Written by James Roberts
Art by Milne
Published by IDW Comics
And so we come lurching to the climactic finale of the “Remain in Light” story arc, possibly best described as the “season finale” of “Transformers: More than Meets the Eye”, bringing things more or less to a close, before the big “Dark Cybertron” even kicks off.
It’s almost impossible to discuss the events of the issue at all without spoilers, except to say that everything works out well for all parties involved, except the bad guys of course. Which really, when you get to the heart of it, is the big problem with the issue, and by extension, the storyline as a whole. Remember, this is the story that solicits teased would “Change the Lost Light forever”, or words to that effect. But in actual fact, when the story wraps up, surprisingly little has changed when one really looks at it.
Oh sure, we know more about certain characters and a few relationships have changed, and one very minor character now has the handy ability to occupy two parts of a room at once, but really is the Lost Light’s crew that drastically different from when the story even started? At the risk of beating around the bush, it feels like somebody we liked needed to die.
Killing characters is a tricky business. You can’t just use character deaths as a way to artificially move the plot forward and create tension and drama, that’s a very Yoshiyuki Tomino way of doing things. But “More Than Meets the Eye” has been doing the almost the opposite since this story began: implying that characters have bitten the bullet (or sword, laser rifle, claw, hand, etc) but then having them turn up alive and well the next issue.
The same way that needless death feels cheap and exploitative, so does implying deaths and not following through on it. When you think about it, virtually every character in the series seemingly died over the last few issues, only to miraculously recover or pull some last minute trick to reveal ’twas all a ruse. If this was all misdirection to set the reader up for a sudden, unexpected, and very permanent death, this would all be well and good, but the fact that every character makes it out of this whole debacle feels like the carrot’s been whipped away from our awaiting mouths at the last minute.
The compete and utter apex of this tomfoolery is the last page of the issue, which reveals (in what feels incredibly like an 11th hour re-write) that what seemed like a poignant and touching death scene and a perfect close to one character’s story was (surprise!) nothing of the sort, and he’s actually recovering off-panel.
Or if not killing a character, having some visible major change would have been nice. Ultra Magnus had a perfectly good reason to leave the story a vastly changed character, indeed a different character all together, but in the end he forsakes that opportunity in favor of giving the status quo a big sloppy kiss.
Something is going on with this series. Call it editorial intervention from someone at IDW or even Hasbro, call it James Roberts unexpectedly fumbling the ball, but either way, the book that sixth months ago had Transformers fandom going mad with glee is losing steam. The writing and characterizations are still sharper than average, but the sense that what we were seeing unfold before our eyes like a magnificent butterfly of bold storytelling is starting to crumble, and of something doesn’t happen soon the death we won’t see coming won’t be a character, but the series itself.