almost the exact same ordeal here.
What's more is that this scene brings in yet another deus ex machina at the 11th hour: Metroplex. No formal introduction, no build up, no explanation of who or what he is to the common uneducated viewer. Just comes in clear out of nowhere and not only brings Windblade back to life but also just serves to solve everything in one fell swoop.
Though, this scene also attempts to try to finally tell us (or at least hint at) what a Cityspeaker is, but... too little too late, guys. Seriously, don't wait for the very end before telling us something like that.
Plus, Windblade now claims that she wants to save Cybertron and is desperate to do so. But she NEVER went through any kind of believable development for her to have such a change of heart. It just came off as just as forced and contrived as Metroplex's sudden appearance did.
And now we'll never really know Starscream's true motive was since he was apparently killed during all this. By all appearances, it looks as though he really did just regress from his interesting reformed persona back to his uninspired, stagnated, backstabbing persona for no other reason than for a GEEWUN-based attempt to shock the audience. Blah.
Victorion got a little more dialogue in this one and then shoved the Enigma into her chest like it was some kind of Matrix. And no, I don't mean she opened her chest and put it into a chamber, she literally just took the thing and
pushed it through her armor plating to force it inside her. But in the long run, Victorion was completely wasted and had no business being in this show at all.
So too were the Combiners themselves, really. They were barely even in this show, despite their being the titular characters! And once again, the Combiners are referred to as a people of their own. What do they mean by this? Who knows? It's yet another concept introduced by this show that goes completely unexplored.
And then at the end we get a tacked-on cliffhanger foreshadowing to Titans Return, with a quick cameo by Fort Max whose eyes flash from blue to red. No. Oh please, no. No more of this, Machinima! Please don't give us another round of this with Titans Return! I beg of you. We've suffered enough!
The only, ONLY cool thing about this was Cy-kill, er, I mean Megatron. He was true to form in this just as he's been ever since he came into this show, and here we saw him as a triple-changer with a Space Gun Mode of his own (in addition to his robot and tank modes) that Optimus used to blast the screaming star Starscream into oblivion.
But really, this show was a wreck. A complete and utter train wreck fueled by bad writing and terrible characterization (Megation aside). And that ending with Metroplex was so badly forced that it might as well have been Primus himself come to deliver divine punishment to Starscream and save everyone in an instant.
Honestly, folks, if you want to experience a G1 story written for an older, nostalgic crowd that not only pays respect to the past, but is does some really cool stuff and is very well written and well designed overall, AND features Optimus and Megatron teaming up to fight a super-powered Starscream whose plan was far more competently executed and made worlds of sense, then I HIGHLY recommend that you ignore this abysmal show and instead check out Naoto Tsushima's 4-part manga story
Transformers: The Battle of the Star Gate. It has beautiful artwork, great-written characters, tons of emotion and drama, a superbly-written take on the G1 cartoon Starscream, and lots of cool action scenes that completely enhance and enrich the story as it progresses. Machinima's Combiner Wars can only
wish that it was that good.
All in all, this show was a near-complete failure, with Megatron as its sole saving grace that still isn't enough to redeem the show as a whole.
Congratulations, Combiner Wars, you are officially a worse show than Transformers: Energon.
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