Silverbolt

Silverbolt is a Fuzor, a malfunction. Two stasis pods fail during the quantum surge in "Aftermath" and produce hybrids: a scorpion-snake called Quickstrike, and a wolf-eagle who wakes up believing himself a knight. Megatron inducts both into the Predacons, and Silverbolt spends about ten minutes objecting to Megatron's methods before being shot down over the Axalon in "Coming of the Fuzors (Part 2)", surrendering, and defecting the moment he is repaired. He kicks Megatron off a cliff on his way out.

His chivalry is played as slightly absurd and entirely sincere, and the show gets a great deal of mileage out of the gap. Scott McNeil voices him in a plummy heroic register that sits oddly against Rattrap's Brooklyn snark, and the other Maximals find him ridiculous. But the code has teeth: Silverbolt is the character who insists in "Transmutate" that a Maximal's duty is to protect all sentient life, that stasis-locking a damaged innocent is not mercy but disposal, and he is furious with his own commander about it. He is right, and the episode does not let him win.

The relationship that defines him is with Blackarachnia, and it is the strangest romance the franchise has produced. He refuses to strike her because she is female, which she finds insulting; he pursues her anyway; she uses him and then does not. Optimus reprimands him for it in "The Agenda (Part I)"; he knocks Cheetor out and deserts rather than arrest her. It is Silverbolt who is with her when they break into the mountain and find the Ark.

The joke never quite stops being a joke, but by the third season Silverbolt's stubborn insistence that decency is a battlefield tactic has been vindicated more often than not.

Wolf-eagle Fuzor beast mode combining flight with a powerful quadruped body; robot mode retains flight and carries a wing-mounted missile launcher and a chest-mounted cannon. He is one of the few Maximals who can engage the Predacon fliers on equal terms. Limits: his code prevents him striking female opponents, which Blackarachnia exploits directly; he is emotionally volatile and can be manoeuvred through appeals to honour; and he is badly outmatched by Rampage.

• Blackarachnia: the central relationship of his run, a courtship she treats as a liability and eventually accepts.
• Rampage: opposed over Transmutate, and the two share the only grief either is shown to feel.
• Optimus Primal: a commander he respects and openly defies over both Transmutate and Blackarachnia.
• Quickstrike: his fellow Fuzor and opposite number, created in the same accident and turned out the other way.

IDW's Beast Wars: The Gathering continues the Silverbolt and Blackarachnia relationship past the show. The Fun Publications convention fiction extends both. No significant divergence from the cartoon's characterisation.

Survives the Beast Wars and returns to Cybertron with the Maximals. In Beast Machines he is captured and reformatted into the Vehicon general Jetstorm before being restored.

• Voiced by Scott McNeil, one of four major roles he held in the series alongside Dinobot, Rattrap and Waspinator.
• The name is taken from G1's Silverbolt, leader of the Aerialbots, and the Beast Wars character's aerial mode and heroic register are a deliberate nod to him.
• Fuzors were a toy-line gimmick, figures combining two animals, and the show explained them in-fiction as stasis-pod DNA scanner malfunctions caused by the quantum surge.
• His refusal to strike a female opponent, and Blackarachnia's exasperation with it, was a running gag that the writers escalated into an actual plot mechanic in "Tangled Web".
• Beast Machines makes him a Vehicon general, Jetstorm, one of several Beast Wars survivors reformatted by Megatron in the sequel.