Transformers: The God Gambit

I’m a huge fan of the old Transformers G1 cartoon and now I have gotten my son into the show too. Yesterday, he was watching a second season episode called, “The God Gambit” and it caught my attention.

In the episode, the Decepticons pretend to be gods on some alien world and the Autobots come and champion skepticism. The episode begins with the alien heroine championing skepticism about the old “sky gods” when an Autobot who was shot down by Decepticons falls out of the sky, crash landing nearby. The religious believers of this world take that as a sign that sky gods are real and that the atheist is wrong.

This episode was surprisingly atheistic. They didn’t even play the old, “Well the Decepticons may not be gods, but there might be gods out there somewhere” card that many shows like to play. The good guys are called heretics and the bad guys were the religious believers.

I highly recommend that people check out this episode from the mid-1980s. It is currently on Netflix Streaming and of course on DVD.

The contrast to this of course is that just a few months ago, I was at a retro-toy convention and there were Christians trying to use G1 Transformers to sell Christianity. I guess they must have missed this episode.

Here is the episode on YouTube. Thanks to Jameson for finding it for me:

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