Opinion: It Should've Just Been Unicron.
**Context**:
I'm gonna go over some stuff a lot of folks know already but I've gotta set the stage for this, so bear with me:
When Beast Wars started, the writing staff couldn't get a straight answer from Hasbro as to what they could and couldn't do. Even basic things, like what planet and era we were on/in. Was this post-apocalyptic Earth? Ancient Earth? A different planet entirely? They didn't know. So, at the start, the writers established the planet had two moons. And if it turned out this WAS Earth, they could just blow up one of the moons and fix that plot issue, which they of course did at the end of season 1 when Hasbro finally said "Yeah, it's ancient Earth."
The secondary antagonists of the series were a species called The Vok, an enigmatic and highly evolved race of beings seemingly made of energy, with technology far in advance of even the future Cybertronians. They're powerful and reportedly have forms incomprehensible to Cybertronians. Except later when they're just lame floating skulls.
But here's the thing: **The Vok suck.**
Nothing they do makes sense, their proposed backstory requires that you know and have read a bunch of comics, AND assumes a lot of things about that comic which don't even make sense if you HAVE read it. Plus it means folding the G2 comic into G1 cartoon continuity, since the Beast Wars series takes a lot more from the cartoon than it ever did from the comics. But those are two entirely incompatible interpretations of Transformers where everything is entirely different, from personalities to back stories to basic events.
Supposedly, The Vok are all about protecting the timeline and preventing Megatron from altering history... except THEY would've altered history in a far more drastic and devastating way than Megatron ever would have, by annihilating Earth in the first story we ever saw them in. So their actions at the start of the series utterly contradict their actions at the end of it. It doesn't even seem like they realise the planet they're doing these experiments on IS Earth when the show starts (which, again, is partly because neither did the writers).
**Further context and problems:**
One plan for them (which didn't come to fruition because only one guy thought it was cool, and it didn't fit at all) was that they would be The Swarm from the Generation Two comic, a race of Cybertronians which were the descendants of the Autobots and Decepticons, but thanks to them being the result of generations of a type of reproduction called "Budding" which further separated each succeeding generation away from the power and light of Primus, they were mindless and just consumed whatever they ran across.
In the end of G2, the Swarm attacks Earth, but Earth is saved by Optimus, who infuses The Swarm with the power and wisdom of The Creation Matrix, finally giving them minds and souls. The Swarm flies off, though we don't know where to, evidently feeling guilt for the destruction they wrought when they had no minds or intelligence.
The proposed backstory for The Vok was that they'd wiped out all life on Earth, and felt bad about that, so they sought to restore the human race with experiments to make up for all they'd done. Comics from 3H (mostly written by Furman) would hint at this being their true backstory, despite it making even less sense at the end of Beast Wars than it did at the start. This also doesn't make sense, especially since it's not shown or even hinted at that humanity was wiped out by The Vok in G2, it seems to be just a basic misinterpretation of the comic.
Their grand experiments don't make any sense. Their goals are constantly contradictory, and their ultimate reveal as just being dumb floating heads is a massive let-down. Why were they in the distant past, instead of in the future, if they wanted to re-seed life on Earth? Wouldn't their plans make more sense if this was POST-APOCALYPTIC Earth, as was one of the many proposed ideas for Beast Wars before they settled on it being set thousands of years ago? Why were they making multiple mega-weapons, including a moon-size one which they use to try to destroy Earth, if the whole point was to PROTECT Earth and restore humanity? Why were they wasting time making dumb experiments when they could've grabbed some ancient humans, extracted DNA, and moved on to the future where they could restore the species?!
Basically, nothing about the Vok made any sense, and all attempts to force them to make sense have repeatedly failed.
**Proposed Solution:**
What if the writers ditched the terrible Vok idea right at the start, avoided a LOT of headaches, and just made it Unicron?
At this time, the mid-90s, Unicron wasn't nearly the overused threat he'd later become. He'd been in the movie, barely featured in season 3 of G1, and been a threat in some comics most fans hadn't read. A return of Unicron in Beast Wars probably would've been hailed as being the coolest thing at the time! Instead, we get a big hologram of Unicron which immediately is then dispelled as being just a convenient form of authority for Optimus Primal, which rather deflated the threat IMHO and was a pointless bit of fan service.
Also, Unicron at this stage was being treated like a primordial god, rather than just another robot built by Primacron as he was in the G1 cartoon. Furman was building up to his Reaching Omega Point comic for Botcon with 3H Productions, which had a grand epic finale of fighting Shokaract, a character wielding The Matrix of Chaos, which contained Unicron's dark godly spark. And later, lot would change over the years in terms of lore to try to fold the body Primacron built in with Furman's godly backstory.
So why not just make it that the reason there's energon everywhere on Earth, so many experiments, a second moon etc, was just Unicron attempting to recover from his destruction in Transformers: The Movie by building a new form capable of holding his powerful essence and mind? The weapons and such were ways of recreating the power his former body had, something capable of breaking down entire worlds.
Being a god, Unicron potentially could time travel. Heck, in the G1 comic he was capable of bringing characters in from parallel universes. Perhaps he went back to a time before he was widely known about on Cybertron and decided to form a new body, either as the mechanical moon orbiting ancient Earth, or as the Earth itself? That would've raised the stakes and been really cool. The first return of Unicron on television since 1987!
Am I alone here? Does anyone else think the Vok sucked and that Unicron would have made a far better antagonist in the 90s in comparison for the finale of season 1?