Sure, you can compare him to Primal, but the difference is that the presence of a modern day Earth and humans is largely why he's so clumsy. Generation One Optimus was inclined to use aging hipster talk and join in the odd game of Dinobot football. This Prime can't even use the word "birthday" right. He's not locked in a war for survival like Primal was (though the stakes are just as high) - it's as though he's very much expecting back-up and doesn't really want to grow close to the fleshlings.
But it's all played for cheap laughs. It's not deep or introspective. Football with the Dinobots is one thing, slumber parties with eight-year-olds are another entirely. Halloween, birthday parties, trips to the zoo...giant robots should not fucking be doing those things. If they're just cooling their heels waiting for reinforcements from Cybertron, we should see more of them TRYING TO FUCKING FIND A WAY TO GET A MESSAGE BACK TO CYBERTRON.
While we're still on the matter of character development, it seems that Prowl has warmed to his teammates and has become more a team player. Bulkhead's shown that he'll probably always be clumsy and a bit of a doofus, but his heart's in the right place (with Sound and Fury proving this).
And Bumblebee has learned a valuable lesson that even the smallest person can change the course of the future.
That's not character development, it's a cavalcade of fucking cliches.
Ratchet had his moment with Lockdown, but the tragedy of Elita-One explains why Optimus is so self-sacrificial (and maybe Sentinal Prime had a hand in his failure at the Academy, but we'll see).
And here you hit upon the two most interesting hooks introduced literally within the first ten minutes of the series, that have had slim development since. I want to know about the war, and I want to know about Optimus's dismissal from the academy. I could give a flying fuck about anything else, even if Grimlock and Soundwave (and Kremzeek!) DO make me smile.
I can't argue with you that the pacing is off (Megs can't get out of that lab soon enough, but he isn't going to be immobile for the whole season), however the first season of Beast Wars was basically a contest for resources, and that was its hook.
And the first season of Beast Wars started off strong, meandered through a bunch of bullshit, and then ended strong. There is a reason I am still watching this show, and that is probably it.
Animated has brought in overt superhero themes,
"Every third episode starts with two minutes of random encounter with a C-list Teen Titans villain" is not a positive.
and Decepticons that are actually a physical threat when they don't have superior numbers (I'm looking at you, live-action movie).
Their numbers are so inferior that the Autobots have fought a total of five of them over the course of ten episodes. Bane and Professor Zoom have gotten as much screentime as Starscream or Soundwave, and more than Blackarachnia.
I'll grant that the AllSpark is interchangable with energon McGuffins or preserving the timeline, though.
If it were just "we have to protect the Allspark from the Decepticons", that'd be lazy but acceptable -- it's war, and the Autobots' purpose is to prevent the Decepticons gaining a tactical advantage. That goes for the other series too.
The problem is that goddamn key. It's not just a McGuffin, it's a deus ex machina of epic proportions. It's a damn sight worse than introducing new characters by virtue of littering an unspecified number of stasis pods all over the world, it's a device that seems to do any goddamn thing the writers want it to. It repairs Transformers, it turns inanimate objects into Transformers, it can apparently turn Detroit black-and-white and age organic lifeforms...what else are we going to see it do, and how soon is Sari going to take Bulkhead's advice and quit using it seventeen times an episode?
And you're still right about Megatron being the boogey man. He had to have most of his body destroyed before he fell back on the original guy's zany and failure-prone mad scientist schemes. Before that it took an underhanded trick by Starscream and five Autobots to incapacitate him.
Granted, but all that happened in the first episode.
It's interesting and promising to me when a "face" villain becomes the "Emperor Palpatine" sort. It's things like that, the remaining mysteries, and the promise of more character episodes that will maintain my interest.
It was interesting at first, but now it's just tedious. And swiftly devolving into an idiot plot. How many fucking times does he have to give Isaac a homicidal robot and ask him not to tell the Autobots where it came from before the good doctor notices a pattern? Talk about taking the "naive genius" cliche to an extreme.
