while the second was the undubbed, English-language episode, "Bad Spark", from the show's second season, to serve as a showcase for the upcoming release of the season in Japan. The third act was Lio Convoy, Close Call!, a new, original story that saw Optimus Primal pulled forward in time to team up with Lio Convoy to stop the monstrous Majin Zarak. Beast Wars Neo Even after the conclusion of Beast Wars II, there was still some time to go before the North American series had generated enough episodes to be aired in Japan, and the 35-episode Beast Wars Neo was produced to fill the 1998 gap. Still cel-animated and ostensibly even more light-hearted than Beast Wars II, this series introduced Big Convoy and Magmatron, new Maximal and Predacon leaders, the former in search of the missing Lio Convoy, the latter questing for the capsule that Lio Convoy had sealed the Angolmois Energy into at the conclusion of the previous series. Beast Wars Neo is particularly notable for one reason - it features the first return of Unicron to animated continuity for a decade. In the course of the series, Angolmois Energy is revealed to be Unicron's life-force, and the series leads to his attempt to transfer it into Cybertron, that it may become his new body. With the end of Beast Wars Neo, the third season of the North American series had been completed, and it was subsequently combined with the second season and dubbed for Japanese release as Beast Wars Metals. Beast Machines As controversial as Beast Wars started out, it was nothing compared to the controversy that would result from the infamous Beast Machines. The series was the only Transformers animated series to be fully plotted from start to finish by Marty Isenberg and Robert N. Skir, writers unfamiliar with Transformers lore who sought to produce the series as, in Skir's words, a "religious epic novel for television". The series tackled the heavy philosophical concept of what it meant to live in an increasingly technological society, running to 26 episodes over two seasons, though in its native Canada, the show was aired simply in one long 26-episode run. As Beast Machines begins, viewers rejoin Optimus Primal and his Maximals as they return to Cybertron, amnesiac and unable to recall how they got there, only to discover that the planet is now under Megatron's rule, its cities deserted, its