Last Stand of the Wreckers issue 5

« The Transformers: Last Stand of the Wreckers #5 »
This is the end, my former friend.
Publisher	IDW Publishing
First published	May 19, 2010
Cover date	May 2010
Story	Nick Roche & James Roberts
Script	Nick Roche & James Roberts
Art	Nick Roche
Colors	Josh Burcham
Letters	Chris Mowry
Editor	Andy Schmidt
Associate editor	Denton J. Tipton
Continuity	2005 IDW continuity
Chronology	Current era (2010)

Where everything FINALLY hits the fan.

Synopsis

In Garrus-9, Overlord tears Guzzle in half, bashes Kup unconscious, and smirks when Impactor destroys his right eye. Down in the Aequitas chamber, Verity Carlo continues to argue against detonating the deterrence chips, which will kill Impactor in addition to the closing Decepticons. She puts her case to Ironfist, arguing that he's made the Wreckers stand for something, and his Wreckers would never kill one of their own.

Pyro decides to abandon his egotistical visions of a glorious death and tells the others to run; he'll cover them. Dying for people he cares about, he tells Ironfist, is the most he can do, and he tells Verity that the Autobots need the humans to look after them. The Wreckers withdraw, Ironfist working out a plan to deal with Overlord, while Pyro is ingloriously torn to pieces behind them. As they withdraw, at Verity's urging, Ironfist reveals the truth he's learnt about Impactor and Pova...

Twenty years ago, pinned down on Pova, Impactor decided the best way to get a shot at Squadron X would be to fire through Springer's midsection. Despite Springer's protest that he didn't have the circuit dampeners needed to avoid the pain, Impactor fired. After winning the battle, Impactor reported to Prowl that the enemy had been caught, but learned Povian neutrality made the operation illegal; Squadron X would have to be released. Instead, Impactor murdered the Decepticons as they knelt in chains as Springer tried to stop him and the others stood silent...

Back outside, Overlord has defeated Impactor, but Springer gloats that his men will soon arrive with the freed Autobot prisoners, but Overlord reveals he had already ordered the prisoners executed. Luckily, the other Wreckers do arrive and Perceptor blasts the monster's hand off to free Springer, while Ironfist chucks him a massive chaingun, which Springer unloads into Overlord.

Overlord shrugs off the fire, rips off Springer's face, and blasts Perceptor offline, leaving only Ironfist. That is when said nerd reveals the gun was loaded with deterrence chips... and detonates them.

Overlord learned the hard way to never let The Fallen ever do your makeovers.

Ironfist falls unconscious, leaving Verity alone as Overlord rises as a fire-consumed, skeletal horror, enraged that he's left unable to face Megatron when he arrives. Realizing Overlord's intentions, Verity, informs him that Megatron is long dead and laughs; Overlord thought Megatron would come for him, yet the tyrant died not remembering Overlord at all. The monster collapses in despair, and Impactor rises from the mat to finish him. When Overlord fails to resist, Impactor refuses to kill him. Repenting his actions on Pova, he disables Overlord for capture and trial... as Springer would want.

Overlord is beaten and the Decepticons have fled, but four Wreckers lie dead. Springer and Fortress Maximus are on emergency life support, their chances of recovery unclear. Pardoned by Ultra Magnus, Impactor and a repaired Guzzle abruptly leave. Ironfist dies en route to Earth from an aneurysm caused by a lab accident with his cerebro-centric bullets eighteen months ago that left one inching towards his brain all along.

On Earth, Prowl takes this report and the ostensibly sole data slug Ironfist was able to make of the Aequitas data. He admits to Ultra Magnus that he knew about Ironfist's approaching death and had arranged for him to be placed on the Wreckers, his dream job, in exchange for bypassing the suicide lock on Aequitas. ("Yes, of course I regret it.") Prowl reveals the true reason for the mission: they couldn't allow the Decepticons to get Aequitas's records of tried Autobots. Prowl recalls the horror of their charges. Magnus believes in revealing the trials; Prowl agrees, but fears the Autobots will be shattered if they learn the truth before the war ends. Departing, Ultra Magnus notes how convenient it would be for Prowl if the data were corrupted, but he likes to think Prowl better than to destroy the evidence. Alone, contemplating the slug, Prowl slightly squeezes it...

And on Earth, Verity writing as "Fisitron", muses whether this is the "end of the road" for the Wreckers or just a "stop-off" to reflect. "Because that's how we honor those we've lost: by looking forward, not back."

Featured characters

(Characters in italic text appear only in flashbacks.)
(Numbers indicate order of appearance.)

Quotes

"It's a story of sacrifice and betrayal, and of good people dying in stupid, pointless ways."

—"Fisitron"

"Oh, don't look so surprised. You didn't expect this stunted little wretch to survive, did you?"
"You're a maniac!"

—Overlord's opinion on Guzzle's chance of living and Kup pretty much summing up readers' thoughts of Overlord.

"Ironfist! You should know better than anyone what the Wreckers are really about! They give the other Autobots something to believe in!"

—Verity trying to motivate Ironfist.

"I figure that dying to save people you care about is the most that anyone can do."
"I think you have your motto."
"No... my last words."

—Pyro and Ironfist

"Sweet."

—Springer gets thrown a giant gun to shoot Overlord with.

"Sweet."

—Overlord holds Springer's face-skin in his palm.

"Oh, man, this is PERFECT! You can't accept that he never gave chase! You lived your life thinking about him every day, and he died forgetting all about you!"
"But... But he owes me! _{He owes me.}"

—Verity giving Overlord the wonderful news about Megatron.

"One way or another, you've killed a lot of my friends today. It's been a long time coming, but this is where you get yours!"

—Impactor to Overlord.

"You see, this is one of those stories with a moral. And the moral is simply this: life persists."

—Verity

Notes

Continuity notes

• The visuals of the battle on Pova in this issue contrasts sharply with how it was depicted in the previous issue. In issue 4, the battle was depicted with a sense of non-reality (befitting a falsified story), taking place on a sunny day, with the participants having little damage upon their bodies, even in death. However, in issue 5, the reality shows a depressing, rainy landscape with the participants all showing the signs of battle injuries. When Impactor is shown standing above the corpses of Squadron X, he is splattered with their fluids.
  • The visuals aren't all that's different; the Wreckers in the real story are way more nasty then the glamorized portrayal in Ironfist's version. Springer begs in an undignified manner for his friends not to abandon him, Impactor is totally unsympathetic to Springer's plight, and Roadbuster cruelly brags about putting inhibitor vices on Squadron X just to humiliate them, rather than any concern about safety. All the exact opposite of how it was portrayed in issue 4.
• Ironfist mentions that Pyro's plan to sacrifice himself isn't "exactly Prime's Fivefold Maneuver". Pyro used the same words in issue 2 to describe the lack of finesse regarding Springer's plan to liberate the prisoners of Garrus-9.
• Ultra Magnus is shown in this issue in the design that Don Figueroa gave him for the first arc of the ongoing series.
• Ironfist's little head scar had been around since #1, so we'd all been visually forewarned what his accident had been...
• The scenes of the dead prisoners is a deliberate copy of #3's scene of the imprisoned prisoners hearing the Wreckers have come to save them...
• Near the end of the issue we see a one-panel flashback of Flame on trial for war crimes during the Aequitas hearings. He'll turn up again later.
• Perceptor uses his pretty-much-forgotten third "tank" mode in this issue.
• At the end of this issue, Kup and Perceptor are the only active Wreckers, with the other eight either dead, AWOL (Impactor and Guzzle), discharged (Whirl), or in critical condition (Springer), not counting Roadbuster.
• "Zero Point", a short story included in the second Last Stand hardcover, would reveal that Squadron X were merely refueling on Pova and that the Wreckers had started the fight unprovoked. In the same collection, Ferak's profile says they were on a supply run and not a combat mission. No "did it to save lives" excuse for you, Impactor!
• Also in "Zero Point", we learn what the Wreckers are thinking when they stand silently by: they're thinking "hooray, good ol' Impactor!" but will pretend otherwise so Springer will keep the team going.
• Autopedia profiles include Pyro, Guzzle, and Impactor. Huzzah!
  • Autopedia tells us that Pyro suffers from Primus apotheosis.
  • Pyro's profile reveals he was at the Simanzi Massacre, same as Rotorstorm in his profile. Both began to suffer their personality disorders following the Massacre...
• First appearances: Flame, Tyrest, Stakeout

Transformers references

• On Pova, Prowl admonishes Impactor through a communications device in his palm which projected an image that resembles a communicube. The text story "Bullets" would later confirm these as communicubes.
• Impactor's Autopedia profile mentions that Impactor got the idea for his harpoon arm after meeting an unnamed dimension-hopping "freelance peacekeeping agent" who had been "ricocheting from universe to universe after leaping through an exploding time portal." Death's Head, yes? Their meeting is chronicled in Wreckers: Declassified, Datalog 151, which refers to the Marvel UK issue number in which Death's Head leaps through a time portal with Cyclonus and Scourge and disappears from the story. The title of said datalog, "The Wreckers at the Crossroads of Time", refers to the short Doctor Who story, "The Crossroads of Time", which saw the titular Time Lord have a run-in with Death's Head following the time portal incident.
• One of Flame's crimes is "desecration of corpses", a reference to the character's zombie-raising antics in the Marvel UK comics.
• The final scene takes place in Mister O's.
• According to the TPB of the series, the police car parked outside is not Prowl or Streetwise.^[1] Several years later, it would be revealed that the car is actually Stakeout, having been assigned to work with Verity by Ultra Magnus after the events on Garrus-9.
• Speaking of Datalog numbers, the Datalog retelling of this series is numbered #332, which was the total number of issues of the Marvel UK Transformers comic had.

Real-life references

• Part of the narration by "Fisitron" on the first page is based upon Alfred, Lord Tennyson's poem, "The Charge of the Light Brigade". At the end of the issue, with Verity finishing the entry as "Fisitron", a book of Tennyson's poetry is on the table.
• One of the sites of Flame's atrocities, Babu Yar, is named very similarly to a famous historical massacre site on Earth.
• Amongst Flame's atrocities is listed the crime of "circuit-boarding", a reference to the torture technique controversially used by the CIA known as waterboarding—kind of appropriate for a rogue Autobot.
• In what's likely a deliberate reference to "The Inquisitor" episode of the British sci-fi sitcom Red Dwarf, Impactor almost directly quotes that show's Dave Lister, with his line to Overlord: "One way or another, you killed a lot of my friends today".

Errors

• In the first scene in the Aequitas chamber, Topspin's body is initially colored gray and black (deactivated), but on the next page, it is colored normally.
• In the panel where Verity is on her knees mourning Ironfist's death, the part of the shirt below her ribcage is colored like skin.

Other trivia

• Prowl starts to squeeze the chip a bit but it's left ambiguous as to whether he actually destroyed it. Even Roche and Roberts don't know whether Prowl did it! ^[2] So how dodgy do you think Prowl is?
• James Roberts has noted that Prowl never asks about the Autobot prisoners, the alleged reason the Wreckers were sent in the first place. Brr.

Production

The hardcover trade of Last Stand reveals information about both Roche's original pitch and early Roche-Roberts scripts.

In Roche's pitch:

• Following Perceptor's death last issue, Springer and Kup both die here. Springer takes out Overlord in a suicide bombing and as a shocked Kup says 'that's that', Guzzle guns him down for all his lost friends. He then is killed himself for it. (A version of this shows up in Sins of the Wreckers.)
• The series ends with Magnus assembling a new Wreckers that he'd run.

In early scripts:

• The characters escape the Aequitas chamber with a transmat that just happened to be there. This was dropped in later scripts for being lazy (the character's even talk about how convenient it is). It would have still required Pyro to sacrifice himself, this time staying behind to man the controls.
• Prowl visibly breaks the data slug but, as we didn't see until "In Word and Deed", Ironfist had made a backup copy.
• No Tyrest in the court scene (Red Alert is there though) and Prowl lists specific atrocities.
• At the very end Verity is in Mister O's with Jimmy Pink implying she's found a 'kind of peace'.

In a Moonbase 2 interview, Roche and Roberts said either Springer, Perceptor, or Kup were going to die in the final issue during planning, but in the end they weren't allowed to do it.^[3] Also dropped was any Guzzle/Kup confrontation, as there simply wasn't room in the condensed beast for it. They claim in the trade that one of the Big Three was allowed to be killed off but they chickened out.

Covers (3)

• Cover A: A silhouette of Overlord looming over Impactor and Springer amidst flames with several Autobot grave markers in front of them, art by Nick Roche and colors by Josh Burcham.
• Cover B: A Transformer hand lying on the ground, art and colors by Trevor Hutchison.
• Cover RI: "Virgin" title-free edition of cover B.

• 

  "See those graves?"
  "Yeah"
  "I put your guys in there!"
  "NOOOOOOOO!!!!!!"

• 

  He's dead, Jim.

• 

  Cover RI

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Reprints

Other than collections of the full series

• N/A

References