Transformers vs. The Terminator #1 »
More brutal than being in Mortal Kombat 11.
"Enemy of My Enemy Part One"
Publisher	IDW Publishing and Dark Horse Comics
First published	March 25, 2020
Cover date	March 2020
Story by	David Mariotte, Tom Waltz and John Barber
Written by	David Mariotte and John Barber
Art by	Alex Milne
Colors by	David García Cruz
Letters by	Jake M. Wood
Editor	Tom Waltz and Riley Farmer

To save the future, a Terminator unit must travel to the past to carry out a critical mission: end the Cybertronian war on Earth before it ever begins!

Synopsis

The year 2029: in the war-torn ruins of Los Angeles, a lone resistance fighter makes his way through a mass graveyard of mangled Cybertronian corpses, slips past the machines that patrol the burned-out city, and makes his way to his rendezvous, only to be met by a skeletal Terminator android! But all is not as it seems; this resistance fighter is himself a Terminator, an advanced T-800 unit clad in human flesh, sourced by Skynet for a desperate, last-ditch mission. In Skynet's subterranean Omega Base, legions of Terminators prepare this cyborg infiltrator for a trip through time via Skynet's experimental time displacement device, but their window of opportunity is closing fast. Sure enough, an aboveground explosion shakes the bunker, a sure sign that an enemy patrol's found their position—a patrol that consists of Starscream, his Seekers, and the Insecticons... for in this upside-down future, Skynet is the resistance, whose mechanical soldiers wage a losing war against the forces of the Decepticons!

War machines from two different worlds clash as Skynet tries to stall out the Decepticons for as long as possible: hordes of T-800 Terminators attempt to overwhelm their foes but are quickly blown to bits, and even Skynet's gigantic, Cybertronian-derived T-8000s only impede the Transformers for a moment before Skywarp and Thundercracker get the upper hand. With the destruction of Skynet's last holdout, the Decepticons have seemingly completed their conquest of Earth, until Starscream glimpses the activation of the time machine. Although he's unaware of the true nature of Skynet's final gambit, Starscream nevertheless tries to snatch the T-800 out of the glowing energy sphere that envelops the cyborg, but he's not fast enough to stop his foe from disappearing in a blinding flash of light...

The year 1984: in a Los Angeles alleyway, a crackling time sphere deposits the naked form of the T-800 just outside of the Big Jeff's restaurant that will, in his future, eventually become the site of Omega Base. Inside that restaurant, a news broadcast reports on the impending eruption of Mount St. Hilary in Oregon, but waitress Sarah Connor has other concerns on her mind as she serves coffee to a particularly surly trucker, whose enthusiasm about his new shotgun causes her to accidentally spill coffee on his shirt. At the behest of her manager, Sarah goes after the man when he storms out without paying his bill, and although Sarah tries to get him to see sense, the trucker grows more and more irate. Right when it seems that the situation is about to get violent, however, he finds himself grabbed by the still-nude Terminator, who demands that the man hand over his clothes. Naturally, the trucker refuses and immediately goes for his gun, but although his shot goes right through his assailant's hand, it doesn't even slow him down—and the Terminator promptly kills the man with a single punch. Understandably terrified by this encounter, Sarah tries to get out of the situation as fast as she can, but freezes when her rescuer, now dressed in the other man's clothing, points a gun at her and demands to know her name. When Sarah introduces herself, the Terminator asks if she knows anything about Mount St. Hilary and how he can get there. Sarah stammers that he could take the freeway up to Oregon... but the Terminator intimidates her into joining him as he climbs into the truck.

The unlikely duo make their way north along the interstate to Oregon as Sarah tries to press this mysterious man for more information, but the Terminator remains cagey and simply tells her that they need to reach the volcano before it erupts, the only way to prevent the end of the world. Although she's understandably confused, Sarah takes the opportunity to point out that this plan has already gone awry: the volcano has already begun its fateful eruption. Sarah's compatriot informs her that, although they can't stop the volcano from erupting, he can switch to his secondary directive... seconds before he stomps on the gas pedal and smashes through a state trooper roadblock! Terrified, Sarah tries to shout that she's being kidnapped as she wrestles for control of the wheel, but the Terminator misunderstands the gesture and takes it as a cue to veer their truck right off the road and into the foothills. Sarah initially thinks that they're driving their truck straight into the lava until the Terminator corrects her... they're headed towards the looming shape of a gigantic starship lodged in the mountainside.

As the truck approaches the vessel, a tiny machine emerges from the wreck; this strange probe promptly envelops their truck in a beam of blue light... at which point the Terminator uses the trucker's shotgun to blow the machine out of the sky. The critically damaged probe loses altitude and slams into the driver's side of the vehicle, crumpling the Terminator beneath a mass of metal—and although it takes much more than that to put down a Terminator, a horrified Sarah realizes that her captor isn't human at all when the impact sloughs off half of the robot's organic face. Ignoring her questions, the Terminator grinds the ruined truck to a halt deep inside the cavernous starship and explains that this is where it all began: this is the ship that brought Skynet's enemies to Earth, and the probe is a sign that the alien invaders have already awoken. Sarah asks what'll happen to her, but the Terminator doesn't care: she played no role in the development of Skynet, and her survival in the coming machine war is irrelevant. Although Skynet did not send him back far enough to achieve his primary directive—to prevent the awakening of the Cybertronians entirely—his secondary directive is to terminate Skynet's enemies; a fact that he boldly announces to the Decepticons as a reactivated Megatron looms over a still-dormant Optimus Prime!

Featured characters

(Numbers indicate order of appearance.)

Quotes

"You were right, 'Screamer. They were nesting underground! Like those... watchamacallem... mole people!"

—Thundercracker

"Don't you dare do... whatever you're doing!"

—Starscream witnesses the activation of the time machine

"Hello? Earth to... guy? What's at Mount St. Hilary?"
"A chance to prevent the end of the world and protect Earth's population. It is imperative we reach Mount St. Hilary before it erupts."
"Okay, maybe we don't talk anymore."

—Sarah and the T-800 don't get on well

"So, ah—you're not a machine?"
"I am a machine from Earth. Not an invader."
"Of course. Obviously."

—Sarah and the T-800

"Cybertronians—I will see you in hell."

—The Terminator gets ready to do what it does best

Notes

Continuity notes

• As is to be expected for a franchise involving copious amounts of time travel, Terminator's continuity is... tangled, to say the least. While the first and second films logically flow into one another and form the loose foundation for what could be considered the "Terminator universe," things get fraught from there: The Sarah Connor Chronicles, Rise of the Machines, Salvation, and Genisys are all basically irreconcilable with one another, presenting conflicting accounts of both past and future events; indeed, 2019's Dark Fate, in its push to market itself as the "true" sequel to Judgement Day, would eventually dismiss all of these other works as irreconcilable alternate timelines. So—all this to say, Transformers vs. The Terminator (perhaps unsurprisingly) presents an entirely new chronology that doesn't gel with any of these aforementioned films: in this comic's future, Skynet is at war with the Decepticons, Sarah's son John and his anti-Skynet militia don't seem to exist, and the Terminator unit sent back to 1984 has no knowledge of nor any interest in Sarah Connor—a stark contrast to the original film, where the T-800's primary mission was to kill Sarah before she could conceive John.
• The past segments of this comic are set in 1984, the release year for both the Transformers and Terminator franchises.

Transformers references

• The 2029 version of Starscream takes heavy inspiration from his Unicron Trilogy counterpart, more specifically, his 2005 Cybertron toy (and, by extension, so do the two other Seekers).
• The Sky Spy probe that scans Sarah and the Terminator's stolen truck—the truck that will obviously go on to provide the basis for Optimus Prime's alternate mode—briefly envelops it in a glowing cube of energy, recalling the scanning sequence from "More than Meets the Eye, Part 1."

Terminator references

• The comic's opening narration tweaks the original preface for the first Terminator film and turns it on its head: where the opening narration to that film ended with the line "...the final battle would not be fought in the future. It would be fought here, in our present," the line is amended here to read "the final battle will not be fought in the present."
• The 2029 versions of Starscream and the Seekers all transform into hunter-killer aerials, airborne drones that have appeared in every Terminator film in some capacity. Likewise, the treaded vehicle that the T-800 hitches a ride on are ground-based hunter-killer tanks, although given the nature of the scene it's not clear if these belong to Skynet or the Decepticons.
• Skynet's Omega Base is built underneath the ruins of a Big Jeff's restaurant, the fictional franchise that appeared in the first Terminator film (and indeed, we see Sarah working as a restaurant waitress there in this very comic, her day job before the events of The Terminator).
• The time machine as it appears in this comic is specifically drawn to resemble its appearance in Terminator: Genisys, which was itself based off of unused concept art from Judgement Day.
• The Terminator attempts to smile several times throughout the comic, although the effect is more unsettling than anything else; a deleted scene in Judgement Day (included in the Special Edition of the film) had that film's Terminator attempt to smile, with a similarly rictus-like effect.
• The comic occasionally features panels from the Terminator's perspective, which use a red-tinted overlay and a scrolling stream of data in homage to similar POV shots from the various Terminator films. In one instance, when Sarah Connor is needling the Terminator for information, his HUD shows several options of response, recreating the scene in the original film where the Terminator is questioned by the tenet of the apartment he's stationed in, including two of the options: "Yes/No" and "Go away". What isn't replicated, however, is the response he chose: "F*** you asshole."
• Starscream announces that Skynet's "judgement" is at hand, which might be a reference to both Terminator 2: Judgement Day and the in-universe nuclear holocaust from whence that film derived its name.
• One of the established rules of Terminator time travel is that only organic material (and inorganic material surrounded by organic flesh, such as a Terminator) can travel in time; as a result, every time traveler arrives in the past naked, and must find era-appropriate clothes after arriving. Like in the first Terminator movie, the T-800 winds up having to kill a human to steal his clothes, which, in keeping with tradition, just happen to include a pair of sunglasses and a slick leather jacket.
• The Terminator repeats several phrases from both Starscream and the trucker he kills, homaging the scene in the original film where the Terminator repeated several phrases spoken to him by the punks he first encountered. Furthering the homage, the trucker refers to the Terminator as "Laundry Day", in reference to one of the punk's lines: "Wash day tomorrow? Nothing clean, right?"
• The Terminator implores Sarah to join him by telling her to "come with [him] if you want to live," a phrase that's been (more or less) uttered in all six films; it was originally uttered by Kyle Reese in the first film, but was used by the T-800 himself in Judgement Day, and has generally since been used by other T-800s and even other characters in the sequels, including Connor herself in Genisys and Dark Fate.
• When the Sky Spy crashes into the T-800, the left side of his face is destroyed, revealed his robotic eye underneath; the same way the original Terminator had his left eye ruined in the first film, revealing his robotic eye underneath. This has happened to the heroic T-800s in each of the sequels as well—although it varies from film to film which side of the face is destroyed (with Judgement Day having the right eye ruined). The only film in which this doesn't happen is Salvation—Schwarzenegger was not in the film physically at the time (serving as the governor of California), and the mocap-based CGI stand-in had his artificial skin burned off very quickly.
• When Sarah cries for help in the highway, she describes the T-800 as a "psycho german guy", probably referring to his accent. Well, this shouldn't be a surprise...

Real-life references

• Thundercracker compares the forces in the Skynet bunker to "mole people."
• Big Jeff's may be a fictional franchise, but artist Alex Milne has reinterpreted the restaurant's chubby blond mascot to more closely resemble Bob's Big Boy, the face of the real-world Big Boy Restaurants franchise.

Errors

• On page 5, the word that should be "costs" is instead in its singular form.
• On page 9, Mount St. Hilary’s name is misspelled as "Mount St. Hillary," with an extra L.
• On the last panel on page 14, "prerogative" is misspelled as "perogative".

Other trivia

• The second line of binary on page four, "00111010 00101001?", translates to ":)?", presumably, a response his fellow Terminator's awkward smile. None of the other binary codes in the scene translate into anything meaningful.
• Backmatter for this issue includes Alex Milne's concept art for the Seekers and Skynet's T-8000 robots.
• The Unknown Comics exclusive cover by Alan Quah and Komikaki Studio is a collage of oftentimes blatantly plagiarized official artwork published in various IDW's comics, Dreamwave's More than Meets the Eye profile books, and even fanart, resulting in a weird mish-mash of sometimes very specific character designs that do not represent the appearances of those characters within this issue, including some characters that are off-model within themselves. Artist Alex Milne has gone on record confirming that some of his art that was plagiarized for this cover was not even officially approved by Hasbro, nor was he ever approached for his permission.^[1] Quah himself later tried to pretend the plagiarism was supposed to be an "homage".^[2]

Covers (14)

• Cover A: The Terminator wears Optimus Prime's face, by Gavin Fullerton
• Cover B: The forces of Skynet stand triumphant over the Cybertronians, by Alex Milne and David García Cruz
• Retailer incentive cover A: Megatron and the machines, by Freddie E. Williams II and Jeremy Colwell
• Retailer incentive cover B: Optimus Prime and a T-800, by Francesco Francavilla
• Diamond Retailer summit exclusive: Arcee lunges for a Terminator, by Nick Roche and Josh Burcham
• Frankie's Comics exclusive: The Terminator and the Decepticon sigil, by Ultraraw28
• Dallas Fan Expo exclusive: Optimus Prime teams up with a T-800, by Kael Ngu
• Slabbed Heroes exclusive: Megatron adorned in fallen robots, by John Giang
• Unknown Comics exclusive: A collage of (plagiarized) preexisting artwork depicting a battle between Autobots, Decepticons, and Skynet, by Alan Quah and Komikaki Studio
• Jolzar Comics exclusive: The T-800 poses next to Optimus Prime and Bumblebee's remains, by Diego Galindo
• Bell County Comic Con exclusive A: Optimus Prime is swarmed by Terminators, by Phil Salazar
• Bell County Comic Con exclusive B: Optimus, Bumblebee, Terminators, and Megatron, by Edward Kraatz and Phil Salazar
• Scorpion Comics exclusive: The Terminator fires his gun, by Monte Moore
• IDW Convention exclusive: Soundwave and Skynet, by Livio Ramondelli

References

External links

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