Beast Wars: Transformers - Season Two Review

2/3/2025

Warning: Unmarked spoilers for the Beast Wars: Transformers cartoon are ahead, that's for the entire series! Avert your eyes, if you wish to stay surprised by these robots in disguise!

Season Two of Beast Wars got cut in half, down to thirteen episodes from season one's twenty-six. There were no shortages of characters, new toy forms, and storylines to present. It's hard to describe any episode of this season as being truly episodic adventures, even though it's technically true in a few cases. So often do even those simple-seeming episodes hint at something larger for a character, foreshadow what's coming, or wrap up some other thread. Season two is stuffed like a turkey.

That time constraint also means that it's somewhat badly frontloaded. This is a minor gripe, but we'll get into that. Let's go over our new characters for this portion of the series for a broad overview. Don't worry, there aren't as many as before.

• Silverbolt

Silverbolt is pretty cute overall, and gives new meaning to the idea of puppy love. He also sounds a little bit like Keanu Reeves' Shadow the Hedgehog to me. Silverbolt, at first, is a confused Maximal who gets caught up in the Predacons for a brief moment. He's straightforwardly heroic in a perhaps naive way. Listen for the little "Superman"-style jingle that often accompanies his declarations of justice. What ends up defining Silverbolt more than anything is his romantic relationship with Blackarachnia. I feel mixed about this. There's nothing bad about it, per se. It's done with more depth than you might imagine, as Silverbolt has to grapple with Blackarachnia's Predacon nature and what that means for his sense of heroism. Maybe it's just me, but their relationship eats up a lot of screentime, and often Silverbolt is just hopeless. Silverbolt gets a huge W though, for having this romance continue all the way through season three, and putting Blackarachnia through her paces. Good character.

• Quickstrike

I think that Quickstrike was an attempt to make a funnier character with more notable personality traits to replace Scorponok and Terrorsaur. They largely succeeded. Quickstrike isn't here to be a relatable, deep character. A lot of it is carried by his American southern accent. He's a character that can get beat up, but also be a little more of a threat than Waspinator. He was "born" alongside Silverbolt, but the two don't seem to have any particular feelings about each other. Quickstrike's existence is justified when the Predacons court martial him in season three. I like him. He also looks shockingly like his toy in a season where almost everyone looks very toyish.

• Rampage

I didn't like this character at first. He seemed to be just a big brute with a really out-there crustacean-tank design. His backstory as Protoform X isn't just an excuse for him to be the new, powerful bot in town, though. Rampage shines the most in the episode Transmutate, where he waxes poetic about the very nature of his existence. Rampage will also get a fun rival in season three. These hints about Rampage's thoughts and feelings are delicious, to the point it might be better that we didn't get to explore that side of him just a little more. Still, I pine for a fourteenth episode just for him. Not a lovable character exactly, or even one I particularly like to see, but he teases the mind. There's more than meets the eye to him.

Coming of the Fuzors

Season two starts on what is basically a three-parter, with no Optimus Primal until the very end. His apparent death in season one is dramatic, and we should be awaiting his return to an extent, but his relative absence in the whole season is felt. More important than that, these first few episodes have to get into the new Transmetal gimmick that was part of the toyline at this time. So, you have to see everyone's new forms (rather cleverly explained by the quantum surge explosion), new powers, AND meet the Fuzors until everything is "in place" for the rest of the story. The Transmetal gimmick means somewhat more organic-looking robot modes, and more robotic beast forms. It's not a pretty look for anybody, by and large.

The Fuzors (that is, Silverbolt and Quickstrike) are a combination of two different animals, though honestly Quickstrike is about 90% scorpion. They have a bit of a weird visual language to them though, and in tandem with some of the new characters Transmetal forms, things are visually a bit muddier than season one. You get used to it though...kind of. Primal looks ridiculous as a shiny, blue, surfboarding gorilla. But, what can you do?

This season ends up owing a lot to Dinobot however, who receives no major upgrades or visual differences. He gets a major spotlight right up until his departure in "Code of Hero." I mention before how Dinobot's personality traits are somewhat in opposition, but it makes him entertaining. Here, though, someone wise used this to create internal conflict and drama for Dinobot, as he begins to question his allegiances and actions. This is so cool it's unreal. Dinobot is well aware of what Megatron is capable of with the Golden Disk, but privately shares it with Optimus Primal before the audience. This gives it an air of gravitas and seriousness.

SIDE NOTE: There are two Golden Disks in the series, and they both usually get called just "the Golden Disk". Sometimes the other one gets called the alien disk, but since you're mostly left in the dark as to what the Golden Disk is until later, it's easy to trip up. One is from the Voyager probe (like in real life) and the other is an alien artifact that unlocks the weird Vok weapon in Other Visits. I have no idea why they did it this way, because it was getting a little confusing even for me. Why have two powerful artifacts be almost indistinguishable visually?

It doesn't seem totally necessary to me to have a two-part mid-season finale of sorts in a thirteen episode season, but we get one anyway in Other Voices. While a fun, dramatic episode, it doesn't match season one's Other Voices. Tigatron and Airazor "die" (we'll talk about that more in season three), which I feel is much more of a loss than anything. Sure, there should be a sense of loss with it, but it feels like we were just starting to get to know Airazor, and Tigatron's absence is felt hard. In that sense, it's good, but I would have preferred they stayed around.

Upwind Of You, For Preference, Vermin

By contrast, Dinobot's death is very possibly the very best single episode in the entire series. Watching him spit one more insult at Rattrap as he kindly asks the Maximals to tell his story tugs on the heartstrings. The dialogue is absolutely fantastic throught the whole thing. What a great character.

Another interesting episode with some death is Transmutate. I had a negative reaction to Transmutate (the character) at first, because it does have a rather scary design. But that all played into the episode, so, well done. Rejected by Megatron and only briefly adopted by the Maximals, it's a sad story as she meets her demise at the hands of Silverbolt and Rampage. It's what the episode shows and suggests about Rampage that intrigues me most, and Optimus Primal remarking something like "We can't lose any more friends" is painful.

The Agenda

After all that, it's time for the epic finale. In my opinion, this is pretty much the peak of what Beast Wars could bring to the table. Seeing the Tripredacus Council and a little bit of Cybertron is a treat, but the inclusion of an upgraded Ravage is particularly inspired. I imagine it would have been relatively easy to pick any Decepticon to survive the Great War and become a Predacon, but I think Ravage (with a new voice and very different design) probably afforded the team some writing flexibility.

Ravage's landing and subsequent arrest of Megatron has a deep sense of satisfaction to it, which will ultimately be a knife that twists. Finally, contact with Cybertron and someone who has a working ship. And Ravage is legitimate in his desire to wrap up this crazy incident with Megatron. Naturally, you begin to wonder how it goes wrong, and boy, does it...

The biggest twists in the series takes place, as the Golden Disk contains a message from the original Megatron, used to persuade Ravage into switching sides. Our Megatron (the T-Rex) reveals his plan to destroy the Ark, the ship that crash-landed on Earth millions of years from present day. Yeah, how cool is this? This is an idea so clever that it makes me envious. Sure, even at the series outset, it doesn't seem terribly unlikely that this is prehistoric Earth, there are Earth animals after all. But the bringing in the original Transformers story, and the Maximals needing to protect their ancestors and all of history? Chef's kiss. The Beast Wars writers turned an inconspicuous plot point into the epic season finale, without sacrificing or diminishing any of their characters to do it. I did have to wince a bit at Optimus' "die-cast" joke, but if that's the only really obvious pandering moment that doesn't serve the story, that works for me.

Also revealed during The Agenda is that Tarantulas is a mole, working with the "Predacon Secret Police." This idea is disappointingly dropped in season three, save for one throwaway line. I bet there would have been an episode about this, had there been time, but alas.

I'll confess that I had seen still images and short clips of the Beast Wars characters onboard the Ark, but seeing it with the full context and buildup in the show is about a hundred times more powerful and interesting. It's definitely more than a little bit of trivia!

Season three is not quite going to match the aura and power of season two, but Beast Wars has nary a weak episode, even after thirty-nine. While the opening salvo of new toys is rough, the character writing more than makes up for it.

See you next time! MAXIMIZE!

- Heroic Maximal Jane