Sfdebris.net

http://sfdebris.com/videos/animation/beastwars2e02.php
http://sfdebris.com/videos/animation/beastwars2e03.php

A good two-parter to kick off season 2 proper. It also raises a couple questions that are never really answered, both come from the same scene. When Dinobot is talking about the two discs he implies they both contain records of the future but we never see any evidence of that the alien disc has anything like that. The other is he seems to imply that his death is recorded on the golden disc which would definitely be outside the knowledge of the bot who added the info to it. Though its possible Dinobot was just referring to his eventual, inevitable death and not a specific event.

We actually get all of that in Code of Hero, it's the entire crux of the thing. Where they do a compare/contrast of a mountain that is shown on the the disk before and after blowing it up, and that IS the thing that answers Dinobot's question. Considering we don't actually see the disks poured over, we have to take the show's word on it, that one example, and the plan hatched in the season finale to kill Optimus Prime, that yes, it IS info from the future, and detailed and relevant enough to risk the entire Beast War thing in the first place.

And while no, it probably doesn't specifically say "Dinobot dies on this date", it does say "The autobots did X on this date, the decepticons did Y in response" and covers the large scale events of history, and it specifically does NOT say "Megatron won the war by doing this." That's more important than anything specific to Dinobot himself. The issue there is, if those events were hard coded, immutable, unchangeable, it meant that it didn't matter that the Beast Wars were in the past, and it meant Megatron's schemes weren't going to work because history showed they didn't work. The events had always happened, had already happened, were always part of history, and Dinobot's path was completely chosen by history already and nothing he did from then on really mattered.

But once he found out history COULD be changed, that meant things were NOT fixed, and so it meant that knowing key points of history in advance and being able to alter them was insanely useful... *especially* because the disk actually updated in response to the changes.

I understand all that but as I said Dinobot seems to imply the alien disc also has information about the future on but we are never shown any evidence of this, it just seems to be connected to the various alien monuments around the planet.

Well we do see it contains info on the then upcoming Alien Mothership from Other Visits.

That's just one of several alien sites around the planet that the disc contains info on (and can apparently be used to control). That's no more a record of the future than a travel guide is.

I was always under the impression that the discs where the golden records sent out on some of our earliest space probes

ORCACommander wrote:I was always under the impression that the discs where the golden records sent out on some of our earliest space probes

The first disk was one of the golden records, Megatron outright tells us this when explaining his scheme to Ravage later on, saying that G1 Megatron intercepted the Voyager probe (when it was at Saturn, given the visuals) and added his message there. The second disk was alien made, left on Earth as part of the Vok experiments, with no real reason given as to why it looks similar to the other disk.

As for the question about Dinobot thinking both disks had future information, I think that was just to simplify the scene for the audience's sake. This was before the reveal that the first disk was one of the Voyager golden records, so at the time the audience didn't really know the difference between the two disks. The writers were deliberately vague when they wanted to be, and according to one writer the Vok were supposed to be from the future too, but that never materialized in-story. In all, it seems like a potential plot hook that just didn't get followed up.

My thoughts as well, not unlike a scene in Other Visits where Dinobot hooks up to the axilon's computer but at least that would have payed off if the canceled episode from s3 had been made (forget its name, think Dark Mirror).

Can I just point out that Quickstrike looks a lot cooler than SilverBolt (whose name I had to look up)?
Scorpions and Cobras are awesome on their lonesome. HE'S BOTH!

Agreed, though I never cared too much for his robot mode. Character wise Silverbolt is far more interesting and entertaining.