When there are many loose story threads to tie up in the Transformers Prime Beast Hunters series, not every detail is going to get covered in the epilogue, Predacons Rising.
Curiously, the question of whether or not any Cybertronian has gone deep underground (as suggested by IDW’s comic books) is never considered. In what does is an interesting biblical take in the final struggle between the Autobots and Decepticon’s quest to awaken their home planet.
There is a resurrection at hand. As the title implies, someone is going to experience a rebirth. With no surprise, and with no thanks to Hasbro’s marketing department, everyone knows Megatron will return. As for how he manages to do so, only a god is able to bring him back to life—or a devil. Unicron finally makes a proper appearance to go destroy Primus once and for all. But there is more than meets the eye for this particular aspect of the tale to take shape. More than one figure will “rise.”
As viewers will recall, Predaking survived his fight with Megatron. He flew off to the wastelands to lick his wounds and perhaps brood much like Conan the Barbarian. He proclaimed himself king of an extinct species, and what he can do is very limited. Without Shockwave’s knowledge of cloning, none of his ancient forebears will be resurrected and his lineage is looking like its destined to die with him. This tale is the main plot. But to see how it unfolded was a disappointment. In the Hasbro lexicon, their foil were the Maximals, peaceful animal-like bots, and there were none in the Prime universe. With no equal, viewers should not be surprised that the Predacons can trounce upon anyone who dare cross their path. Not even the undead could match them one on one.
And nor could Unicron. Try as he might—and did—this demon god brought the bones of the original Predacons to life, but at a cost of infusing them with his anti-life. They become Terrorcons and the fight they make upon the living is a joke. None of the warriors that the chaos bringer animated to life stood out as generals. They were simply generic, Despite the fact that Hasbro is developing toys to honour the Generation 1 characters and their namesake, nothing about the toys made its way to the television screen.
Sadly, the hope of seeing dinosaurs go up against dragons did not materialize. The Dinobots are hidden away. They have only appeared in IDW’s comics adaption of this series. That’s a shame and the only way to see them now is in however Michael Bay wants to dream them up for the big screen.
Some viewers may well wonder if there are any other Transformers left? When Cybertron was left to become a dead husk, anyone living fled this planet. It seems no one went underground. The number of days between “Deadlock” and “Predacons Rising” is left ambiguous. The story looks like it takes place a few days after. And no time is spent to establish if Optimus even bothered to check if anyone crawled underground, to feed on the last drops of energon that may be hiding on the planet.
Little weaknesses in the planning becomes even more apparent as the Autobots do not maintain contact with their human family back home. Even a brief cameo would have been nice to show that they are still communicating with Jack, Miko and Raf while they are rebuilding. Sadly, none of that is addressed. And neither do the writers consider the fact that Airachnid is simply stuck on a moon. She can easily return anytime. Once when she finishes feeding on all the energy she can find from her followers, she can transform into a helicopter and leave.
Hopefully the video release that’s coming will explain why these story threads are not being addressed. No series can ever truly end until all the aspects that stitch the saga together are firmly tied up.
