Lockdown

Lockdown is the best antagonist the Bay films produced, largely because he is the only one who is not trying to conquer anything. Introduced in Age of Extinction (2014) and voiced by Mark Ryan, he is a bounty hunter who works for the Creators, the Cybertronian originators later identified with the Quintessons, and his job is to retrieve Optimus Prime. He has no interest in Autobots and Decepticons as factions, regards the war as a squabble, and says so.

His design is the strongest in the series: a black Lamborghini Aventador LP 700-4, a face that splits open to deploy a cannon, and a modular arm that swaps between weapons. His ship is a trophy vessel, a hold full of captured Transformers frozen in stasis, which does more to establish menace in one shot than most of the films' exposition. He also functions as the films' one genuine mercenary: his alliance with the CIA's Cemetery Wind unit and Joshua Joyce's KSI is transactional, and he betrays them without hesitation.

He kills Ratchet in the film's opening act, a slow and ugly scene that establishes the stakes, and he very nearly kills Optimus, who spends most of the third act pinned and helpless.

He dies in the Hong Kong finale: Optimus, freed by Cade Yeager, impales him on his own weapon, and Bumblebee and a tow truck driven by Tessa Yeager finish the decapitation. It is a messy, unheroic kill and it fits the character. Mark Ryan, who voices him, had previously voiced Bumblebee in the 2007 film and Jetfire in Revenge of the Fallen.

Black Lamborghini Aventador LP 700-4 alt mode. His face splits open to deploy a heavy cannon, and his modular right arm swaps between a grenade launcher, a magnetic grapple and a large blade. He commands a starship equipped with a magnetic manipulation weapon capable of lifting vehicles and buildings wholesale, and a trophy hold of captured Transformers in stasis. Limits: he fights alone by choice, and once Optimus is free and assisted he is beaten in a straight fight.

• Optimus Prime: his target rather than his enemy, a distinction the character makes explicitly and repeatedly.
• The Creators: his employers, the Cybertronian originators later tied to the Quintessons, who want Optimus returned.
• Harold Attinger and Cemetery Wind: a transactional alliance with the CIA unit hunting Autobots, which he abandons the moment it stops being useful.
• Ratchet: killed by him in the film's opening act, the death that sets the tone.

Lockdown was created for Transformers: Animated, where he is a bounty hunter who modifies himself with parts taken from his victims and has a history with Ratchet specifically. The film version imports the concept, the face-cannon and the trophy ship, and drops the Ratchet history, then kills Ratchet anyway.

Killed in Age of Extinction. Optimus Prime impales him on his own weapon during the Hong Kong battle, and Bumblebee and Tessa Yeager complete the kill with a tow truck.

• Voiced by Mark Ryan, who also voiced Bumblebee's brief spoken lines in the 2007 film and Jetfire in Revenge of the Fallen, and who worked on the films as an on-set voice coach.
• The character originated in Transformers: Animated as a bounty hunter with a similar face-cannon and trophy-collecting habit, and the film version is a direct adaptation of that concept rather than a G1 character.
• His ship's magnetic weapon, which lifts ships and buses into the sky over Hong Kong, was one of the most technically demanding sequences ILM produced for the film.
• Age of Extinction's opening kill of Ratchet was intended to signal that the surviving Autobots from the first trilogy were genuinely expendable in the new roster.
• The Creators storyline he introduces was intended to lead into a Quintesson arc that the franchise never delivered before the continuity was rebooted with Bumblebee.

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 identity of the Creators he serves is left vague in Age of Extinction; The Last Knight and subsequent material tie them to the Quintessons, but the film itself never names them.