Episodes: 26
Running time: 30 min
Cast: Will Friedle (Bumblebee), Constance Zimmer (Strongarm), Darren Criss (Sideswipe), Peter Cullen (Optimus Prime), Michael Whitfield (Fixit), Khary Payton (Grimlock), Eric Bauza (Drift).
Rating: 2.7/5
I know, I know, I’m watching this series rather late. Life and all that, you know? I was also not really a fan of Fixit or the humans, so that put me off for quite a while. The fact that TFWiki didn’t really update their page on Transformers Robots in Disguise Season 3 also made me hesitate, because I didn’t really want to see the Bee Team do monster-of-the-week episodes for another season. But I got down to it, and my feeling are… mixed.
Transformers: Robots in Disguise Season 3 is a cell-shaded 3D-animated series that follows the adventures of Bumblebee and his team on Earth in the aftermath of Transformers: Prime. This season sees Team Bee learning to combine and going after teams of villains, even as they uncover an insidious threat that has grown to endanger all of Cybertron. If you consider Transformers Robots in Disguise to have Seasons 1, 2, and 2.5 – then this is Season 3. If you count them as Seasons 1, 2, 3, then this is Season 4. I consider this Season 3.
The subtitle for the show is “Combiner Force”, and we do get… some combiner teams. A total of three. It was fun to see the show struggling to let the Autobots combine, but once they could do form Ultra Bee, the team had to be nerfed (by taking away Drift for the last part of the season) so that they couldn’t use it all the time to win every battle. Nevertheless, the combiners had interesting designs, and I liked how that turned out.
We also see the return of Optimus Prime and other fan favourites for the series finale, even though they were not really around for most of the series. I would have liked to see Team Prime return (ie, with a Transformers: Robots in Disguise version of Arcee), but that didn’t happen because… I’m not really sure. I guess they wanted to push Windblade at this point in time?
Steeljaw, who was the villain for the past few seasons, was missing for the first half. But he came back, and I liked seeing how he manipulated the Autobots and his interactions with Bumblebee. Although he’s not all that imposing, he’s the slick, slimy sort of villain who’s actually quite charming. He doesn’t really have a big role to play in this season, and I was a little irritated that he had been left out when the season began, so it was gratifying to see him appear in the finale as an ally of sorts.
Many other new characters appear too – characters that didn’t become toys. I felt this was a tremendous wasted opportunity. There were so many Transformers: Robots in Disguise toys that felt like tired rehashes of the same old characters, and I thought the series didn’t create any new characters. But they did! And they were wasted. Why? I’d have loved to get a Nightra or Dropforge figure, but oh well. The show didn’t quite sync with the toy line.
There is an effort to create proper series arcs in the show. However, that’s just it – it’s an effort. What started out as some mysterious plot by Soundwave, Steeljaw, and other villains were all explained away in one line in the final episode by the “big bad”, without actually telling us why they would go to all the trouble of bothering Team Bee. It felt so disjointed, like they just threw a bunch of ideas and let the writers all work in silos, before the head writer came in to tie everything together. It was disappointing. I thought all those ideas were going somewhere, but nope, it was like they rushed to tie everything up in the last 2-3 episodes with no proper setup or foreshadowing. They made it more adult though (can’t believe how many times Bumblebee got tortured in this season), so I wasn’t exactly sure who the target audience was anymore.
Overall, Transformers: Robots in Disguise Season 3 had great ideas that were kind of just mushed together to fill 26 episodes. If there had been a better writer on board, all these elements could have been woven together to form a more epic and coherent whole. As it is, it felt like a meh show that kind of ends the Transformers: Prime continuity on a whimper. It could have been so much better.
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