I finally watched this last night, while I have been enjoying the episodes, this one did feel a little flat.

I did like the disgust/contempt Starscream showed towards choosing a non flight vehicle mode.

The battles were OK, I feel that there is a distinct lack of purpose in the battles though, prime nearly always gets kocked down, and early in the episode, the autobots get a hard time and later on they do well, with the odds being nearly the same.

I loved prime catching the missile, and the cruelty that Starscream shows towards his minions. The discontinuity between the first view of the security monitor with the phone on it and the latter view showing the side of the phone was a bit dissapointing.

As for the series tying together, apart from the episodes feeling really short, I get the feling that there is a bit of long term groundwork being laid for every episode and it will gradually grow into something fairly complex. we are at least getting something a bit meaty in each episode and it's so far so much better than anything we've had in years. certainly the unicron trilogy gets left behind, Animeted, well that's a hard one to beat, but I think it's more serious. It certainly has better production values than G1 and story wise I think it's going to be generally better too. as for Beast Wars/Machines the start of those was slow too, and the show ended up creating the fan favorite inductee into the Hall of Fame.

As for people not being happy with prime, as much as I love my rose coloured glasses, prime has always been fairly preachy, he is the moral backbone of the autobot cause, I look forward to him being tested though, perhaps by megatron or Starscream in a later episode.

I am really keen to see how this developes over the next couple months. Definitely hanging for a Bulkhead toy, and maybe an Arcee.