Why/how are they alive? Has there ever been any explanation?
They have a spark.
Please don’t tell anyone that I, someone who hasn’t watched the last two live-action movies, knew this off the top of my head.
The Spark concept was introduced in Beast Wars…prior to that, there was no explanation as to why they couldn’t just rebuild someone and then load a backup. (Which, in fact, they did, on at least one occasion - Optimus Prime’s entire identity fit on on 3.5" floppy! But, for the most part, dead is dead - they just had a much wider ‘we can save him!’ threshold.) Or where ghosts, like Starscream after his death in the Movie, came from.
The Spark concept explained the uniqueness of identity - although it had some issues layering it onto G1 - the creation of the Dinobots and Stunticons (constructed on Earth) becomes inexplicable, and the Technobots a bit iffy (constructed using bits of Unicron (basically the Transformers version of Satan), but…well, there’s no indication that Unicron Bits would grant a Spark, and if so it’d probably be a Unicron-tainted Spark), and the concept of a Shell Program had to be used to explain the occasional reprogramming of characters (basically, instead of their core program being altered, an extra layer was added between the Spark - which still provided life and sentience - and the body, giving them a new personality).
Although since that retcon, the existence of Sparks (or Embers, in the Shattered Glass universe) has been pretty much universally assumed within all Transformers media (there may be some that don’t, but I’m not familiar with them if so), but the ORIGIN of the Spark changes between continuities.
It could be utterly unknown, in universe (such as the IDW or Shattered Glass variants on G1), it could be a gift from the Transformer god, Primus (most commonly), it could be an emanation from the Allspark (such as in the Live Action movies, or Animated)…or it could be completely unaddressed (the Aligned continuity has belief in Primus and Unicron, but thus far, only Energon and Dark Energon are stated to come from the, and it’s not clear if even that’s true or not).
Wasn’t there originally an explanation that they were all built by some now-lost race, and that the Decepticons were the robots built for war, while the Autobots were for peaceful purposes? Hence explaining why all of the original Transformers that turned into military vehicles or weapons were Decepticons.
That’d be the Quintessons.
That really only pushed things back a little, since the Quintessons are, themselves, living machines.
Primus sort of is, too, but being a multi-universal deity…well, that sort of does an endrun around the whole issue.
How do they retcon the floppy disk? I’ve always wondered.
Well, whatever they were, it was more than meets the eye.
Did they ever have Transformers idly discussing the weirdness that life ever formed from squishy organic bits?
I don’t think they ever did. It remains part of the canon of the Marvel Comics continuity to this day, so far as I know. (But I’ve never been a huge fan of the Marvel comics, even the UK-sourced stories. Yeah, heresy, I know.)
That said, while some elements originally exclusive the Marvel Comics continuity (such as Primus or the mad scientist Jhiaxus) have made their way into other continuities, that particular timeline is, currently, inactive. The currently active continuities (none of which were created when floppies were still commonly in use) don’t have that little bit of oddness in them, neither do (most of*) the other inactive continuities.
So, no need to retcon…it’s just ignored because it’s never happened in any of the timelines that currently matter to Hasbro or any of the license holders.
Sort of, actually. Not so much ‘how is living non-machines possible?’ but they’ve been known to have reactions ranging from confusion to revulsion at the various aspects of organic lives.
- Just hedging my bets with this one. There may be some Marvel variants that have been explored at various points where that was still in play.
Well, he never really was all that in terms of personality, I guess…
Perhaps it was a 20 TB flashdrive disguised as floppy. I mean, there was a transformer whose sole function was to jump inside another transformer and play a tape (that only worked about half the time). Talk about a crummy existence.
Well, first of all flashdrives didn’t exist yet at the time, but more importantly, it was a human secretly copying OP’s essence to a floppy after Prime and Megs had a VR showdown which ended with Prime committing suicide because he’d allowed an NPC to come to harm to defeat Megs. Maybe Transformers had some super floppies on cybertron, but a kid on Earth of that era had 1.44 megabytes at best.
They did earlier explain the presence of some of the 2nd year Autobots who showed up (to sell toys) by way of them having their personalities copied to storage crystals or something of that type, then building new bodies for them on Earth, so it’s not entirely unheard of, but that human tech could do it and fit it in that small a space… that’s just crazy.
Then again, in an earlier still story, Buster did have the Creation Matrix copied from Prime’s head to his brain years before anyone found out that “hey that thing’s a big hunk of tech sitting in the chest of Prime’s original body” so I don’t know that they really gave much of a shit about that sorta thing and were just trying to entertain kids and sell toys.
Aside: In one of the physics labs I’ve taught on electromagnetic induction, one of the questions at the end was “Why are there no DC transformers?”. One clever student wrote “Because Marvel bought the comic book rights”.
OK, this turned into an insanely long post…TL;DR version: the concept of the Spark is inconsistently applied, especially when the writers get a cool seeming idea for an episode that doesn’t fit with established mythology.
Watching the most recent episode of Prime, I got to thinking about an earlier episode, that, in hindsight, make the Spark concept in the Prime continuity a bit of an anomaly.
Some data points -
-
Sparks definitely exist in the Prime continuity, they’re mentioned repeatedly, especially in reference to Megatron’s use of Dark Energon.
-
The Spark Chamber is shown in the torso when Megatron does his DE thing. It’s not explicitly stated that that’s standard design in this continuity, but it is in the Beast Era.
-
As I implied in the above-quoted post, where their nature is particularly explored, the Spark is shown to contain the identity of the Transformer. In the Beast Era, particularly, there are multiple cases of Sparks being transferred between bodies, and the memories and personalities went with them. This is, of course, the point of them. May not be true in the Live Action continuity, as the Allspark has a tendency to create feral 'bots. In Animated, however, Allspark animated machines (such as Wreck-Gar or the Constructicons) generally have personalities, even if they’re not necessarily terribly bright. (OK, they were, on the whole, idiots. Soundwave doesn’t count because he was a robot even before his Allspark upgrade.)
However…
- In the episode in question, TMI, Bulkhead’s memory and personality are being overwritten by an ancient artefact - the progress is shown at a few points…in his head. In the end, the energy from the artefact is expelled, and Bulkhead is perfectly fine, with memories and personality intact. (Even ones shown to be lost earlier in the episode.) Now, there’s a couple fixes for the problems this causes. But they all have problems in themselves.
- The artefact was creating a shell program. Simple.
Problem: That obviates the conflict of the episode - the conflicting desires the Autobots had of getting the information he was getting overwritten with (a formula for synthetic Energon, which would lessen the advantage the Decepticons have) and not functionally killing Bulkhead. With the shell program option, they could simply get the formula, then purge the program and restore Bulkhead. (They had to figure out how to purge it, either way, but if it was simply a shell program, they could wait until it was finished before doing so.)
- Sparks in Prime continuity don’t contain the memories and personalities, just the motive force. (ie: All Transformer personalities are essentially shell programs.) Inconsistent with most continuities, but potentially consistent with the Live Action movies.
Problem: His personality and memories were intact after the energy is expelled - if it was actually overwriting the real location of his memory, they should have been lost forever, or required intervention from Ratchet to recover them.
- Bulkhead’s Spark Chamber is in his head. Requires a bit of a change from previous continuity by putting it anywhere but his torso, but, hey, that’s only a minor change.
Problem: See point 2. It’s also unlikely the Spark can be overwritten, thus the use of shell programs. [Edit - actually, there’s the case of the IDW continuity Arcee, whose Spark was altered, somehow, by Jhiaxus, giving her a different gender than the rest of the species.]
- Prime continuity Cybertronians have mental redundancy, having memories and personality stored both in their heads and Sparks. Perfectly consistent with what came before - who’s to say that shell programs don’t inhabit a layer that’s actually used regularly?
Problem: See point 1. If it’s just overwriting the brain version, they could let it finish, then reload from the Spark later.
- The writers of the episode didn’t give nearly as much thought into how it meshes with the mythology as I just have.
Problem: None, save for the fact that it’s not as fun to acknowledge this as it is to come up with a fanwank, and I’m unable to do so.
Conclusions:
-
TMI, while an entertaining and somewhat tense episode while watching it, it doesn’t bear too much thought about the logic.
-
I think way, way too hard about the logic of Transformers. Especially semi-throwaway non-Mythology episodes. (Semi-throwaway, because it actually led directly into the next episode, and hopefully will be called back again in season 2, but it doesn’t have any influence on the overall arc of the season, and even if called back, from the looks of things won’t significantly influence anything from season 2, either.)
Problem: None, both of those points are entirely true.
It’s been done elsewhere, for sure.
http://www.netjeff.com/humor/item.cgi?file=spacetravellers.txt
Depends on who you ask. You might not get a coherent answer out of Jetfire, though.
- The Spark and the Shell are analogous to the ib and the ka of Egyptian mythology, with the ib (Spark) holding the essence of the being, while the ka (Shell) is the spark of life connecting the soul to the body. If the Shell were completely overwritten, the Spark might be separated from the body as if by death, essentially leaving a soulless husk animated by a parasite.
Of course, I’ve never actually watched any iteration of Transformers and first heard about this Spark business while watching Starscream and Rainbow Dash battle to the death.
That’s essentially my option 2, and suffers the same objection - while it does allow for the overwriting of his brain to ‘kill’ him, it doesn’t make any sense in connection with the ending where his memories and personality were perfectly intact.
Those options could work if the ending involved Ratchet having to spend some time to bring Bulkhead back to himself, but, as a throwaway episode, they didn’t actually have time to do that, or, if he’d lost the memories permanently, but that would be a much darker ending than they clearly wanted.
The ka isn’t where the memories and personality dwell in a normal soul. It’s more of an interface between the body and the ib (leaving aside all the other parts of the soul as the Egyptians described it). The interloper was equivalent to a demon replacing his ka with its own spirit. If it succeeded, the original ib would have been driven out. Since part of the original ka remained, once the possessing spirit was driven out, Bulkhead’s Spark was able to reconnect to his body. His memories weren’t being overwritten so much as access to them was being locked out.
Again, having not seen the episode (or any episode), I don’t know how much of the background you provided comes from the Transformers themselves. Do they actually understand how this Spark business works?
(I’m only doing this because I enjoy making pretzel-logic to explain things in fiction.)
Totally unclear in this particular universe.
What we know they know, or at least believe:
The Spark exists.
The Spark chamber is an easily located physical portion of the body.
Sparks emanate, ultimately, from Primus via the Well of All Sparks (only confirmed in the last episode).
Sparks are a vital aspect of them - no Spark, no life, UNLESS reanimated by the use of Dark Energon.
SOMETHING that can’t be replicated by their technology is what makes an individual that particular person, since this universe has a ‘dead means dead’ policy in place (aside from Megatron who is powered by Dark Energon).
Things we can infer:
The Spark SEEMS, due to the fact that everyone who was raised from the dead using Dark Energon, aside from Megatron, who infected his Spark with Dark Energon while alive, has been a feral, bestial zombie, the seat of their intelligence and personality - however, the nature of the zombie-Transformers could simply be the influence of the Dark Energon (which is the ‘blood of Unicron’ who is, again, basically Satan).
Whether they know much beyond that about the nature of Sparks or not, they don’t appear to have the technology that’s found in certain other continuities to extract and move the Spark. Why they don’t is unknown.
The Spark is likely connected to Energon (the power source for Transformers and their technology), since a) both come from Primus, and b) Dark Energon can replace the Spark as an animating force.
The Prime universe is a young one - the TV series only started last November, and has a fairly erratic schedule, so, despite having been, theoretically, on the air for ~50 weeks, it’s only had 24 episodes so far. It nominally follows on from the War For Cybertron game and Exodus novel, but all three versions contradict each other on major points (such as Dark Energon), and WfC didn’t really deal with the nature of Sparks (haven’t read Exodus, so I don’t know how much it did), so there’s not really anything to go on, there, either. So, there’s not a lot of information to go on, since we’re only now getting to the point where it’s relevant.
Certain details can be extrapolated from other continuities (particularly the Beast Era of the G1 universe and the IDW comics), but it’s pure speculation about it applying to Prime.