Dinobot

Dinobot is the Predacon who defects, and the reason Beast Wars is remembered as more than a toy commercial. He arrives in "Beast Wars (Part 1)" as Megatron's second, denounces his commander for landing them on the wrong planet, is shot for it, and then walks into the Maximal camp and challenges Optimus Primal to single combat for command of a crew he has just met. Primal refuses to kill him, and Dinobot joins the Maximals not out of conversion but because his honour code, which he insists is a Predacon virtue, has nowhere else to go.

What the writers build on that premise is a genuine tragedy about determinism. Dinobot helped steal the Golden Disk in the first place, and he knows what is on it: a record of the future. In "Aftermath" he takes both disks from the Predacon base, hands the alien one to Rhinox, and hides the Voyager disk from everyone, because if the future is fixed then he is not the author of his own life. "If the future is indeed immutably foretold, then my demise is but moments from that confirmation, for I could not live if not the master of my fate." That question drives him back to Megatron in "Maximal, No More", where he returns the disk, refuses to execute Quickstrike, and then cannot bring himself to kill Rattrap, and so betrays Megatron a second time and is left with no faction and no honour.

"Code of Hero" resolves it. Contemplating suicide, he instead tracks Megatron to the valley of the proto-humans and defends it alone against six Predacons, sustaining fatal damage, destroying the Golden Disk with his last shot and securing the existence of the human race. He dies of power failure surrounded by the Maximals, quoting Hamlet: "Tell my tale to those who ask. Tell it truly, the ill deeds along with the good, and let me be judged accordingly. The rest is silence."

He is given a hero's funeral, a missing-man formation by the Maximal fliers, and the anthropoids keep the stone hammer he improvised. The episode is routinely ranked among the finest half-hours of Western television animation.

Velociraptor beast mode with high strength, speed, reflexes and stamina; arguably the best pure combatant in the series, having held off Optimus Primal, damaged Megatron, and defeated six Predacons in sequence. Armed with optic lasers, a rotating tail-mounted blade assembly used as both weapon and shield, and a detachable sword. Limits: no flight beyond brief use of the spinning blade, and no ranged advantage against fliers. Almost every defeat he suffers comes from ambush rather than a fair fight, and it is a wound from Tarantulas near his spark chamber, not accumulated damage, that begins the power failure that kills him.

• Rattrap: mutual contempt that becomes the show's central friendship; Rattrap's recriminations are what push Dinobot toward his last stand.
• Optimus Primal: adversaries turned to genuine mutual respect, sealed by Primal's refusal to kill him in the first episode.
• Megatron: a commander he despises and cannot stop measuring himself against, and who clones him twice.
• Tarantulas: a running feud in which Dinobot repeatedly drops rocks on him, and which ends with Tarantulas landing the wound that kills him.

Fun Publications' BotCon material fills in his pre-war history: Theft of the Golden Disk and Dawn of Future's Past show him serving under the criminal Cryotek and duelling Maximal security during the raid on the archives, and give him an energy-based sword rather than the physical blade. Dreamwave's More Than Meets The Eye profile covers the same raid. IDW's Beast Wars: The Gathering brings back a cloned Dinobot rather than the original. No version contradicts the cartoon's account of his death.

Killed in "Code of Hero", dying of power failure after defending the proto-human valley alone; cremated with full honours. Megatron subsequently clones him using Rampage's half-spark to create Dinobot II in "Feral Scream Part 1"; that clone recovers fragments of the original's personality and sacrifices itself in "Nemesis (Part 2)".

• Voiced by Scott McNeil, who also voiced Rattrap, Waspinator and Silverbolt; the Dinobot and Rattrap arguments are one actor performing both halves.
• His dialogue is threaded with Shakespeare throughout the series, and his death line is a direct quotation of Hamlet's last words, a choice made by story editors Bob Forward and Larry DiTillio.
• The 1996 Deluxe toy's tail splits into a gear-driven spinning blade and a separate sword; packaging called it a "Cyberslash" weapon while the television commercials called it "spinning Veloci-Rotor blades".
• Beast Wars 10th Anniversary Dinobot shipped with a DVD of "Code of Hero" and one arm of the build-a-figure Transmutate.
• Dinobot is one of the very few Beast Era characters never resurrected in an outside continuity after death; Tigatron, Airazor, Terrorsaur, Scorponok, Tarantulas, Rampage and even Transmutate all returned somewhere, and he did not.
• Early in the series he had a running gag of declaring Optimus Primal dead after minor injuries and offering him a glorious funeral; he is the only character in the show who actually receives one.

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.

• Whether Dinobot II is in any meaningful sense Dinobot is left open; the finale implies the original's personality partially reasserts itself once Rampage's spark is destroyed, but the show never confirms it.
• The abandoned season-two script "Dark Glass", which would have restored the original Dinobot's mind to the clone, is widely known among fans and is sometimes treated as intent rather than the non-canon unproduced material it is.