This episode is pretty creepy, and not because of my fear of spiders. Airachnid is big, metal, has a humanoid face and doesn't move like a real spider, so she doesn't creep me out in that sense. She does creep me out in the sense that she's a total sadist, thoroughly enjoying the pain she causes.
What starts out as a simple recon of an Energon reading turns into a nightmare when Arcee and Jack discover a crashed spaceship belonging to Airachnid, a Decepticon (voiced wonderfully by Gina Torres) who has caused no small amount of pain for Arcee. Airachnid has been collecting trophies of species she's driven extinct, and once she learns that Jack is special to Arcee only he will do as her trophy for humanity.
It's a very dark story, with lots of painful flashbacks to scenes of Airachnid torturing Arcee and killing her previous partner. Arcee fears losing someone close to her again, and since Jack is human he's no match for Airachnid.
Or so everyone believes. Jack actually proves to be pretty resourceful and do some serious damage all on his own. As someone who's not a fan of humans in Transformers, I was very impressed. This show might just change my mind on that stance.
The problem this episode does have is what to do with Airachnid once she's defeated. At one point Arcee has her at gunpoint, and if this had been Beast Wars and she had been Dinobot I would have had no doubt that she would have pulled the trigger-- but this being Prime I had no doubt that she wouldn't. And so Airachnid escapes, with Jack and Arcee musing worriedly what she'll do. And they should be worried. This is a character who just said she wiped out species for fun, and had a ship full of stuffed corpses to prove it. She was built up a bit too high to let her just take off.
But that aside, this episode continues to establish Transformers Prime as one of the better Transformers series.
As usual, this episode is currently available to watch for free at http://www.hubworld.com/transformers/shows/prime/videos.
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