Bot Reviews: Transformers: Timelines Deluxe Depth Charge

Kingdom may be hard at work releasing updates of the Season One cast of Beast Wars, but there’s some much-loved characters from later in the series that’ll take Generations awhile to get to, if they get to them at all, like Depth Charge.

This Ultra-sized Transmetal Manta Ray was introduced at the start of Season Three, as a grim, renegade hunter bound by vengeance, who’d come to the world of the Beast Wars to hunt his nemesis, the Predacon Rampage.

He was very much cast in the mold of edgy 90’s antiheroes, all full of grimness and anger, refusing to get along with the heroes for no real reason, as he struck out on his own. Also, it was funny how hard the show worked to shill him as a Cool Guy. Either way, it worked, and he’s many a fan’s favorite from that series.

So, onto this update, released by the Transformers Collector’s Club back in 2013. To the uninitiated, the Transformers Collector’s Club was like Generations Selects, but worse in almost every way. The figures were way more expensive (thanks to limited runs, and some kind of misguided idea about “preserving value”), much harder to get (you had to be a dues-paying member of the Club to order them, and they often came as a part of a large multi-figure “subscription” package), and came from an outside-of-HasTak company with questionable management. But, what the Collector’s Club did have going for them was a near-infinite paint budget per each figure, and a lot of weird, clever, outside-the-box ideas. Still, it’s nicer to have the collector-oriented repaint-line of exclusives be created in-house, and sold for retail prices through a bunch of channels.

Anywho, released by the Club in 2013, Depth Charge is by far the easiest, and most affordable Collector’s Club figure to get on the secondary market (when I got him around 2018 or so, a fellow collector was selling his loose copy for the price of a sealed mainline Deluxe). This is because he was incredibly over-produced. See, he was given for free as a subscription bonus to Club members, but was then also made available separately for purchase, and since you needed to be a member of the Club to get him anyway, it seems no one felt inclined to double-dip. This version of Depth Charge is a repaint of Terradive, a Deluxe Decepticon from Transformers: Hunt for the Decepticons, a movieverse spinoff line that came out between Revenge of the Fallen and Dark of the Moon.

Someone at the Club noticed the tooling happened to suit Depth Charge, and turned it into a Cybertronian pre-Beast version of the character. Since I like Beast Wars, funky exclusives, and I’d never owned any Club figures (and still don’t have any others), I thought I’d give it a whirl. Here’s how he stacks up in 2021.

Vehicle Mode

Unlike most modern figures, Depth Charge was packaged in his alternate mode, so I’ll start here. While Terradive’s fighter jet mode is supposed to look nebulously Earthlike, it works well enough as a Cybertronian altmode, and as the altmode of someone who’d one day decide to become a Manta Ray.

That is to say, it’s a sleek-looking Deluxe-sized fighter jet, with forward-swept wings, and angular tailfins. Or rather, I would call it sleek, were it not for the excessive undercarriage caused by his legs being extremely visible from most angles. While he holds together fine, I do wish the transformation engineering had found a way to hide those legs better, since the rest of him is so sleek-looking.

The real star of the show here is his colors, because this deco, created with an infinite paint budget, is really lush. There’s so many colors here. Depth Charge is mostly a cool, aquatic shade of blue, enhanced by accents of vibrant purple on the wings and transparent cockpit, as well as bits of yellow, grey, and slick silver paint.

The most clever bit of deco, to me, is a pair of “eyes” painted on either side of the cockpit, using a pair of molded running-light details that were already sculpted on, and making them the pupils of yellow eyes, with little purple borders. It just really feels like they went the extra mile with this deco.

For features, Depth Charge shows his old 2010-era mold budget by having three complete unfoldable landing wheels (though they don’t roll).

He also comes with a spear accessory, meant for his robot mode, but you can stash it beneath the jet mode, when it’s folded up, using a moveable grey clamp at the back of the jet that was specifically added to facilitate it, and brackets halfway up his jet-mode body. That being said, when it’s stashed away, the clamps tend to bend the fairly thin spear, so I usually leave it off, lest I warp his weapon over time.

Transformation

This was back at a point where being a part of a Movie toyline meant you were difficult to transform by default, and Revenge of the Fallen was the nadir of this. However, toyline-original designs like Terradive tended to avoid the worst of this, so, luckily, he isn’t one of those legendary Bayverse nightmares, and is just straightforward enough to figure out. That being said, he’s definitely more complex than he needs to be, with a lot more flipping and flexing and bending than you’d think a jet former would require. Really, it’s going back into jet mode that tripped me up more, because you’re compressing stuff in and making it all peg together a specific way, instead of just exploding it outwards. Still, it’s easier than that Kingdom Blackarachnia I just reviewed.

Robot Mode

Depth Charge is noticeably taller than most modern Deluxes, but that’s because he’s a bit of a beanpole, with lanky proportions.

The more I stare at him, the odder his shape is. He’s got long legs, and an elongated torso. His chest is funky, in that it’s his upside down cockpit, and two tiny fins, made into a triangular point,  and he’s got incredibly skinny arms that end in thick forearms, making him look almost cartoonish. I’m not totally sure it works as Depth Charge, who was a buff bruiser, but it’s certainly a unique look.

I love the tiny wings on his back, though I’m less of a fan of his larger wings just hanging out at his ankles. I’m also not a fan of the construction of his torso in general, outside of the chest, because the rest of it is kind of janky-looking, full of mashed-together panels, hinges, and hollow spaces. Still, it doesn’t spoil an interesting-looking figure.

In particular, he has a dynamic, sleek head sculpt. This is clearly why he was picked to be repainted into Depth Charge, because of how well it fits. He’s got fish fins on the sides and top of his head, and it looks like he has the character’s odd mouth panel. And it combines nicely with that wonderful deco, which, once again, is the star here.

In this mode, he’s a more evenly-distributed combo of blue, silver, grey, purple, and yellow, and from the tiny maximal symbol on his chest, to random things like the gold highlights on his thighs, it really feels like no expense was spared. It’s not even just that it works overtime to make sure he looks like Depth Charge (which he does), it’s just really pretty. Oh, and he has a transparent purple lightpiping gimmick on his head, one that seems like it should be blocked by the fact that his eyes are painted over red, but in practice, holding him up to light, a red glow still shines through, thanks to the paint.

Depth Charge is plenty poseable, and it combines with his lanky sculpt to make him impressively expressive.

He lacks a waist joint thanks to his transformation, but has all of the rest of the joints and swivels you’d expect. On top of that, he has swivelling wrists, and while he doesn’t have ankle tilts, his foot-mounted wings have tilts in them that replicate the effect, as well as serving to make him really stable. Perhaps I misjudged having them there. The only dim spot is that his ball-jointed hips feel a bit looser than I’d like.

Appropriate for a sea-themed character, his big accessory is an extremely long, skinny, blue trident with yellow prongs. In fact, it’s taller than he is!

That being said, it’s incredibly thin and bendable, in a way that feels fragile (and his Transformers Wiki entry warns you about breaking it). You can loosely fit it into his hands if you stick one of the thinner sections of it in, or you can have him grip it more securely if you carefully slide one of the thicker sections in.

His swivelling wrists play well with it, perfect for getting him into some two-handed poses.

There’s even a little geared gimmick with the prongs. By default, they’re in a triangular spear configuration, but you can push the base of the prongs backwards, to have them automatically fan out into a more traditional fork shape.

And when you’re not using it, you can clip it onto his back using one of his jet mode connections, either in full long-spear mode, or folded in half.

It’s a unique, characterful accessory, but I still wish it didn’t feel as fragile and breakage-prone as it does.

Overall

I mostly got Depth Charge as a novelty, since he’s the easiest Club figure to obtain, I like Beast Wars, and he’s got a lush deco. But outside of that novelty, he’s a pretty solid figure, on top of being one that inadvertently serves as an excellent update to a Beast-era character that hasn’t really gotten much love. While I quibbled a bit about his jet mode’s kibble, his only real problem is his fragile-feeling spear, especially since, even though he’s relatively affordable and common for a Club figure on the aftermarket, it’d still be a pain to replace if it broke. Maybe in a few years, the Beast-era train that Kingdom started will run all the way to a new-mold figure of him, but for now, this is a solid update, and a good representation of the fishy edgelord. I’d say if you can get a deal on him, he’s worth picking up, and even outside of being a Beast Wars homage, he’s interesting enough as a one-off, and can fit on many different shelves.