5/10
Torn between story and animation
4 November 2008
Warning: Spoilers
I like the storyline in Five Faces of Darkness a lot. It is a dark and fairly interesting insight into the cartoon transformers' origins. The Quintessons emerge as a truly original and intellectual threat, and the Decepticons' plight at the beginning of the story is quite shocking.

One is rarely moved by the bad guys, much less in a children's cartoon, but here, we see them utterly defeated, demoralized and starving. To my taste, that's a brilliant and fresh approach to the otherwise repetitive conflict that we had seen in the previous seasons.

Here we also see a bold, young and daring depiction of Rodimus Prime that will rarely appear again save for some exceptions during the third season, where he normally appears as a boring, depressive and insecure leader.

Galvatron also seems to have more layers to his personality in this five parter than in the following episodes, with the notable exception of the fantastic 'Webworld'.

The only downside to this 5 part saga is the ugly, cheap animation by AKOM. ranging from pedestrian (but tolerable)to 'carnage in c minor' dreadful. It's too bad that they got to produce half the season's episodes, ruining many an interesting story with lazy, rushed, incompetent jobs.
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