Here's the good news: Transformers fans who know "G1" inside and out will find a lot to like in Kingdom, the final chapter of Netflix's trilogy of Transformers: War for Cybertron miniseries.
That's not a huge crowd, mind you. If you're not a younger Gen Xer or an older Millennial, you likely walk into this exposition-heavy Kingdom without a proverbial life vest. There's nothing to keep you afloat as you grasp at shifting currents of understanding while the six-episode miniseries floods you with a boatload of new proper names and time-twisted trickery.
Even if you've been following along through the otherwise great Siege and its competent yet exceedingly dense follow-up, Earthrise, keeping up with Kingdom is still a struggle. Fans of G1 benefit most because, ultimately, this whole thing is a darker and more textured version of the story told in the classic '80s cartoon. Without that touchstone, it's easy to get lost.
Kingdom picks up right where we left off in Earthrise, with the last remnants of the Autobot and Decepticon factions stranded on a prehistoric Earth. Hunkered down at crash sites in separate locations as the story opens, the eternally warring groups are licking their wounds and hardening their defenses ahead of a last-ditch push to find the Allspark.
That would-be source of all Transformer life — the reality turns out to be a bit more complex than that, as we eventually learn — is somewhere on Earth. Optimus Prime saw to that as Earthrise wound into its finale. But the all-powerful McGuffin isn't the only thing out there in the jungle. So are the Maximals and their mortal enemies, the Predacons.
It turns out that these prehistoric Earth-dwellers are distant descendants of the Transformers we know and love already. The Maximals, the Autobots-aligned crew, are transforming alien robots who can take the form of forest animals. There's a rhino (Rhinox!), a rat (Rattrap!), a cheetah and a tiger (Cheetor and Tigatron!), and an eagle (Airazor!). They're led by a transforming gorilla, Optimus Primal.
It *does* feature a character who has a literal T-Rex head in place of a hand when he's in his robot form.
(This is the part where I remind you again that the whole series is based on an '80s cartoon and, while that decade was many things, it was never, ever subtle.)
The Predacons, meanwhile, are dinosaur Transformers. And you know what? Kingdom may be the weakest of the bunch in this series, but it does feature a character who has a literal T-Rex head in place of a hand when he's in his robot form. It's something of a triumph that he appears in serious scenes that continue to feel high-stakes, despite the ridiculous head-hand thing.
I'm keeping the Maximal and Predacon details vague because there are big spoilers in how they tie to the story. Suffice to say, it's not an accident they had already set up shop on Earth long before the Transformers arrived. There is no recovering the Allspark without them.
The new faces in Kingdom add to an already hefty cast, to the point that multiple key characters from the earlier chapters in this trilogy fade to the background. Bumblebee, a pivotal player in the larger story, has a vital role to play before everything is over, but we barely see him until that time comes. The influx of new characters and backgrounding of older ones contributes to Kingdom being hard to follow, especially with all the dense exposition that needs to be delivered.
This stretch of six episodes — about three hours of television, all in — is where War for Cybertron's deepest secrets are finally revealed. So in addition to meeting this new cast and getting a handle on their personalities, we're also finding out how they connect to the big picture, as well as the mysterious forces that have been shaping said big picture. All while carrying forward the ongoing feud between Optimus Prime and Megatron, which has been War for Cybertron's (and really, all of Transformers') main thread.
With so much to do and so much information to impart, Kingdom is left with some serious pacing issues. The middle episodes in particular plod along and blend together in a stew of proper names and high-minded concepts related to time travel and the rules of existence. I found myself rewinding scenes more than once all throughout Kingdom, just to keep up.
It doesn't help that the new Transformers miniseries arrives just a week after Kevin Smith's revitalized take on He-Man in Masters of the Universe: Revelation. Smith wrote a story that pushed the fiction forward, expanding our notion of what a He-Man story can even be. War for Cybertron, meanwhile, is a re-telling. For all its inherent flaws, Kingdom also wilts in the shadow of a more competent and clever return to an '80s icon.
That's not to say the overall journey isn't worth it. Kingdom does tie up the threads that need tying, and in the end it brings closure to Optimus Prime's forever battle with Megatron — the most critical plot across all three miniseries. It also very clearly plants a flag for future stories in this universe, with the biggest surprises and twists of the final episodes pulling double-duty as they lay the groundwork for what comes next.
Longtime Transformers fans know this already, and they're the ones who will feel most fulfilled by Kingdom's epic finish. The rest of us will be turning to wiki pages and replaying scenes just to try to make sense of it all. And that's the best case hope for Netflix here. Plenty of people are simply going to bounce off Kingdom once it overwhelms them. Even a 30-minute episode feels like an eternity when you can't follow what's going on.
That's too bad after such a promising start. Hopefully, War for Cybertron's creative team is able to recognize what went wrong in Kingdom and factor that into their thinking moving forward. There's still room in this world for more Transformers stories, and despite its flaws, this Netflix production got a lot of things right.
It's just a rough finish. If you've kept up for this long, Transformers: War for Cybertron - Kingdom is the end of the story you've been waiting for. Just don't expect to keep up with all of it if you don't have decades of Transformers fandom (or a willingness to wikidive) to fall back on.
All six episodes of Transformers: War for Cybertron - Kingdom come to Netflix on July 29.
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