To help the Autobots learn their Earth history, Sari takes her friends to a dinosaur theme park. It's there that Bulkhead's klutzy antics start to make the bot feel a lot worse about all the damage he causes and tries to restrain himself, especially after he breaks the animatronics. It's only after they're delivered that Sumdac learns that the mysterious head in his laboratory has come back online, and said head, Megatron himself, has plans to rebuild his body by any means necessary.
Tropes:
- Alas, Poor Villain: Prowl feels this way when he hears that Sumdac plans to melt down the Dinobots (as the Autobot believes that there's more to them than that). Fortunately, this is averted by Prowl and Bulkhead breaking the dinos out of the tar pit and taking them to what becomes this series' Dinobot Island.
- Artistic License – Paleontology: Pretty much everything Tutor Bot spouts in regards to dinosaurs and fossil fuels is grossly inaccurate, to say the least. Especially egregious is that one of said inaccuracies (that fossil fuels are made from actual fossils, whereas in real life, the two are simply produced in the same way) kicks off the third act. Sumdac actually points this out when he's repairing Tutorbot.
- Be Yourself: Prowl eventually tells Bulkhead to be himself, because smashing stuff is what Bulkhead excels in.
- Bird-Poop Gag: At the end of the episode, Grimlock gets hit by droppings from a pair of birds perched on a branch above him.
- Blatant Lies: Megatron tells Sumdac that he's an Autobot who's friends with Optimus Prime's unit, but he doesn't want them to know he's on Earth due to his current state. Sumdac believes him due to having limited knowledge about Cybertronians, but pretty much everything Megatron says is a lie.
- A Day in the Limelight: While Prowl gets a few moments to shine (namely the fact that he's one of the few to realize that the Dinobots have Sparks), Bulkhead gets the most attention of any of the Autobots, and explores how his klutziness makes him feel like more of a liability than a help (something further shown in later episodes).
- Double Take: It takes Sumdac a few seconds to realize that the giant robot head that's been dormant in his lab for several decades just spoke.
- The Farmer and the Viper: Megatron, while making himself seem helpless and pitiful to earn Sumdac's sympathy clearly means to back stab him the second he can.
- Foreshadowing: When Megatron finds himself unable to control the revived Dinobots after they were shut down from the AllSpark-charged EMP Blast, he notes the Dinobots function almost as if they have sparks now, hinting that the AllSpark energy from Sari's key managed to evolve them from mindless robots into living transformers.
- Hypocrite: In the last episode, Bumblebee was upset at the others for making fun of his size. Here, he makes fun of Bulkhead for his size and clumsiness.
- Internal Reveal: Sumdac learns that the head he built his robotics empire from has come back online. Unfortunately, he doesn't know that he has the Autobot's greatest enemy in his lab.
- The Klutz: Ends up being deconstructed for poor Bulkhead, as his inability to avoid breaking things is making him feel a lot worse internally. Prowl tries to teach him to be gentle, but it doesn't quite work; in fact, doing so makes Bulkhead less useful in combat than usual. It's only when he stops being careful that he's back to his old self.
- Line-of-Sight Name: Well, Line of Earshot name, but Grimlock gets his name when Megatron describes his current situation as "Grim, Locked in this prison of a lab."
- Manipulative Bastard: Megatron, knowing that the only way he'll ever get out of the lab is through Sumdac, tells him that he's an Autobot and that he only wants to help the humans and his "friends", but that he doesn't want them to see him in his current state. While the audience knows that he's full of scrap, he does a thorough job of convincing the kindly Sumdac. To be fair, they're called Decepticons for a reason...
- The Masquerade: Prowl and Bulkhead chose to hide the Dinobots on a small island out in the middle of Lake Erie, in spite of Optimus Prime's desires to destroy them.
- Mythology Gag: Once again, the Dinobots are defeated by a tar pit.
- Older Than They Look: The Autobots (particularly Ratchet) aren't impressed with how long the dinosaurs have been extinct; the Cybertronians as a race have existed for longer than the dinosaurs were alive. Prime admits though that their sheer size was impressive.
- Screw the Rules, I'm Doing What's Right!: Prowl at the end of the episode. Instead of agreeing with Optimus and Professor Sumdac that the Dinobots should be destroyed, Prowl and Bulkhead secretly free them and transport them to an island at the middle of Lake Erie.
- Shout-Out: The music that plays as Sari and the Autobots enter the dinosaur park is very similar to the Jurassic Park theme music.
- Take That!: Perhaps inadvertently, but old Grimlock takes a shot at Transformers: Robots in Disguise. Doubles as a Mythology Gag, as it uses the show's Japanese name.Grimlock: Cars and trucks bad! Car robots...worse!
- Toilet Humor: The end of the episode has some birds crapping on Grimlock.
- Wham Shot: A few birds take a dump on Grimlock, causing the latter in his frustration to transform into robot mode.Grimlock: Me, Grimlock...like!
- Unwitting Instigator of Doom: If Bulkhead hadn't broken the dinosaur animatronics, then the entire plot (and the creation of the Dinobots) wouldn't have happened.
