One of the Worst Scenes in Beast Wars: "We Were Given a Paradise"

[Winter]

Tigertron... frustrates me. Most of the time he's a awesome badass who did awesome things and had a cool voice... Other times he was an idiot hippie who confuses "Peace and Love" with "Force Obedience". This is perhaps best shown in the two part episode The Trigger. Long story short Tigertron finds himself on a floating island made by aliens. This place is deadly, filled with traps that will be acctivated if you get to close to them and if you try to use weapons to deal with the traps you will be fired upon by a Big Fucking Laser. Violence is permitted and you are ALWAYS being watch and you will be given no peace so long as you are there.

So Tigertron... naturally assumes this is a paradise that he must protect even as it tries to kill him no less then 4 times for the crime of walking around admiring the place. And the reason he thinks this is because the place is pretty and green and Look! A Butterfly!

Tigertron even gets annoyed when someone points out the flaws of this supposed utopia and the episode tries to present him as in the right. Only, as we later learn, he's not. Rattrap actually has this place figured out as soon as he arrives, it's not meant to be a paradise it's a puzzle to test intelligent beings and this is strictly a pass/fail test cause you either figure this out or you die.

Combine that with what we learn about the Aliens later in the show, up to and including that they view Unicron as a "Figure of Authority" and them trying to wipe out an entire world because the "Experiment Failed" along with later abducting Trigertron and Airazor because they entered a place they didn't bother protecting shows that this is not some benevolent race who are in-tune with nature. They're monsters who view everyone around them as lesser, to quote them directly "That which does not become part of the one shall become void."

And YET Trigertron at the end of the episode bitches and moans how "We Were Given A Paradise" that was actively trying to kill them even before the Predacons took control of it. A Paradise that forces you to live in peace at the point of a gun is not a paradise worth living in.

And this only got worse in Beast Machines where Optimus Primal goes full hippie and plans to force all of Cybertron to go full Technoganic and if no one wants to do it, that's fine, they can remain trapped without a body for all eternity until they change their minds.

The Trigger was a warning sign of the problems that would bring the end of the Beast Era to a Terrible end which was a Go Back To Nature message where Technology is evil and we must purge it... in a show about talking robots and one of the series most iconic lines is "Freedom is the right of all sentient beings."

Again, this wouldn't be so bad if not the fact that the show treats Tigertron in the right here when he is clearly in the wrong. Argh, I hate that theme!