Knock Out

Knock Out is the Decepticon medic, and the funniest character in a series that is otherwise almost relentlessly grim. Daran Norris plays him as a preening, self-satisfied hot-rodder whose priorities are, in order, his paint job, his own survival, and the Decepticon cause. He debuts in "Deus Ex Machina" alongside his partner Breakdown, and within two episodes the show has established that his interest in the war is largely aesthetic.

The vanity is a running joke that the writers never let become the whole character. Knock Out is a genuinely capable scientist and surgeon: he performs the cortical psychic patch procedures, restores Starscream's T-cog, extracts the Omega Key from Smokescreen's body using the Phase Shifter, and in season three runs the Synthetic Energon experiments on C.Y.L.A.S. that produce the Terrorcon outbreak in "Thirst". He is also a coward in a way the show finds credible rather than contemptible; he is the only Decepticon who accurately assesses his odds.

His best solo material is "Plus One", where a communications failure leaves him driving around with Agent Fowler and June Darby in his own boot, unable to call for a ground bridge and increasingly undone by the indignity.

His ending is the show's one genuinely light note. In the finale "Deadlock", with the Nemesis lost and Megatron dead, Knock Out simply changes sides, announcing himself an Autobot with no apparent crisis of conscience whatsoever. Nobody is fooled and nobody objects. He is still there, uneasily, in Predacons Rising.

Red sports car alt mode with the highest ground speed on the Decepticon roster; carries an energon prod and a rotary saw built into his forearm. His real value is medical and scientific: cortical psychic patch procedures, T-cog transplants, Synthetic Energon research and field surgery. Limits: a poor and reluctant combatant who avoids fights he might lose, physically outmatched by nearly every Autobot, and entirely unreliable under pressure.

• Breakdown: his partner and the closest thing he has to a friend, whose death he registers mostly as an inconvenience.
• Starscream: a fellow opportunist and sometime co-conspirator; the two attempt to terminate Megatron together in "Sick Mind".
• Megatron: a commander he serves out of pure self-preservation and is happy to euthanise given the opportunity.
• Bumblebee: a speed rivalry that gives the show most of its car-chase material.

The IDW Transformers Prime tie-in comics keep him consistent with the show. He was later imported into IDW's mainline continuity in a somewhat harder-edged form. No significant divergence within Prime itself.

Survives the series, defecting to the Autobots in "Deadlock" after Megatron's death, and appears on the Autobot side in Predacons Rising.

• Voiced by Daran Norris, best known as Cosmo in The Fairly OddParents, whose comic timing shaped the character considerably beyond what was on the page.
• Knock Out's alt mode is an unlicensed sports car in the Aston Martin idiom; Prime avoided vehicle licensing across most of its cast, unlike the live-action films.
• He and Starscream attempt to kill Megatron in "Sick Mind", making him one of very few Decepticons to survive a failed assassination attempt on his own leader.
• He is the only Decepticon in the series to switch sides successfully and survive to the end of the continuity.
• The character was popular enough that Hasbro produced multiple Knock Out figures across the Prime, Beast Hunters and later Generations lines, unusual for a Decepticon medic.