Prisoners of War: Rampage
Featured Cartoon Appearances: Transmutate, Deep Metal
Featured Comic Appearance: Sure, whatever...
Fanfic Appearances: "Silver Shards" by Thylacine2000
With Rampage, three quotes of his usual pop into my head. These are: 1) "Ignore the pain, it’s only going to get worse," 2) "Is that fear you’re feeling, Maximal," and 3) "BWAHAHAHAHA." :) He seems quite disturbed, especially given his predilection for fear and pain, and very intelligent as well. There’s clearly more to him than a raving loony, as you can see by watching several different episodes. He feels definite loss with the death of Transmutate and near joy with the arrival of Depth Charge. It’s this side of him that I’ll focus on in a bit.
While no definite timeline is set for the creation of Protoform X, it seems that like everything else in the Beast Wars universe, he’s not that old in relation to the rest of the Transformer mythology. He is the product of a secret Maximal science fair project attempting to create the ultimate Maximal warrior. Things obviously didn't turn out the way they had hoped, given the backdoor manner in which they tried to dispose of him. The reason for Rampage's dementia may be something the Maximal scientists screwed up on while trying to replicate Starscream’s spark. It may be just the way his personality turned out by whatever process they create life in Cybertron’s future. After all, Quickstrike is also a Maximal by programming, just as Rampage is. This may be just a fault in the programming sequence or some other technical mumbo jumbo. Perhaps he does it because of some perverse hatred of self. I’ll leave this up to the fanfics. It would be interesting to know how Rampage acted after first coming online. Was he always one to laugh at others’ pain? Did he start as the brooding, dark individual we see in "Transmutate?" Again this is fanfic territory. Whatever happened to him, we see how he is now. Everywhere he goes he revels in spreading fear and pain. It seems to be the only way this brilliant individual could conceive of to deal with the pain and hatred he himself feels. The methods he deals with the darkness within him can be seen with Transmutate and, especially, Depth Charge.
His relationship with Transmutate is fairly straightforward. Before she even emerged from her pod, he could sense she was different. He feels that she’s another part of him, almost seems to know already that others would look down at her as inferior and she would recognize this. With Transmutate, he could nurture her and teach her. Maybe, in some part of him, he thought of this as a kind of therapy, something to ease his own pain perhaps. Through Transmutate, we see another side to Rampage, a side that’s kind in some ways (saying "I’m your only friend" isn’t really nice, but he did genuinely like her, as only Silverbolt on the Maximals did), as if he was trying to take care of her and protect her. The last scene of "Transmutate," while Rampage is holding the dead Transmutate in his hands, speaks volumes and showed a more sensitive side to what had been an otherwise deplorable individual, a side that, again, only Silverbolt was able to recognize.
We learn in "Deep Metal" that Depth Charge and Rampage have a history and I’m not talking about prom. Rampage escaped from a colony of some kind called Omicron, where Depth Charge was serving as a security advisor, and wiped out everybody except Depth Charge. Though it’s never said for certain, it’s almost implied that Rampage meant to kill everybody. One single scene in the series says to me that Rampage knew exactly what he was doing when he left Depth Charge alive. What if Rampage thought it would be amusing/therapeutic to turn a noble, abiding Maximal into an obsessive assassin, to turn a self-appointed protector of life into a killer? Optimus Primal says at the end of "Deep Metal" that there was a time that Depth Charge never would have left fellow Maximals in a bind. While Depth Charge was helpful to the Maximals for much of season three, he was clearly more concerned with Rampage. This change in Depth Charge isn’t enough to prove that Rampage was deliberately doing this to Depth Charge though, especially with only one attack. But it wasn’t just one attack. It was at least two, the other being Starbase Rugby, where Depth Charge also had many friends. At the beginning of "Deep Metal," Rampage knew Depth Charge was on his way to prehistoric Earth before Depth Charge was even into Earth’s atmosphere, almost as if he had a connection to him. But why would Rampage want to do turn Depth Charge into a killer? Imagine the pain and guilt Depth Charge feels over losing friends he felt he should have protected not once, but twice, from the same monster, or the fear of what he was turning into. Rampage wanted to make someone suffer to feel his pain, and that someone was Depth Charge.
So what’s this cinching scene? At the end of "Nemesis, Part I," Depth Charge is sent on a mission to stop Megatron. And go figure, Depth Charge goes after Rampage instead, giving into his obsession with Rampage. After a little priming by Rampage, Depth Charge goes into a frenzy remembering all the pain and guilt about losing his friends. Depth Charge finally has Rampage trapped, raw energon in hand, ready to kill him. The only thing stopping him from driving the energon into Rampage was Rampage holding back the hand that held the crystal. And then Rampage released Depth Charge's hand and simply lay there, no longer putting up a fight. He opened up an opportunity for this once noble Maximal to kill an unarmed living being, something, it is implied, that a Maximal normally wouldn’t do. As Depth Charge brought down the killing blow, all Rampage could do was laugh. I mean, imagine the amount of pain Depth Charge must have felt, killing like this on top of the guilt of his own feelings of inaction before. This is what Rampage was working up to. This is what he wanted Depth Charge to become. And when it finally appeared that he had succeeded, he was obviously happy. Rampage played Depth Charge like a fiddle, crafting a normal Maximal into a crazed individual bent on revenge all while releasing himself from a life he hated.
Rampage is, in my opinion, one of the more interesting Transformers in the mythos. He has his share of insane moments. His quest for seeking suffering and fear in others is beyond the realm of normalcy. But there's more to him than this. He has a softer side, one few understand or fathom, and needs to be fulfilled. In all, Transmutate probably said it best: "Friend dark."