Quickstrike

Quickstrike is the other Fuzor, created in the same stasis-pod malfunction as Silverbolt in "Aftermath" and turned out as his exact inverse. Where Silverbolt wakes up a knight, Quickstrike wakes up a brawler: a scorpion-cobra hybrid with a cowboy drawl, no plan, and an appetite for a fight with anyone in reach. Colin Murdock plays him as a swaggering hick, and the character is written as pure aggression with the strategic depth of a bar stool.

He is useful to the plot mainly as a test. In "Maximal, No More" Megatron pits Dinobot against him in a duel to prove Dinobot's loyalty, and Dinobot defeats him but refuses to kill him, offering instead to train him. Quickstrike is too thick to understand that he has just been shown mercy by someone who despises him.

His one moment of genuine consequence comes in "Master Blaster", where Tarantulas manipulates him into using a control harness on the possessed Optimus Primal and then into dropping Megatron into a lava pit. It is the closest anyone comes to assassinating Megatron in the entire series, and Quickstrike does it because Tarantulas told him to and it sounded fun. Megatron emerges from the lava reborn as a dragon, and Quickstrike is put on trial for it in "Other Victories", a proceeding interrupted by the Vok.

He dies alongside Inferno in "Nemesis (Part 2)", shelled by Megatron during the destruction of the anthropoid settlement, having contributed almost nothing except one accidental regicide.

Scorpion-cobra Fuzor beast mode; his left arm is a scorpion pincer and his right is a functioning cobra head capable of delivering a paralysing cyber-venom bite. Physically strong and genuinely aggressive in close quarters. Limits: no ranged capability worth mentioning, no flight, no tactical sense at all, and an unmatched susceptibility to manipulation, which Tarantulas exploits to nearly kill Megatron.

• Silverbolt: his fellow Fuzor and opposite number, created in the same accident and turned out the other way.
• Tarantulas: manipulates him into the attempt on Megatron's life; Quickstrike never grasps that he is being used.
• Dinobot: defeats and spares him in a duel Megatron staged as a loyalty test.
• Inferno: a fellow blunt instrument and the character he dies beside.

Little used outside the cartoon. Fun Publications convention fiction includes him in Predacon rosters without significant reinterpretation. No significant divergence.

Killed in "Nemesis (Part 2)" alongside Inferno when Megatron bombards the anthropoid settlement the two were attempting to claim.

• Voiced by Colin Murdock, who also voiced several minor roles across the Vancouver-produced Transformers series.
• Fuzors were a toy-line gimmick combining two animals in one figure; the show explained them as stasis-pod DNA scanner malfunctions caused by the quantum surge in "Aftermath".
• The cobra-head right hand was a toy feature first, and the show wrote the cyber-venom bite around it.
• Quickstrike is the only character in the series to successfully put Megatron in a lava pit, and the result was Megatron's Transmetal II dragon upgrade, arguably making him responsible for the Predacons' most powerful asset.
• The name is an original Beast Wars coinage; Hasbro later reused it for unrelated characters in Robots in Disguise and other lines.