Continuity-wise, Where is thy Sting brought a lot to the table. Two new characters, our first ever gestalt combiner, Shockwave’s identity revealed to the rest of the Autobots, and Ultra Magnus’ apparent death all work together to make a pretty good episode. Oh, and Wasp showed up, but, what with everything else happening, he didn’t seem quite as important as he could have been.
Wasp still baffles me a bit. Apparently, at some point, he was supposed to become this universe’s Waspinator, based on the toy and based on his voice. (An aside- I wish they had gotten the old actor [Scott Mcneil] to do his voice. It wasn’t bad, but Beast wars remains my favorite series of any that I have seen, so it would have been cool.) Anyhow, Wasp has now delivered on this, remaining a redecoe of Bumblebee. I suppose maybe that’ll happen later this season. In any case, Wasp felt like a way to forward the episode’s plot, when the real gems this time were Jetfire and Jetstorm.
I bought the Safeguard two-pack about a month and a half ago or so. 
They were pretty cool, (My very first combiner!) but the packed-in comic was a bit confusing for me, because, while the story itself was acceptable, if not downright good, some of the actual dialogue seemed…. off… I had wondered then if the brother’s speech was written by a ten-years-old boy, and it turns out that’s just the way they talk. Fair enough. They seemed overly powerful, but the reason for that is obvious. Safeguard (as in, cartoon safeguard. Try to keep up.) was pretty cool, even if we didn’t get to see much of him. It was also pretty neat that the brothers are the first Autobot fliers. There has traditionally been an overall ‘theme’ to each side’s alternate mode. In Beast Wars, the Maximals all transformed in to mammals, while the predacons all turned in to creepy crawlers and insects. (The exception to this being, of course Megatron and Dinobot. That’s fine though, because they were both awesome.) In any case, the ‘good guys,’ be Autobot or Maximal have had a number of soldiers capable of flight. Animated completely abolished this until now, which is kind of a neat choice. You could argue that Omega Supreme’s alt-mode can fly, but he’s sort of the exception to the rule, on account of the fact that he is a giant robot that doesn’t take crap from anyone outside of him. It’s fantastic that even the great transformers have their own giant, near-mythical robots.
On the opposite, not-at-all-mythical side of the spectrum, we have the elite guard. These guys are just making me sad. To be clear, I’m talking about Ultra Magnus, Sentinal Prime, and Jazz. Magnus is partly responsible for Sentinal’s superiority complex In that he hired and promoted the asshole, and doesn’t seem to care that Prime has repeatedly more with his team of intergalactic construction workers than than his (Magnus’) entire damned army of guardsmenbots. Sentinal, and (yes, I realize his entire goal from a character standpoint is to do this, don’t worry,) is a jerk. He’s the corporate lackey that spends all of his on-the-clock time bad-mouthing the lower-on-the-food-chain employees that keep the company afloat. Clearly, one of the gens of the autobot army… Jazz, on the other hand, would be cool if he didn’t spend nearly all of his screen time watching each and every one of his superiors fuck up over and over. Seriously. He sits around at watches it all happen. It’s a wonder the decepticons haven’t dominated everything in sight already with this group of clowns running the rodeo.
And that’s pretty much what happened at the end of this episode: Shockwave beat the silicone out of Ultra Magnus. Did anybody else find it weird that the first thing Ironhide asked upon finding his leader strewn In bits all over the carpet was “Where’s your hammer”? Bottom Line, though: It looks grim for Mags. I admit that I’m a bit afraid that some dumbass will put Sentinal in charge and we’ll go from bad to worse.
