SPACE-- AGE JACK.

I’ve never gone so quick from “Wow, that’s so cartoon-accurate, where did they hide the car parts?” to “Oh.  I see.”

Listen, I love when the toys and the cartoon look like each other, but “most show accurate toylines” kinda overlooks the fact that it’s generally the show that chooses whether or not to accurately render the toy.

Everybody knows the Quintessons are portrayed inconsistently between Transformers: The Movie and “Five Faces of Darkness.”  In the movie, they’re just weird aliens that the Autobots run into, who like to put prisoners on trial and execute them right after finding them innocent, because lol so random.  In “Five Faces,” though, the Quints are retconned into the creators of the Transformers, so their motive for putting Autobots on trial has changed. 

The plot hole is that the Quintesson’s judgement has changed.  In “Five Faces” Kup and Ultra Magnus are, by virtue of being Autobots, charged with theft of Cybertron.  The verdict isn’t directly stated, but they’re implicitly guilty, since we know the charges are true (from the Quints’ point of view, anyway).  However, when Hot Rod and Kup are tried in the movie, they’re explicitly found innocent.  Obviously it doesn’t make much difference if you’re going to be fed to Sharkticons either way, but it makes you wonder why the Quintessons “exonerated” Hot Rod and Kup.

Well, recently I watched “Five Faces” and paid more attention to the dialogue:

SPIKE: What crime did the Autobots commit?

QUINTESSON: Theft.

ULTRA MAGNUS: You’re confusing us with Decepticons.

QUINTESSON: Do you not occupy Cybertron?

SPIKE: Huh?

So it finally hit me: Hot Rod and Kup were found innocent in the movie because, at that time, the Autobots didn’t occupy Cybertron--the Decepticons did.  Quintesson law, apparently, is less concerned with who took the planet than with who has it right now.  Which fits with the Quints’ motivations--although they’d love to get revenge on all Transformers, their primary objective is to get Cybertron back.  (Which makes you wonder what they were up to before the movie, but that’s another issue.)