Blackarachnia

Blackarachnia is the most thoroughly rewritten character in the series, and the only one whose defection takes three seasons to complete. She emerges from a Maximal stasis pod in "The Web" already reprogrammed: Tarantulas has overwritten her with a Predacon shell program, and she wakes as a Predacon with a Maximal spark underneath, a fact she spends most of the show refusing to confront. Venus Terzo plays her as sardonic, transactional and permanently one step from betraying whoever she is standing next to.

What makes her work is that she is not a good person waiting to be released. She is genuinely self-interested. She works for Megatron while stealing his data, works with Tarantulas while trying to kill him, plays Silverbolt's chivalry against him openly in "Tangled Web", and joins the Maximals in "Optimal Situation" mostly because the Predacons have stopped being useful. The show lets her be unpleasant for a long time before it lets her be heroic.

Her turn comes through Silverbolt, and the series is careful to make it mutual rather than redemptive. She saves his life; he refuses to shoot her; they exchange components and a kiss in "The Agenda (Part I)" while both their factions are trying to kill each other. It is Blackarachnia who discovers the Ark inside the mountain in "The Agenda (Part III)", who gives up its access codes to save him, and who then activates Teletraan-1 in "Optimal Situation" and saves the entire Maximal crew from erasure.

The shell program finally kills her. In "Crossing the Rubicon" she consents to have it removed, dies on the table when Tarantulas disrupts the surgery, and is revived by the alien Transmetal driver as a Transmetal II. She wakes up a Maximal by choice for the first time.

Black widow spider beast mode with wall-crawling, webbing and a venomous cyber-bite that can disable a Transformer; as a Transmetal II she also gains telekinesis and greatly enhanced durability. Robot mode carries a hand-held blaster and web-lines. She is the Maximals' only genuine hacker after Rattrap, capable of cracking Megatron's databanks and operating Teletraan-1. Limits: physically among the weakest combatants in the show, dependent on ambush and deceit, and for most of the series her Predacon shell program is progressively degrading and would eventually have killed her regardless.

• Silverbolt: an antagonistic courtship she initially treats as a tool and eventually accepts, the show's second real romance.
• Tarantulas: her creator, tormentor and psychic controller, and the reason she exists as a Predacon at all.
• Megatron: an employer she never stops stealing from, and who never quite trusts her.
• Cheetor: he develops a crush on her in "Cutting Edge" and is turned down flat; they settle into a working partnership.

IDW's Beast Wars: The Gathering and The Ascending give her the Elita-1 origin the cartoon never mentions and continue the Silverbolt relationship. Transformers: Animated's Blackarachnia is a separate character entirely, a corrupted Elita-1, and shares only the name and the spider theme.

Survives the Beast Wars and returns to Cybertron with the Maximals. In Beast Machines she survives the Vehicon campaign and remains with Primal's resistance.

• Voiced by Venus Terzo, who would later voice Jetfire's associate roles in the Vancouver franchise pool and remains closely associated with the character at conventions.
• Her toy is a black-and-gold repaint of the Tarantulas mold, and the show turned that reuse into the plot point that Tarantulas built her.
• IDW's Beast Wars: The Gathering established that her Maximal protoform originally carried the personality component of Elita-1, a retcon widely adopted by fans and never referenced on screen.
• The Transmetal II design was created for the series and only later produced as a toy, the reverse of the usual Hasbro-first process.
• Beast Machines makes her a spider-form Maximal working with Primal, and Transformers: Animated later reused the name for a completely unrelated Elita-1-derived character, muddying the search results for both.

Where the cartoon, the Marvel comics and the toy bios disagree, or where a popular claim does not hold up. We record these rather than smoothing them over.

• The Elita-1 protoform origin is IDW's addition and has no on-screen support; whether it applies to the cartoon character is unresolved.
• Whether her Maximal spark or her Predacon programming is her "real" self is a question the show raises repeatedly and deliberately never answers cleanly.