62 In Cybertron Dreams, Thundercracker becomes Decepticon leader pro tem when Megatron leaves Cybertron ostensibly because of the valor he showed in the battle with Unicron. For Reloaded, I wanted to show there was more to it than that.

As for why Thundercracker gets this nod at all, when there are so many other Decepticons you would think were more logical choices (Onslaught, for instance), well... he was the first Decepticon toy I had, and I've got a sentimental spot for him. It's really as simple as that (though we'll get back to this later).

112 Musterion is a Greek word meaning "that which cannot be known until it is revealed" - not so much a mystery, despite the similarity of the word, as a secret. Which seemed appropriate for what's going down in this episode.

131 Why yes, it's been 4 years since the prior Issue, why do you ask? (More on this at the end of the annotations).

156 All the way back in More than Meets the Eye, Part 2. PJM

226 Feedback and his spark-twin, Shriekback, are original characters devised back in the old days to make up for the fact that Soundwave was going to be leaving Cybertron at the end of Dreams. The latter is named after a band.

Feedback and Shriekback's vehicle modes are based on a military command and control vehicle built from the Mercedes-Benz Unimog truck. PJM

321 Specifically, a 1969 Dodge Coronet Super Bee. Yeah, that was Shana's idea.

376 Historically, not a question all that many people would ask themselves.

421 Ardie's fondness for the Walt Simonson era of Marvel Comics' The Mighty Thor is directly responsible for this sound effect.

446 Why Megatron never just scrapped Starscream back in the day is something that has perplexed every Decepticon of the old guard at one time or another.

513 The absence of a slowly spreading pool of energon suggests that Windrazor has been null-rayed rather than out-and-out blasted.

577 Kremzeek Kola: When you really need a zap!

656 I was very tempted to swap the positions of Blaster's two humanoid-robot minions in this episode, so that Cliff could say "Rewind! Back it up!", but it wouldn't have fit with their personalities for Eject to be missing the show and Rewind doing the play-by-play.

675 For a good example of this phenomenon, I refer the reader to the Mythbusters episode "Salsa Escape", in which they blow up a concrete truck. Or any of the dozens of other episodes which feature the clip of the concrete truck exploding in the opening credits. It's clearly a giGANtic explosion, but all we hear is a sort of BWOOOO sound. Also, we see here that Thundercracker doesn't actually have to be moving to do his sonic boom trick, which was news to Razorclaw.

727 Metallikato is basically Cybertronian kenjutsu; in the modern UF universe it's considered one of the Panzerkünst. The Decepticon Bludgeon is probably the most prominent Metallikato stylist in the canon. As part of his Seeker training (see note 752 below), Thundercracker learned what is essentially a sort of Decepticon krav maga - special forces street fighting, comprised of some Metallikato, some Crystalocution (that's where the actuator locks and throws he uses later in his fight with Razorclaw come from), and moves from a number of other formal Cybertronian martial arts, all blended into one brutally efficient system.

737 Rodimus Prime. Not on-screen. Didn't end well for Razorclaw.

752 Here I finally get around to codifying the difference between a Decepticon Sky Soldier (of which there are hordes) and a Seeker (of which there are three left at this point). The Seekers were basically the Sky Soldier SAS. Very highly trained, ultra-elite commandos. Starscream, Thundercracker, and Skywarp were seriously bad dudes once upon a time. By the time we saw them on Earth, they were mere shadows of their former selves, particularly the latter two.

768 Howard Cosell commentating the 1973 title fight between Joe Frazier and George Foreman (for HBO, not, as Eject believes a moment later, Wide World of Sports).

796 Fairlight Curtana, the next generation version of the Fairlight Excalibur deck. PJM

825 Soundwave's online alias of "Gabriel Blackrock" references 20th-century industrialist G.B. Blackrock (from the Marvel Comics Transformers series). In the UF universe, he may or may not have had some relevance to the Transformers' secret war on Earth between 1985 and First Contact with Salusia in 1999.

842 The Blues Brothers. Soundwave is Elwood, Sylvie is Jake. It makes a strange sort of sense.

848 No, she was not naked.

906 Chuck Keith sighting! PJM

937 This is not a universal tradition of combiner teams; the other Stunticons, for example, would simply have held a party if someone on the opposite team clobbered Motormaster and took him prisoner.

1064 The others aren't sure which thing they're more shocked by: the fact that Soundwave knows how to hack Minicon status computers off the top of his head, or that he just totally saved that guy's spark.

1072 The virtual geth swarm was intended to be reminiscent of the real-world Collector seeker swarms in Mass Effect 2. The program they're injecting into the Minicons' avatars is supposed to paralyze them, not kill them - the one the Commcen team encountered above was having a sort of cybernetic allergic reaction.

1162 This utility is, unsurprisingly, called blazingsword.exe.

1211 In the popular computer roleplaying game Autobots: The Early Years, Red Alert can always, always be found in the Ark's forward battery, futzing with the targeting computer, no matter the time of day.

The game itself plays like a combination of the Real World's Transformers: War for Cybertron and Mass Effect, with aspects of the relationship/influence mechanics from Knights of the Old Republic and Dragon Age. You start as an Autobot with promise, put in charge of a small task force -- but if you do well enough, you may well find yourself as the new Prime! But can you get Cliffjumper and the Dynobots to respect you without totally alienating the Protectobots?

1285 Soundwave's vehicle mode is taken directly from War for Cybertron. PJM

1295 Although remodeling alternate modes is less difficult in the modern UF era than it has historically been for the "native" Transformers thanks to adaptive technology brought across by the extradimensional Cybertronian refugees popularly known as the Beast Warriors, only a handful can transcan and reformat themselves without outside assistance (as e.g. Bumblebee does in the first live-action movie), and Blaster is not one of them.

1327 As seen in Transformers: War of Cybertron, where, ironically, it's Soundwave screwing with the speedways while the Autobots try to get to the Decagon.

1372 Portal reference!

1540 Tayari Plaza is one of the locations encountered in Halo 3: ODST. A lot of the visual design for Little Iacon was taken from the streets of New Mombasa, especially its nighttime mood of war-torn, abandoned desolation.

1613 The ability of Frenzy's fists to become drills was wholeheartedly swiped from IDW's run on the Transformers comic. Which made sense to me, because the high-pitched whine of dentist drills goes well with Frenzy's disorienting harmonics ability.

1637 A similar tactic was used by the geth to bypass security on Noveria in Mass Effect.

1671 And here, Blaster channels the spirit of Will Smith.

1697 The surest way to deal with an Armature or Colossus in close quarters in Mass Effect if you've got the Mako handy? Run It Over. (The other option, shooting it with a tank cannon at range, isn't available here.)

1796 Not the way you want to cap off a visit with your best friend's parents. PJM

2007 In the light of note 1295 above, Terror is almost certainly indulging in snark here - a beat-up early-model Sky Soldier is the last guy you would expect to have innate transcan capabilities.

2035 This is the real title of this version of the song.

2102 In Mass Effect 2, this would have been a heat sink, but frankly that explanation for including an "ammo" gameplay mechanism in the second game is weak, so I've omitted it.

2126 Miko may have taught it to him, but old-timey video game fans may recognize this as Captain Spencer's stunt from the overhead-camera stages of Bionic Commando.

2146 It is generally accepted in the studio that Frenzy is pretty much the only Transformer who could say this opening line and MEAN IT. PJM

2244 Nightstick is an original character devised to make use of the "Cybertron Defense Hot Shot" toy from Transformers Cybertron. Not to be confused with Targetmaster Cyclonus's partner, who does not exist in UF. He's Red Alert's military counterpart, head of the Autobot Military Police (the job Red had before he became Director of Planetary Security for all of Cybertron).

2269 A similar mission occurred in War for Cybertron, save that there the Decepticons were trying to take the AA guns offline.

2371 In other words, 18 years, assuming one cycle is roughly equivalent to a nanosecond. PJM

2372 In Transformers Animated, Stinger's firepower is underclocked because he's not a warrior, not because he's underage.

2520 GLaDOS & Jonathan Coulton, 2007. PJM

2451 Look out honey 'cause I'm usin' technology
Ain't got time to make no apology

2530 As an aside, when I got to about here, iTunes DJ came up with Kate Bush's "Experiment IV":

They told us all they wanted
Was a sound that could kill someone from a distance

2579 MBTA joke.

2612 Think Graham Chapman.

2690 Again, Blaster channels Will Smith.

2706 Red Alert and Starscream once before seriously crossed paths in the episode Auto Berserk. Not one of Red Alert's better days. It's a wonder he's not more bitter about it. PJM

2762 Alexis and Starscream had kind of a thing going in Transformers Armada, but the circumstances and events in their backstory were completely different in UF. We'll get back to this.

2900 And now, what the heck took us so long to get us to Issue #5.

2007 was, to put it bluntly, not a good year for us medically, for either of the authors. Gryphon was having his Great Brain Adventure, and as for myself, I was dealing with increasing levels of ammonia buildup in my bloodstream and brain. The reason for it? I was in the advanced ending stages of cirrhosis of the liver due to a longstanding genetic condition. It got so bad that I was incapable of driving, and had to have my mother take me to and from work. And then, finally, at the end of 2007, I underwent a liver transplant and spent over 3 months recovering from the surgery.

Suffice it to say, I'm now doing fine, but the entire medical adventure severely threw me off my game, so much that I didn't feel up to resuming Cybertron Reloaded for quite some time afterwards. Never mind the fact that Transformers media was experiencing a resurgence (via the live-action movies and Animated) which made it somewhat difficult to keep up. In that period, Gryphon had moved onto other projects, which I helped with (like Manhunt and Star-Crossed) but didn't majorly contribute text. Thse additions to UF also made things more convoluted, as the background timing of events continued to shift, and made it more difficult to get up the mojo to continue.

However, finally, yet more Transformers media came out (notably War for Cybertron and Prime), which seemed to finally light the spark that allowed us to get back on track with Cybertron Reloaded -- and here we are today.

Here's hoping it won't be another 4 years until the next issue.... PJM