Dark Side

The Dark Side.

In the Beast Wars television series, the Dark Side is the name of the Predacon transwarp ship stolen by Megatron and his Predacon rebels.

Unnamed at first, the only time the Predacon ship is named in the television series was in the episode Equal Measures where Terrorsaur said to Cheetor "Welcome to the dark side!" upon being discovered in the ship. Since then fans had adopted the name Darkside for the ship. The name was confirmed as official when the Beast Wars video game and DVD box set also referred to it as the Darkside (The ship may have been called the Terror Crasher in the Japanese TV version). In the Botcon 2006 exclusive toy box set, Dinobot was called "Darksyde Dinobot", in the same fashion that the included Maximals were called "Axalon Rhinox", "Axalon Cheetor", etc. Pete Sinclair posted at Allspark that it was spelled that way to make certain they didn't run into any legal problems with George Lucas. IDW Publishing's Beast Wars Sourcebook in 2008 then changed the spelling to "The Dark Side", with an "i" and a space. All three spellings of the ship are technically correct, as they were officially used.

Crew

The original crew of the Dark Side included:

• Megatron - Commander
• Dinobot - Second-in-command.
• Scorponok - Engineer, later second-in-command after Dinobot turned on Megatron.
• Tarantulas - Weapons/Special Ops. (Secretly a spy for the Tripredacus Council)
• Terrorsaur - Fighter
• Waspinator - Pilot

After the ship crashed the crew was joined by several former Maximal protoforms:

• Blackarachnia - Maximal protoform turned into a Predacon with a shell program by Tarantulas.
• Inferno - Maximal protoform turned into a Predacon with a shell program by Tarantulas. His beast mode instincts take over his personality making him fiercly loyal to Megatron.
• Quickstrike - Maximal protoform whose violent nature and damaged datatracks resulted in him joining the Predacons of his own accord.
• Rampage - Maximal serial killer forced to obey Megatron.
• Transmetal II Dinobot - Clone of the original Dinobot created by Megatron from a blank protoform, Dinobot's raptor DNA and half of Rampage's spark.

History

When the rogue Predacon crew stole the Golden Disk, the Dark Side went into transwarp and ended up in prehistoric Earth, fighting the Maximal ship, Axalon. Both craft shot each other down.

In season three episode Changing of the Guard, the Sentinel defense system was installed in the Dark Side after the Predacons stole it from a Maximal salvage mission. However, later in Season Three episode Other Victories, the Dark Side was destroyed by the alien Vok when they sent Tigerhawk to stop Megatron.

A toy of the Dark Side was packaged in with the 2006 release of Megatron by Hasbro, though not named as such. It is simply called a Predacon ship.

Timelines

The origin of the Darksyde was expanded on in the Botcon Timelines story "Dawn of Futures Past". In this story, the Darksyde was a ship stolen from Cybertron by Waspinator and Terrorsaur. The two had a contest to decide the name of the ship. Terrorsaur won, and named the ship the Darksyde. Waspinator expressed disappointment that the name Buzzerbot was not chosen, as he thought it sounded better; a sentiment surprisingly shared even by Megatron. ^[1]

References

1. ^ http://www.seibertron.com/comics/view.php?comic_id=848