Impactor... Returns!

[Metal Vendetta]

Yaya, the main bits I've been rereading with regard to this issue are mainly just the two stories revisited within - Shadowplay and Chaos Theory, the first two parts of the loose "trilogy" to which Elegant Chaos is a sequel. There's a lot about Functionism that gets mentioned off-handedly that I missed first time around - for example, Quark talks about how a lot of the early Decepticons were drawn from the manual classes in Shadowplay and here one of the cadets calls Impactor "manual scum". I've since learnt that Roberts mentioned in an Underbase interview that a lot of the Springarm/Wheelarch body-type 'bots were encouraged to go into police work under Functionism, so the cops with that body-type in this issue are a nod to that.

With regard to the Autocracy series, I find it hard to reconcile the characters even with the Infiltration cast, let alone the present day stuff, but over four million years of war it's been established that it went through lots of different phases and I just have to assume that the war went through some stupid phases every now and again. We saw it with All Hail Megatron, when Megs decided to stop fannying around with infiltration protocols and the scarcity of energon and having an actual plan, went BWAHAHAHAHA, killed all but a small number of Autobots and decided to camp out on Earth doing, uh something... actually that stupid phase lasted ages, now I think about it.

[snarl]

I think the war lasting 4 millions year is quite guff in all honesty.

I had hopes that idw would compress it down to 10k or something.

4 million just stretches credibility a bit imo.

[bumblemusprime]

I've always thought the 4 million number was crazy, too. In fact, I hate to say it, but Mad Brick's "Great Shutdown" theory of a Cybertronian age without any fuel was the best explanation I could see for such a number.

I just figure that for robots, 4 million years of war doesn't necessarily mean 4 million years of hot war. Given the infiltration protocols, it's likely that the Autobot/Decepticon war took on characteristics of the Cold War--involvement in small regionalized conflicts, escalating them by galacto-political forces beyond their established outcomes (30+ years of conflict in Vietnam exacerbated by US aid to France and South Vietnam).

I also have always liked the idea that Cybertronian programming is stuck in a bit of a rut from doing the same thing over and over again. Phase Sixers purge things and DJD purges Phase Sixers, but that means you've essentially given your nuclear bombs a personality. Cybertronians don't quite seem to get that there can be a line between weapons and personalities.

[Sunyavadin]

A few friends and I think we've nailed it.
Brainstorm built the time machine because of the horrors he lived through following the rise of the functionists.
As one of a small band who sympathised with the writings of a mostly forgotten Tarnian agitator from four million years ago, he hit on a plan to save the world. By creating a completely new one. One where there was a chance for a hero who could save Cybertron from the Functionist tyranny.
And after acquiring the crucial item he needed, he was finally ready to create that hero, by travelling back in time and giving that long-dead poet the thing he needed to be truly....SPECIAL.
There was only one problem with the plan. After he travelled back in time and replaced the newly constructed Megatron's spark with the point one percenter he had acquired, his newly created timeline began to assert itself in the present, overwriting the world he had left behind. A new timeline in which the presence of Megatron and his Decepticons did indeed prevent the rise of the functionists, but at a high cost. The new players in the timeline he had created discovered his time machine, and not realising that they were living in the altered timeline already, they used it to travel back and try and prevent whatever changes they feared he might be making, not realising the Brainstorm from the timeline they remembered was merely acting out the necessary actions to lead up to that point.
Their impact upon the timeline, and the chance they might cause Brainstorm to FAIL, caused the original, unaltered timeline to begin to reassert itself in the present, leading them to fear what changes Brainstorm might be causing, not realising it was their actions in stopping him which were causing the other timeline to begin to impose itself over the one they remembered.



TL:DR - shockw-BRAINSTORM did it.

[Bumblebot]

So, Sam Beckett needs to save young Al in order to prevent old Al turning into Roddy McDowall?