Revisitation 134: All That Jazz.

15/7/2023

This week, Spike quits, Jazz quits, Prowl quits and I'd quit if there wasn't only two weeks left of this nonsense.

All in my cheerful look at Police Action Part 3!

3 Comments

LiamKav

16/7/2023 11:04:14 pm

A story that literally ends with us being told "all of this was pointless" really shouldn't have the readers going "yeah, it was".

Snowkatt

20/7/2023 09:37:08 am

I never bought in to the "drama"driving this last arc, because like the rest of the series it rings hollow.

Spike took out a Decepticon a war criminal at the very least and too out a major threat, the looming specter of Devastator.

If anything the Autobots should be glad, isn't killing Decepticons what they do ?
Were they jealous or something ?

This doesn't absolve Spike in the least though, he is still a creepy slimy git, and a terrible badly developed awfully written character.

If the conflict was build around Spike being untrustworthy or the Autobots worrying about their "allies" being able to turn againt them on a dime, then that might be worth writing a story or two about.

Instead Costa gave us this garbage, the series plans to end the way it started.
A humongous confusing boring waste of time.

Llama God

20/7/2023 04:44:20 pm

I think calling this a wet fart is a bit unfair. To wet farts. At least they provide a bit of momentary relief.

To echo what's already been said, this is certainly a confusing and pointless end to what could generously be described as a "story thread", if I was being kind.

If the whole point of this arc, or indeed the entire run, was to show that Spike was actually playing both sides the whole time, then it failed abysmally. The fact we don't really have a clear idea what it was meant to be about just shows how much of a failure it is. But Spike was never a likeable character, and never someone we ever had any trust or faith in, with his womanising ways and being the best of the best of the best and all that bullshit, so this has no impact at all. And really, there seems no point to it all - why would he be working with them in the first place if his plan was to undermine them? Sure, get their confidence and then betray them, that's fine - but given everything he went through, his whole portrayal as a doesn't-follow-the-rules maverick, it just doesn't work. At all.

And let's not forget (much as we might try to) the whole Bumblebee miniseries where the Autobots are betrayed by their human allies. That at least had a little more internal sense and had a little more impact. This has nothing.

The reveal that the Autobot's biggest critic was also a facimile makes no sense, and robs that part of the story of any impact it might have had. If there had been actual consequences of that revelation, if the Autobots had once again been abandoned by their human allies and forced on the run again or something, then revealing it to be all part of a Decepticon plot might have actually been interesting. As it is this is a "so what?" And it doesn't even really tie particularly well into the whole "Megatron was controlling people through the tiny gun Megatrons" story. It's just messy.

I remember at the time this was originally published I was very disappointed. Because if this was indeed to be The Last Story on Earth, then as a conclusion to the storyline kicked off by Furman back in Infiltration #0 then this was very unsatisfying, to say the least.

Ultimately, whilst this run has had the seed of a couple of good ideas in there, it needed a writer of a better calibre to pull it off. And Costa was not that writer.

Revisitation 134: All That Jazz.

Leave a Reply.

Author

Archives

Categories