Review: Transformers Combiner Wars “Destruction’s Dawn”

After nearly an hour’s worth of grueling content, half-assed CGI, robotic voice acting (even for actual robots), and a severe lack of both wars or combined robots fighting in them, we have finally reached the finale of Combiner Wars, the show Hitfix.com touted as “The Game of Thrones of Animation”. Really called it there, guys.

I’ll be giving a far more venomous rant about all the problems with the show overall next week, so let’s just get this over with.

SPOILERS

Windblade, apparently not dead, finds herself in a white void, listening to the random echoing voice she heard a few episodes ago. She identifies this voice as Metroplex. Who the fuck is Metroplex, you may ask? Fuck if I know, I reply. What I do know is that Windblade is bipolar as all hell, because she constantly flip flops from wanting to kill everyone on a moment’s notice and wanting to save people. In this case, she’s claiming it’s the latter, but Metroplex tells her that she abandoned him and others like him to go off on her bloodthirsty vengeance quest, and that Cybertron is “on a knife’s edge”, whatever that means. He gives her the whole Mufasa speech about remembering who she is, and finally we get an explanation as to what the hell a City Speaker is.

Basically, they speak to cities. Like, literally speak to spirits within the cities. In this case, Metroplex is one such city, and she speaks to him so he can pull out a giant robot arm out of his ass to fight this somehow even more pathetic version of Starscream. Huh, and here I thought it was like some sort of Community Organizer type job. But not even a city-sized fisting can defeat this gaseous cloud of purple piss (who is now making such inane screeches that I am thoroughly convinced they were just electrocuting his voice actor behind the microphone and decided to throw in the recordings), so Optimus and Megatron decide to take this opportunity to lay the final blow. The run up to get into position, and Megatron turns into a giant gun somehow! (Remember, I didn’t watch the G1 cartoon, so this surprised me. Plus they already showed him turning into a tank before, and I’ve been told changing into more than two things is a quirk that’s pretty rare in this franchise) They take aim and hit the screaming star (huh, I just got that!) right in the…grape flavored center, ending the threat once and for all. Hooray!

In the aftermath, Megatron gives Optimus props for pulling the trigger, which he weirdly could not do before in front of Megatron, his greatest enemy, but could easily do for his former top henchman. Character arc achieved! Anyway, Megatron gives them the enigma, makes a forced as hell reference that makes me wince every time I hear it, and then pisses off to go find other small former henchmen to beat up. What a guy! Windblade hands over the enigma to Victorion…who promptly eats(?) it. And hey, her screentime in-story now increased to just over two whole minutes! With five whole lines! Neat!

Victorion questions Windblade giving her the enigma, since she “hunted and killed” them…even though we’ve only seen her kill one guy in self-defense, and he’s not even dead anymore! Yeah, Menasor and Computron are alive now for no given reason despite being dead when they were meshed together with Starscream. But at least now we can stop calling Windblade a killer for no reason. Too bad it won’t bring back Maxima (BURN!). And I guess Combiners are being treated as a whole new species separate from Autobots, Decepticons, and whatever the Mistress of Flame apparently is, because all four of them (including Devastator, who I forgot to mention) walk off into the sunrise to get hit by traffic or something. The Mistress commends Windblade and says the Combiner Wars have ended. Must have happened off-screen somewhere, because there SURE AS FUCK weren’t any Combiners warring in this show, just a bunch of brief skirmishes between a group of crazy people that deserve to be in that robot asylum from Futurama. But none of that matters, because Windblade says there’s now an “even bigger problem”: The Titans have returned! Great, just what we need, a Teen Titans Go crossover. Anyway, that’s the show, so now it can transform and fuck off.

If the first three episodes of this were a steady take-off and maintained altitude, the fourth is the left engine going out, the fifth is a downward tailspin, the sixth is the spectacular crash, the seventh is gazing into the fiery explosion and wreckage, and this ending would be pointlessly attempting to cobble together the scrap into a working aircraft again. This series is near universally loathed by casual and hardcore Transformers fans alike and it is pretty difficult to not see why. Next week, we give an overview and final thoughts as we give an autopsy to this malformed creature, look at where things went wrong, and possible curse and use caps lock tons more. In the meantime, I’m going to go combine my liver with about a quarter gallon of Absinthe until I can no longer feel anything.