I forewent sleep last night to stay up and binge watch all eight episodes. This batch is a definite improvement over the last batch of eps.
While Paramount+ labels it as "Season 3", it definitely feels more like how season 1 was split up into three episode batches, with this being the Part 2 of the season 2 episodes, as it directly continues off from where the last of those episodes concluded, unlike how episode 1 of season 2 picked up long after the finale of season 1. The two part climax of this batch also feels like those of the first two season 1 episode batches, as there are still a few loose ends left open and it did not feel like a true series finale like how the season 1 finale could have been.
Without spoiling anything, watching the previous episode batch and this one back to back really shows how the Decepticons turning bad back in those episodes now feels like it was a red herring meant to throw us off from suspecting the true main antagonists who appear in these new episodes. In that sense, I no longer find the Decepticons going bad again as regressive in storytelling as it originally seemed to be.
Of these eight episodes, only one of them felt pretty lackluster to me, and all but one other one move the plot forward in a serialized direction, and I'll always be for serialized storytelling in Transformers cartoons.
All in all, I'd say this was a pretty good batch of episodes. The writing feels stronger again, more like the middle and latter thirds of season 1. Thankfully, the previous batch of episodes was not a sign of things to come, quality-wise, but were instead just setting things up for this batch in ways we didn't expect it to do.
Granted, there was one big plot twist in these eps that I could see coming a mile away, but the precise details of how the twist was done was something I did not see coming at all. So even though I knew that twist was coming, I was still surprised by how it was done.
news.tfw2005.com
