YMMV / Beast Machines

• Alternate Character Interpretation:
  • Tankor (Rhinox). The writers intended him to have chosen evil of his own free will after having been twisted by his time under Megatron's control. A popular fan theory is that he wasn't evil — his actions were caused by input from his awakened spark being filtered through a shell programme. Both interpretations fit what we see on the screen (given that, upon his death, Rhinox seemed genuinely repentant, the Shell Program makes a lot of sense).
  • Was Megatron just pretending that Savage/Noble was a wild animal driven purely by instinct, or was he really like that and useful?
  • At what point did Silverbolt really become aware that he had been reprogrammed into Jetstorm - and start enjoying the experience of being an evil monster? When Blackarachnia originally awakened Silverbolt's mind in Jetstorm's body, his personality appeared to be more or less the same, but when she brought him back completely in season 2, he had clearly changed from Nice Guy Knight in Shining Armor to a guilt ridden loner (in the form of a samurai condor) who was understandably upset over his tenure as Jetstorm. If he didn't realize what he was doing until after the initial reawakening, was it really the Jetstorm personality refusing to be changed back, or was it Silverbolt speaking through Jetstorm?
    • Speaking of which, the very device used to bring back Silverbolt didn't really feel like it could function as Rattrap explained when showing it to Blackarachnia; did perhaps Rattrap already have the same intent to use it just how Blackarachnia would? It would definitely explain how Rattrap recognized Silverbolt with such glee despite the drastically different body he now had. Blackarachnia simply stealing the device would've simply accelerated the progress of what Rattrap may or may not have already had in mind to do himself.
  • Is Megatron's personality shift, in particular his new hatred of organic life, simply sloppy writing, or is it residual influence from G1 Megatron's spark? (And even then, G1 Megatron was more apathetic towards organics than anything. On top of that, BW Megatron was already an unhinged individual especially towards the end the Beast Wars. It's possible this personality shift was also influenced by his madness?)
• Ass Pull: Though well-received, the reveal that Thrust actually has Waspinator's spark rather than Silverbolt's borders on this.
  • How the Hate Plague was dealt with. Since the original solution - the Matrix of Leadership - was out of the question, Optimus had to craft an answer that even the Transformers Wiki admits was pulled "out of his monkey butt".
• Audience-Alienating Era: Often considered one for the Beast Era of Transformers, due to a massive tone shift from Dramedy to angsty Villain World story. It used to be considered this for Transformers as a whole — then Transformers: Energon came along.
• Audience-Alienating Premise: One reason why it was so ill-received when it first came out. The surviving heroes of the Beast Wars now forced underground on their own homeworld, their species subjected to a virtual genocide, and struggling to survive against an overwhelming evil force, all set against a backdrop of things like nature vs. technology.
• Awesome Music: Whatever your opinion on the show actually is, the soundtrack itself is genuinely amazing.
• Base-Breaking Character: Nightscream. Back when the series was first airing, he was a flat out scrappy, seen as an annoying Creator's Pet for being a wangsty teenager with an ability that comes in clutch too often, not helped by being one of the only two new Maximals in a cast of mainstays. As a result of Character Perception Evolution however, along with much more maligned characters in later years like Kicker Jones, Nightscream has managed to gain some fans for his more sympathetic reasoning behind his behavior, his charming relationship with the feral Noble, blossoming friendship with Silverbolt, and managing to act as the rookie of the group without retreading Cheetor's character arc or being just a Kid-Appeal Character.
• Better on DVD: The series really does work better as a single narrative rather than as an episodic series.
• Complete Monster: Megatron. See this page for details.
• Contested Sequel: Between longer story arcs, and a darker tone compared to Beast Wars, fans of the original either think this was a good follow-up, or a joke to the franchise. Some of the more generous critics were willing to concede that had Beast Machines been a standalone series with no prior continuity, it would be decent enough on its own merits but as a followup to the critically acclaimed Beast Wars, it just could not measure up as a worthy sequel.
• Continuity Lock-Out: A common complaint of the show was that the continuity was so strong that the show was impossible to follow unless one started from the beginning. Yet still, at a length of only twenty-six episodes, this is not as much of a drawback as it could be.
• Critical Backlash: There were some Beast Wars fans who still enjoyed the show as well as newcomers. Most of the complaints were about the many changes to the characters' personalities and behavior.
• Ensemble Dark Horse: See here.
• Evil Is Cool: The Vehicons. Refer to the Ensemble Dark Horse and Rooting for the Empire entries.
• Fan Nickname:
  • Big Floating Head for the Grand Mal, since the thing was never given a name in-show, and its true name was only gleaned by reading the scripts.
  • Hasbro's own toy, released a few years later, was named "Megatron Megabolt", turning from the head into Megatron directly (this toy is also weirdly compatible with a G1 Fortress Maximus). A green recolor was released later named "Megabolt".
  • Megatron's final form in the show has been dubbed Optimal Megatron due to it being a copy of Optimus Primal's Optimal Optimus form.
• Fanon Discontinuity: Even people who generally like the show often don't like to consider it a sequel to Beast Wars. The two are dramatically different in terms of writing and overall design, and the show's events as a whole are not kind to the Beast Wars cast—quite a few characters get killed off, and a number of others suffer horribly or become borderline unrecognizable.
• Fashion-Victim Villain: Season One has Megatron look like he's wearing a cheap Bane mask and using a curtain as a poncho.
• Fridge Brilliance: Remember when Rattrap said, "Good thing Tankor was a friend! Imagine if he was recycled from a PREDACON!"? Technically, all of the original Vehicon Generals were. To elaborate: Rhinox, Silverbolt and Waspinator all served as Predacons at some point during the Beast Wars.
• Fridge Logic: Obsidian and Strika were Autobots during the Great War, according to supplementary materials. This raises questions about why they unquestioningly served a being named Megatron.
• Genius Bonus: The title of the episode "Prometheus Unbound" refers to the Greek legend of Prometheus. Anyone who knows about the myth will get why that is notable. Let's just say that it heavily foreshadows how the series ends.
• Harsher in Hindsight: Hey, remember that Beast Wars episode where Rhinox got brainwashed into becoming a Predacon and it was Played for Laughs? Well, it's taken very seriously here when he turns evil out of his own volition, after despairing in the face of an enslaved Cybertron, and manages to inflict quite a lot of damage before dying.
• Hilarious in Hindsight: According to a Fox Kids press release, the original name for the series was going to be Beast Hunters, which later became the subtitle for the third season of Transformers: Prime.
  • A Contested Sequel of a breakaway hit depicting the struggle between an all-encompassing robotic evil (seemingly defeated in the original) attempting to remake the world in its own image and a band of rebels lead by a Messianic Archetype who sacrifices himself to take out the Big Bad at the last moment and quite literally reformat the world into a sunny paradise. The heroes are helped along by a figure called The Oracle, the hero and the villain have deeply philosophical existentialism/nihilism clashes and the object of assimilation is called... wait for it, The Matrix. This must be The Matrix Revolutions WITH ROBOTS!, right? No, it came out three years before the Matrix sequels.
  • In the episode, "Sparkwar Pt. II: The Search", Chalk on top of voicing Primal, also voices a hologram of Optimus Prime though it turns out to be Megatron in disguise. Over 2 years before he got to voice Prime proper in Armada and the rest of the "Unicron trilogy" while Kaye would himself go on to voice Optimus in Transformers: Animated.
• It Was His Sled: The identities of some of the Vehicon generals. Thrust is Waspinator, Jetstorm is Silverbolt, and Tankor is Rhinox. Even people who haven't seen the series know it.
• Jerkass Woobie:
  • Nightscream has pretty solid reasons for being messed up... yet the fan consensus seems to be that his annoying qualities outweigh his sympathetic ones and he spends a lot more time angsting than he really should.
  • Rattrap in "The Weak Component." His making a deal with Megatron is certainly questionable and often a Never Live It Down moment, but considering the way his own teammates (save Optimus) treated him, he had the audience's sympathy.
  • Thrust and Jetstorm border on this at times, especially Jetstorm due to Silverbolt being freed from the shell program resulting in his Death of Personality.
• Magnificent Bastard: Megatron. See Beast Wars for details.
• Mis-blamed: Bob Skir received a great deal of criticism from the fandom - to the point where he had to cancel a convention appearance because he was receiving death threats. While he was indeed one of two story editors, he was blamed for everything a given fan had an issue with. Not exactly fair, especially as Skir didn't develop the series himself and was working from what Marv Wolfman started. Notably, Marty Isenberg (the other story editor) never received such vitriol and his being named story editor of a later show was not met with disdain. This all may have been an unfortunate result of Skir making himself available via his website to fans, who incorrectly took him as the ultimate authority of the show.
• Narm: The bizarre designs for the Maximals' robot modes are a little hard to take seriously at times. In particular: Rattrap having a wheeled axle in place of legs, Blackarachnia's Klingon forehead, Nightscream's floppy hair and general plastic-surgery looks, and the way every character's eyes pointed in two different directions on a regular basis.
  • Rattrap arguably gets it the worst, as he seems to have been reformatted into the body of a child. In addition to the lack of legs making him even shorter than he already was, his face (and the fact that his head seems to come with a small baseball cap built in) makes him look like◊ something Enzo would reboot into.
  • Optimus Primal's dead body from Fallout is probably meant to look like if he disintegrated, but the model quality instead makes it look like he's been comically flattened. The Japanese Gag Dub even turns the scene into intentional humor by having the Maximals cheer "Ybonco is flat! Yay!". Phelous put it best in his review for the series.
  - "Primal kinda died too by becoming a hilarious pancake on the floor, which seems more like a gag for Waspinator in Beast Wars than a supposed-to-be dramatic death for your main hero."
  • When he starts growing after absorbing all of Cybertron's sparks, Megatron bends over and squats over his throne, growling. Yes, it looks exactly like you might think.
• Nightmare Fuel:
  • Megatron apparently runs on this instead of Energon... He started by spreading a deadly virus across the planet, followed that up by building an army out of mecha-corpses, and decided to finish by stealing the souls of his entire species long before the maximals landed. He only got worse from there.
    • Over the course of the series, he begins to mutilate himself in progressively more horrific ways in an attempt to live up to his own doctrines of machine supremacy, eventually stripping himself down to an errant mutant spark that consumes the sparks of other cybertronians to prepare for his "Ascension" resembling something more like a cybernetic lich than the typical warmonger of any other Megatron before or since.
  • Blackarachnia's faceplate coming up, revealing the extra sets of eyes. Talk about putting your Game Face on.
  • The effects of the Key to Vector Sigma on the Maximals. Their organic sides being turned into technomatter drives him insane, leaving them as giggling maniacs who attack their own comrades. And the worst part? They can infect other Maximals by touch.
  • While it is far milder than the original, it's still unnerving to see the effects of Megatron's Hate Plague on the Maximals, who devolve to ranting and attacking each other at the top of a hat. And unlike with the original version, they actually know what's happening to them, and try desperately to fight the effects.
• Older Than They Think: One of the many criticisms levied against this show is Cybertron originally housing organic life. However, this was not a Retcon invented solely for this series. The original G1 cartoon had an episode called "The Dweller in the Depths" which revealed that the Quintessons, the creators of the Transformer race, originally experimented with half organic creatures called Trans-Organics and the episode shows some of the organic caverns deep in the depths of Cybertron. In fact, the link between the Trans-Organics and the Transformers could explain how the latter could scan organic creatures for alt modes in the first place.
• Rooting for the Empire: A handful of people thoroughly enjoyed the Vehicons more than the Maximals, due to having cool designs, varied and interesting personalities, and being pretty entertaining.
• Special Effects Failure: Due to limited use of specular and emissive maps unlike Beast Wars (meaning fewer shiny and glowy effects) explosions are represented by meshes with a solid, shaded texture. They also have shadows.
  • The Speed Stripes that appear during action scenes sometimes have gaps in them, through which the background can be seen.
• Take That, Scrappy!:
  • In "Survivor," Nightscream belittles the rest of the team for losing the Beast Wars. Rattrap responds by knocking him to the floor:
    "You watch your mouth, junior! I've lost friends in that war."
  • For some, Optimus became The Scrappy due to his endless and self-righteously indignant babbling about how "WE NEED TO RESTORE THE BALANCE!" and becoming so fanatical that he was like a Knight Templar. Thus when Cheetor called him out on his plan to obliterate all the mechanical life on Cybertron—which essentially would have made Optimus an eco-terrorist—many fans rejoiced upon hearing Cheetor's speech. Many felt that Optimus had degenerated into a nutjob who was fanatically following the orders of the vague and mysterious Oracle without question, and needed to be snapped out of it.
    • It helps that the entire point of the first season finale and second season opener seemed to have been about how Optimus was descending into fanaticism and needed to stop himself. He's even brought that delving into that made him similar to Megatron to the point where, a bit in dream sequence, Megatron himself calls him out for it.
• They Changed It, Now It Sucks!:
  • The changes to several of the character's personalities were a very sore point for fans of Beast Wars, for one.
  • While the animation was an improvement, the redesigns for the Maximals weren't as liked. Whenever newer toylines/fiction reference the Beast Era, the designs from Beast Wars are usually given the homage.
• They Wasted a Perfectly Good Character: The reveal that Waspinator is Thrust doesn't really go anywhere, as no one ever thinks to reformat him back and his Vehicon personality remains dominant for the rest of the series.
• Too Bleak, Stopped Caring: It's pretty dark right from the get-go and doesn't let up, so it can be tricky to sit through until the ending.
  • Case in point: The Weak Component. You'd expect Blackarachnia, Cheetor and Nightscream to cut Rattrap some slack, since he's just getting used to his new body. Instead, they all pick up the Jerkass Ball and drive him to go to Megatron for some weapons upgrade. What a loyal and understanding group of friends.
• Unintentional Uncanny Valley: The Maximal robot mode faces are a lot more human-like than they were in the previous series, but still have robot-like features and some added animal-like features too. The end result is facial designs that aren't quite human-like, but aren't quite animal-like either, and feel a little off as a result.
• Unintentionally Unsympathetic:
  • In "Survivor", Cheetor physically reprimands Rattrap when the latter calls out Nightscream for insulting the memory of their fallen comrades. While Rattrap's attitude wasn't helping, it still makes Cheetor look like he cares more about the new guy than their lost friends, especially considering how close he was to two of them, Tigatron and Airazor.
  • In Beast Wars, part of Blackarachnia's story arc was that she wanted to make her own choices through her own free will and wanted the Maximals to give her a wide berth to do so. In this series, Blackarachnia would attack Rattrap and call him a traitor when he made a weapons deal with Megatron, despite being a former Predacon herself and having an opportunity to reach out to Rattrap and understand what drove him to such lengths. She also forcibly changes Jetstorm back into Silverbolt despite expecting characters like Silverbolt and Optimus to give her the chance to make her own choices. Given how in the previous show, she wanted to every chance and opportunity to make free choices of her own accord and be accepted by the Maximals as-is, Blackarachnia in this series can come off as being seriously entitled and hypocritical, wanting every second and third chance based on individual sovereignty and free will for herself but not being willing to give it to others.
• Values Dissonance: In the Japanese dub, Nightscream was turned into an Agent Peacock and received Ho Yay with Silverbolt (which Blackarachnia mocked) as a humorous reference to Japanese comedian Masaki Sumitani using a "Hard Gay" persona for some of his skits. Post-2000's, in non-Asian countries, people would definitely complain about the homophobia in using LGBT+ stereotypes for humor in a children's show.
• Vindicated by History:
  • Thanks to the generally bad reception of Transformers: Energon, this series is often seen in a much better light. It's hardly universal, of course, but still quite a feat considering the backlash it once received. This has grown over the decades, especially thanks to other media of dubious quality like the machinima and netflix shows or some of the Bayverse films who make one realize that in hindsight, a show could be a lot worse. Nowadays the sentiment seems to be more that while it leaves a lot to desire as a sequel to Beast Wars, as a standalone show, it's actually very good, with surprisingly mature storytelling, and a balanced take on its environmental message in an era where shows could be very Anvilicious. The voice cast is excellent, and the CGI animation is years ahead of its time. Several of the characters and designs have gone on to be revisited in shows or as Third-Party transformers toys, particularly Strika who remains very popular as a female character who eschews the "sexy robot" aesthetic. Similarly elements of Blackarachnia's design would be revisited in future shows such as her Transformers: Animated counterpart (on which Marty Isenberg also worked) who shares this version's spider abdomen butt, and concealed multiple eyes in robot mode. It's by no means one of the pillars of the franchise but on many fan polls it tends to do surprisingly well, especially considering its reception at the time.
  • Similar to the series, Nightscream (who was a major Scrappy when the series first aired) has gained fans in recent years, due to future characters being much less likeable.
• Visual Effects of Awesome: Pretty much the only thing people can agree on is that the animation is top-notch for the time (Special Effects Failure aside), and has even aged a fair bit better than the stuff from its predecessor. The lighting is on point, and the character acting is a lot more detailed and expressive - which is all the more impressive when you consider how complex and experimental most of the designs are.

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