« The Transformers: More than Meets the Eye #21 »
And the rest... is silence.
"Remain in Light 5 of 5: This Calamitous Life"
Publisher	IDW Publishing
Published in	More than Meets the Eye #21
First published	September 25, 2013
Cover date	September 2013
Written by	James Roberts
Art by	Alex Milne
Colors by	Josh Burcham with Joana Lafuente
Letters by	Tom B. Long
Editor	John Barber
Continuity	2005 IDW continuity
Chronology	Current era (2013)

The last of the answers comes out and new mysteries are born as the Lost Lighters race to stop Tyrest's killswitch. But the shadow of death looms large over the crew... will everyone make it out alive?

Synopsis

With only inches to spare, Tyrest is stopped from passing through his portal by Tailgate leaping onto his back, immune to Tyrest's paralytic thought weapon thanks to cybercrosis-induced loss of hearing on the signal's frequency. Tailgate hits the switch on Tyrest's staff that deactivates the signal, freeing the other Autobots from its effects, but is then seized by the deranged Chief Justice, who threatens his life if Rodimus does not let him enter the portal. Tailgate urges Rodimus to open fire since he is soon to die anyway, but the quandry is soon removed from Rodimus's hands: Tyrest is shot in the back by Minimus Ambus!

Outside, Cyclonus responds to Star Saber's call for challengers, but the resultant duel goes poorly for him. When Star Saber asks him what he fights for, however, Cyclonus replies that it's personal, and drives his single horn into Star Saber's eye. The blinded Saber drops Cyclonus, but manages to teleport away before a killing blow can be struck.

With Tyrest dispatched, Ambus—now in a truly diminutive state, not even as tall as Rodimus's waist—explains that the form they have seen him in up until now was another suit of armor, and that he was knocked unconscious when its head was crushed. As everyone tries to deal with the killswitch and its victims, Pharma tries to make a run for the portal, only to discover than he cannot pass through it. Rung concludes it operates on Aequitas technology, barring entry to those who carry some form of guilt, but Skids, at peace with himself for the first time after the mystery of his missing memories has been solved, finds he can step through. Pharma is unfazed by the whole affair, and his incessant smugness is the final straw for First Aid, who blows his head off in a moment of unchecked anger.

Across the room, Perceptor wires Rodimus into the killswitch, intending to use the Matrix-half within him to reinstate the "sparkcode" common to all constructed-cold Transformers that the killswitch is scrambling, thereby undoing its effects... but in the process destroying the Matrix map, and potentially Rodimus himself as well. With this hanging over them, Ambus confesses that he did indeed lure the Lost Light to Luna 1, having opted to let his Magnus Armor manually return to Tyrest rather than teleport away, thereby allowing them to follow it. Unaware of the Chief Justice's insanity, he assumed Tyrest would discipline Rodimus for the reckless leadership that Ambus had been unable to deal with. Rodimus, however, admits to being responsible for much worse than poor leadership: he had actually conspired with Prowl and the others to bring Overlord on board the vessel, goaded into doing so when Prowl accused him of being afraid. Rodimus vows not to die in an act of self-sacrifice, so that he can make recompense for his misdeeds. The switch is then thrown, the Matrix shatters... and those affected begin to recover!

Outside, the Legislators abruptly cease their battle with the Circle of Light, detecting the activation of a new imperative: the crippled Tyrest has managed to activate Part 1, Section 1 of the Tyrest Accord, recalling the robots to defend his broken form. Unaware of this, Whirl begins celebrations, congratulating Cyclonus and asking if their deal to let bygones be bygones still stands. Cyclonus grimly agrees... though not before a brief, silent fantasy of pushing Whirl into the smelting pool below.

On the other side of the portal, a confusing sight greets Skids: he finds himself standing on the surface of one of five multi-coloured copies of Cybertron itself, the other four floating in the sky above him, as a huge iridescent ball of energy hovers in front of him. The orb communicates with Skids in a synesthetic medley of sensations that he cannot comprehend, but his struggle for understanding is cut off by a cry for help from Rung from the other side of the portal. Skids sprints back through to the control room, now flooded with Legislators, and dives into battle... though nobody notices the tendrils that follow him out of the portal and drag Pharma's headless body back through. Informed of Tyrest's law-amending computer by Ambus, Tailgate saves the day by scampering to the console and putting his knowledge of the Autobot Code to use re-writing section 500, remembering at the last moment the pivotal relevance of a semicolon. His amendment repeals the law—"all of it"—causing the Legislators to cease functioning, but the victorious Tailgate then collapses.

The next day, back on the Lost Light, Cyclonus stands vigil over Tailgate, who is only minutes from death. Tailgate sadly confides that he was only two weeks old when he became trapped under the Mitteous Plateau, and that he has wanted to do something important with his life ever since... but having now done so, he finds it all a bit underwhelming. He asks Cyclonus to kill him quickly, to spare him the agony of his final moments, but Cyclonus refuses. A communique from Ratchet brings Cyclonus rushing, but the call proves to have been premature: Tailgate's spark has contracted beyond the point the cybercrosis cure Ratchet and Swerve have divined from Pharma's medi-bay would work. Cyclonus returns to Tailgate's side, and silently impales the little bot on his Great Sword.

Epilogue

Some time later, the Lost Light departs Luna 1, having gleaned all they could from what remained there. Rodimus and Ambus—now back in his armor and Ultra Magnus once again—talk things out, listing off damage the adventure has caused, including Brainstorm's retreat into his laboratory with the Point One Percenter spark. The pair idly wonder how Luna 1 was able to remain missing for so long... never having seen the set of five gigantic planetary turbines on the moon's dark side, surrounding a strange gear-like hieroglyph that was among the images projected by the energy ball Skids encountered...

Later still, Magnus speaks with a repaired, refurbished Cyclonus, and asks for an update... on Tailgate. Cyclonus—now with his missing horn replaced, a gift created for him by Tailgate—explains that he is recovering well, his spark having been re-energized to a point where the cure could be implemented thanks to a transfusion of energy from Cyclonus, through the Great Sword, as suggested by Whirl just as Cyclonus was returning to Tailgate's room. Impressed by Cyclonus's actions, Magnus formally welcomes him on board.

Featured characters

(Numbers indicate order of appearance.)

Quotes

"I've never bought into the notion of Primal Infallibility; I think that sometimes, God gets it wrong. He lets the best of us get sick and die while degenerates like you go on forever. But I think Primus is smiling on me today, Star Saber: he's letting me correct one of his mistakes."

—Cyclonus

"But we're friends! You should have told me! You should've said something..."
"I know, but—what would you have done?"
"I dunno—made you settle your tab?"

—Swerve and Tailgate on cybercrosis

"Righto then, nurse: arrest me. Tell me off and lock me up. I've been a bad Autobot."
"You're smiling. Everything you did at Delphi—all those patients you killed—and you're smiling?"
"I know, I know—I'm incorrigible."

—Pharma and First Aid

Notes

Continuity notes

• Tailgate's loss of hearing on the higher frequencies was foreshadowed in issue #17, when Ratchet listed it off as one of the effects of his disease.
• When listing off Rodimus's assorted stunts and goofs, Minimus recalls him using Rung as bait during the Sparkeater affair (from issue #3), the Fortress Maximus hostage situation (issue #6), Cyclonus's arrest (issue #10), the meeting with the Galactic Council (2012 annual), and a previously unseen incident involving someone named "Thunder-" something. Given the next-issue preview at the end of this issue shows Rung holding a picture of Thunder Clash, I think we can all see where that's going.
• Tailgate's recognition of the importance of the semi-colon comes from his lectures on the Autobot Code courtesy of Ultra Magnus, which he specifically called out way back in issue #6.
• Cyclonus has been singing to Tailgate as he lies dying; they shared a song together back in issue #13.
• The panel of Cyclonus running out of Tailgate's room parallels Tailgate's panicked rush out of the medical bay in issue #17.
• Tailgate was seen making something back in issue #15. Here, we find out it was a new horn to replace Cyclonus's missing one, lost back in the first issue.
• Seeing how Tailgate was only a fortnight old before he was trapped underground and left offline for about six million years, this might explain why his holomatter avatar back in issue #13 was a baby.
• On Tailgate's deathbed, the writing on his arm says "Waste Disposal" instead of "Bomb Disposal." While a previous instance of such in issue #6 was an art mistake, this one is much more likely to be intentional, a signifier that he's decided to accept reality before the end. On Twitter, James Roberts mentioned that there was a cut line from an earlier draft about Tailgate wanting an "honest death."
• If Cyclonus had killed Whirl by pushing him in the smelting pool, then Tailgate would have died too (as Whirl wouldn't have been around to tell Cyclonus how to save Tailgate). You could also make the connection that it was Tailgate's softening influence on Cyclonus that stopped him doing the said killing.
• Swerve mentioned that he ought to be trying to cure cybercrosis in the Annual, as an example of better things he could be doing with his life. (As a metallurgist, such a cure might actually be in Swerve's field of expertise.)
• After discovering the hot spot back in issue #17, Brainstorm was quick to point out that he was anti-apartheid and supported "equal rights for knock offs!", implying that he was forged. Before the killswitch is turned off in this issue, we see that Brainstorm is also suffering from its effects, meaning that he was in fact constructed cold.

Transformers references

• When blasted by Ambus, Tyrest lets loose a "SHEEAAAGH!", a cry-of-pain sound effect that's one of Simon Furman's trademarks.
• Similarly, Tailgate notes he doesn't want to "die screaming", another Furmanism.
• Pharma's body is dragged through the portal by metal tentacles to evoke imagery of the Quintessons, who were at one stage floated as More than Meets the Eye's final boss. As the story eventually went in another direction, James Roberts has referred to this as a "Schrödinger's plot point", in reference to how it could simultaneously be Quintesson foreshadowing and a generic tentacled trans-portal retrieval device.^[1]

Real-life references

• Tailgate calls cybercrosis "The Big C", a common real-life euphemism for cancer.
• Rodimus is literally put on a cross to use the power of their creator to wipe away the consequences of sin, at the potential cost of his own life. He's even wearing a "crown".
• When Brainstorm is shown in his workshop with the harvested Point One Percenter, a model of the U.S.S. Sulaco from the film Aliens is featured prominently amongst the equipment on his desk.
• When Cyclonus has his little imagine spot about pushing Whirl into the smelting pool, Whirl's claw sinking into the molten metal looks like a shout-out to the final moments of the heroic T-800 in Terminator 2: Judgement Day.

Trivia

• The release of this issue was preceded by a three-week "Countdown to 21" Twitter campaign, during which James Roberts tweeted various teasers and factoids about this issue at a (notional) rate of one a day. In addition to the soundtrack tunes, listed below, and various teases about the content of the story, we learned that the issue was originally going to be titled "There Is A Light That Never Goes Out".
• Cyclonus refers to Vector Sigma as "he".
• Tyrest believed his portal would lead to Cyberutopia. Considering the otherworldly nature of the place Skids visited, he probably thought Tyrest was right... but the truth was something completely different; as revealed in Lost Light issue #22, the mysterious space was actually the Grand Architect's mind.
• As Tyrest, Star Saber, and Pharma represent different pillars of society gone wrong (law, religion, and medicine respectively), they are each symbolically defeated by "uncorrupted" examples of those same pillars: Tyrest is crippled by the law enforcer Ultra Magnus, Star Saber is almost killed by the religious Cyclonus, and Pharma gets his head shot off by the medic First Aid.

Crew manifest

• Minimus Ambus is fine!
• Tailgate's cybercrosis is successfully treated!
• Everybody lives, Rose! Just this once—everybody lives!
• 13 deaths, 5 new arrivals (plus 20 or so Faders), one boxed, and one banishment since the launch.

Soundtrack

For all of "Remain in Light":

• "A Dazzling End" from the Doctor Who Series 4 soundtrack, by Murray Gold
• "The Universal" by Blur

For this issue in particular:

• "Stronger Hearts Than Mine Lie Empty" by Ballboy
• "Sunshine (Adagio in D Minor)" by John Murphy
• "Nobody Loves Us" by Morrissey
• "Longest Day" by Soulsavers
• "No Cars Go" by Arcade Fire
• "Dreaming of You" by The Real Tuesday Weld

Foreign localization

Japanese

• Title: "Hikari no Naka ni Tamarite 5: Kono Higekiteki Jinsei" (光の中に溜まりて5 この悲劇的人生, "Gather in Light 5: This Calamitous Life")

Swedish

• Title: "Stanna i ljuset 5 av 5: Detta olyckliga liv" ("Stay in the Light 5 of 5: This Unhappy Life")

References

1. ↑ James Roberts at TFN 2024

External links

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