This is Part Six in a series.
As I said in the previous post, I’m going to restrict myself to broad strokes as much as possible. The goal here is to get an initial three season run out of the Transformers series, and remember, that’s three 26 episode seasons, and we’re releasing on streaming platforms, like Netflix, so that’s really more like 12, 6-7 episode seasons released quarterly over a three year period.
The first season we start on Cybertron, kind of. Mostly because we need to establish a few things. We show how during the war on Cybertron the Autobots and Decepticons deal with other planets. The Decepticons take the form of unmarked military vehicles from whatever planet they are trying to conquer. They then stage attacks on important facilities within the various factions on the planet, causing the native inhabitants to go to war with each other, and either fully or nearly wipe each other out. If they don’t fully wipe each other out, the Decepticons wait until the population reaches a certain threshold and then unleash a weapon on the planet that causes any non-spark powered technology to go dead. At this point, with no resistance left on the planet, they take over and strip it of all resources, obtaining large amounts of energon.
The Autobots by contrast form a partnership with the planets they encounter, giving them technology to use to protect themselves from Decepticons in exchange for a small percentage of their resources. To keep their involvement on the planet a secret and avoid attention from the Decepticons the Autobots take on the forms they are best known for, civilian vehicles. This is a noble strategy, and shows the Autobots to be our heroes, however, it also explains why they eventually lose the war. They need to ally with ten planets to get the same amount of resources that the Decepticons get from a single planet. Additionally, it is a continuous process, meaning supply routes need to be maintained. The Decepticons take a planet, strip it, and move on, leaving a barren husk in their wake, they are less vulnerable to being cut off from their energon supplies, though eventually they will run out of planets to consume close enough to Cybertron to make harvesting them worthwhile. We only need to spend a few episodes setting this up.
Also, while still on Cybertron, we show the Decepticons setting off their weapons that shut down all non-spark based technology across an entire sector of space, creating a dead zone that some third faction theoretically cannot cross. This is the turning point of the war, allowing them to focus their full efforts on the Autobots. However, as always, Energon on Cybertron is running low, for both parties, and it’s getting harder and harder to get new Energon shipped in, both sides are attacking supply ships. Cybertron must be abandoned. A deal is reached. Each side will send off ships to distant colonies, first the Autobots will send a ship, then the Decepticons, so on and so forth. In this scenario the Autobots have a huge tactical advantage as they have more allies out in the universe, and the worlds that they’ve visited are habitable. What worlds the Decepticons will go to are barren wastelands, it’s a death sentence for them, so they all get sent out to become raiders, conquering new worlds and turning them into proper colonies, ruled with an iron fist. Additionally, each ship that goes out into the universe is a Titan, this will come into play later in this Hasbro-verse.
Now, ships are being sent out, and it’s down to Optimus and the last remaining Autobots, and Megatron and the last remaining Decepticons. As in the Generation 1 cartoon, Megatron follows Optimus through the Space Bridge because he realizes that Optimus isn’t heading to a known Autobot colony. He’s heading to an unexplored region of space. And thus, we get them crashing into Earth during the age of the dinosaurs, and that’s the end of the first season.
Second season starts with the Transformers waking up, Decepticons first as in the original Generation 1 cartoon. They then begin to employ their tried and true strategy from the war, set the natives to fighting each other and killing themselves, so they can harvest all the resources for themselves. The Autobots eventually wake up, and start actively trying to stop the Decepticons, except they try and keep their presence on the planet a secret from the natives. They learned during the war that revealing themselves to a general populace usually led to panic, and they’ve got the Decepticons making trouble already, they don’t want to be lumped in with them and attacked on two fronts.
Eventually, the Autobots make a deal with the US Government and its allies, similar to the one they made with other planets during the war. That deal always came with a single caveat, the technology the Autobots share is only to be used to defend the entire planet from off planet threats, never against other denizens of their own world. The tide starts turning on Earth, and the Decepticons are mostly fought to a standstill. Eventually, Megatron realizes he needs more troops, so he leaves Earth to gather more Decepticons. End season 2.
Now, Season 3 takes place years later, when Megatron eventually returns, it plays out very similarly to Transformers: Prime. Optimus and the Autobots while still working with the US Government do not trust the government, this is because Cybertronian technology was used against other humans, not alien threats. How that happened will be covered during the events of another series that takes place during the time between seasons 2 and 3. Effectively, this third season does a lot of the same things Prime did. We learn Unicron is sleeping at the center of the Earth, Primus is at the center of Cybertron. M.E.C.H. exists. And Agent Fowler is the liaison between the Autobots and the US Government. We end the season with a similar situation to the movie that finished the Transformers: Prime series. Unicron’s spark is separated from his body, Optimus Prime is dead, and Cybertron is revived. Most of the Transformers return to Cybertron. Maybe we need more than a single season for all that, which is fine, but that’s the basic gist of what we need to have happen in this season.
Maybe we even treat this as two separate series, with Seasons 1 and 2 dropping together, then other shows such as the next one I’m about to talk about dropping, then season 3 dropping, in as many seasons as it needs to tell its story effectively. We don’t need the exact same events as Transformers: Prime to occur during season 3, we just to get to that end point, while hitting certain other points along the way. After the events of what I’ve laid out for season 3 occur, we don’t visit Cybertron for a while. Maybe Autobots make brief guest appearances in subsequent series, but after a certain point on the timeline, Cybertron goes dark, and we see no Transformers. Until a message comes through to Earth from a reborn Optimus Prime, at this point, he should have been dead for a few real world years, possibly even close to a decade, depending on how many properties we tie together, and how long it takes to get through them all. Some can run concurrently, so it all depends. We’ll get into the contents of the message from Optimus later in this blog series, it’s a surprise.
Anyway, that’s how I’d set up the Transformers for a Hasbro-verse. Not much changes for them, and that makes sense, they’re the first property in the timeline. But we’ve laid some groundwork for some very interesting stuff later. Next up, we pay a visit to G. I. Joe.
A New Hasbroverse 