Quintus Prime

As this is our seventh Prime figure, we're now over halfway there! Quintus Prime possesses the Emberstone, which can create new life. After the war with Unicron, he is said to have wandered the cosmos, birthing diverse lifeforms on numerous planets. On the worlds Quintus Prime traveled to, his emblem is discovered within ancient ruins left behind. There's some kind of Transformers joke about Johnny Appleseed/Apple Computers in there somewhere, but I can't figure it out. Quintus was the scientist of The Thirteen, but for some reason sided with Team Evil when it came to fighting amongst themselves, proving that you can be the smartest guy in the room and still not have the sense God gave a duck. He was just more interested in his experiments than anything else, and the bad guys would let him do any stupid thing he wanted without making him worry about things like "ethics" or "consequences." Just like Maximus Prime was going to be named after the Maximals, Quintus Prime is named after the Quintessons, the evil little squid-aliens from the 1986 movie, with the implication being that he was the one who created them; of course, the Quintessons were named after a store near the Sunbow offices called "Quintessence," which I guess would make that store Quintus's grandpa? When the character appeared in the Earthspark cartoon, his face was based in part on the rapper MF Doom, and hints of that remain on this toy, thanks to the angular shape of the sculpt. He's got six eyes, and the back of the head is clear so light will shine through them, but the big collar behind the head stops that from happening very well. Quintus Prime is a very unusual robot, in that he has six arms, but zero legs; this figure gets that wrong, in that he has two arms and two legs. The actual design has Quintus's entire lower body just being a series of thin, ribbon-like tendrils, which Hasbro did gamely attempt to reproduce by way of sculpted flaps that form a "skirt" around the figure's legs, with the skirt and the legs both extensively using translucent greenish yellow plastic. There would be worse ways to do it, that's for sure. There's a single tendril on both sides of the waist that's done in solid grey, and has a loop at the end capable of holding an accessory, suggesting we're supposed to view those as arms (they're not), but even if we did (we shouldn't), that would still only bring him up to four, not the proper six. The sculpted tentacles do have nice detailing to make them look mechanical, rather than organic, and the chest is covered in interesting angular shapes. All the Primes come with at least one signature artifact as an accessory; Quintus of course gets the Emberstone, the thing he used to create life on all those various planets. In the fiction, it functions pretty much like the Allspark from the movies, but it works on organic materials instead of mechanical ones. It's just a big, faceted nugget cast in translucent yellow (despite being blue on the cartoon), and can be held in either the hands or the tentacle-loops, or hidden away inside the robot's torso cavity. Quintus himself gets typical articulation (head, shoulders, biceps, elbows, wrists, waist, hips, thighs, knees, ankles), and the skirt parts are done as five separate pieces so the legs can still be posed if you want to. Converting Quintus is not difficult: raise the arms up and cover the hands with their kibble, turn the waist around, fold up the shins, and point the feet down. That's really it. Now, the former "skirt" pieces do have slots that plug onto tabs on the compacted legs to make everything more secure, and the altmode definitely looks more different than it actually is, but this is a very simple effort. The altmode is a spaceship of some sort. It looks very much like a squid, with all those tentacles at one end and a long, pointed mantkle with fins near the tip at the other, which for me mainly calls to mind the Vorlon ships from Babylon 5. The way the legs transform leaves the shins sticking up more than you'd expect, but there's nothing wrong with your toy: that's the way they were designed to work, even if it doesn't look great. The tentacle-arms can either be folded back along the body of the ship, or swung forward to act as landing gear. There's a hollow cockpit area, but that's where the Emberstone gets stored, so don't expect to see any Headmasters or anything in there. Quintus Prime isn't the worst of The Thirteen Primes we've gotten so far (it's going to be hard for anyone to take that crown from Prima), or even the least interesting. He'd have been better if they'd found a way to actually give him six arms, or if the altmode were less "stand up to robot," but he's still decent. And while I know there are no plans to reuse any of the Thirteen molds in the future, it really seems like this might have been designed with an eye to repainting it into Botanica, the Transformer with a plant altmode from Beast Machines, who had roots for legs just like Quintus has these things. And since Botanica has never had any merchandise of any sort before, this would be a real opportunity for Hasbro to do something awesome! -- 03/03/26 Would you buy a Botanica/Scrounge two-pack? Tell us on our message board, the Loafing Lounge.