Today’s header image is a puzzler: The Decepticon Soundwave wearing the sigil of the Autobots for a brief second in the heat of battle. Sure, it’s just an animation error, one of thousands in Transformers episodes (turns out cranking out the weekly exploits of 70 or 80 different characters can lead to some shortcuts on the production side) but it’s also one that has always seemed like it should have more meaning. After all, Soundwave is the best of the Generation One characters, with his weird symbiotic cassettes and altered Frank Welker vocals, why wouldn’t I want to see him switching sides? It’s the kind of intellectual exercise that leads to fascinating alternate universe fanfic, and also today’s cybernetic query…
The MS-QOTD (pronounced, as always, “misquoted”) has also always thought it would have been terrifying and amazing for Luke or Leia to have joined their big cyborg dad on the Dark Side, somewhere in the original trilogy, asking: Which character from your favorite fictional worlds would be best served by switching sides?
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Most of my favorites have already been done. The Green Ranger was evil, the Justice League became the Justice Lords, Transformers has “Shattered Glass” (a sort of “Mirror, Mirror” reverse universe where the Decepticons are good and the Autobots are evil, and not everyone is in their original faction), Hakaider had a stint as a hero and so on.
But the one I most want to see is The Valeyard, the evil incarnation of The Doctor. We’ve seen bits of him in the classic series, but I’d love to finally see him as the “current” incarnation of The Doctor even if it is only for a mini-series or a two part special or something.
Hmm, there’s already been so many. Instead of of killing cyclops, they should have turned him into real mutant revolutionary. Magneto’s idealism without curly mustache villain stuff, just will to get even. He and his people have been screwed over so many times that it would be justifiable.
Leaving the Mirror Universe aside, I’ve always wondered what if Spock was really half-human, half-ROMULAN – Sarek being a deep cover Romulan agent who had a child on Vulcan – and that Spock was a Romulan spy inside of Starfleet.
It puts the whole ‘Ambassador Spock’ of TNG era into a whole new light, spending all that time on the Romuland world.
A very similar premise was pitched for an alternate reality Trek story (in the novels, I think, though it may have been for a comic, been a long time since I read about it), but was turned down. I was always disappointed by that because it would make for an intriguing story that just throws so much into question.
Sticking with a Transformers, the work that IDW has done with Autobot Megatron has been fantastic. He realized a few years ago that he had gone too far with his methods and has taken up with the Autobots. Doesn’t seem like it would make sense but it’s the most compelling Megatron has ever been written.