The God Gambit

The Decepticons scheme to conquer a race of primitive humanoids by exploiting their religious beliefs.

Detailed synopsis
The episode opens with Astrotrain chasing Cosmos through space, shooting him down where he crash-lands on Titan, one of Saturn's moons. On the surface, slaves are forced by the high priest Jero to worship a false god statue and give tribute. Rebels led by Talaria try to break this up and denounce the false god for what it is, but Cosmos' crash-landing convinces the slaves that the gods must be angry.

Astrotrain, seeing what's going on, decides to play Goa'uld and tell the people he is a god to enslave them and extract Cosmos' data tracks, in addition to mining the energy crystals of Titan. Starscream is not happy about playing second fiddle.

One of the rebels activates Cosmos' transceiver, and communicates with Optimus Prime on Earth. Jazz and Perceptor head to Titan aboard Omega Supreme (who, for some reason, runs out of fuel on a trip from Earth to Saturn, even though he can fly to Cybertron on most occasions), defeat Astrotrain, and free the enslaved people. As Jazz puts it, "We're not gods and never claimed to be".

Stats

 * Stats

Notable quotes
Here's the church. Here's the steeple. Open the doors and where are the people?!
 * - Starscream, playing the role of Wheelie

We're not gods and never claimed to be.
 * -Jazz

Sarcasm, not appreciated.
 * -Omega Supreme

Sorry to bust up your revival, but the Lady ain't got her heart in it.
 * -Jazz while saving Talaria from being sacrificed.

Mighty Astrotrain, what about me?! Die, like the worm you are!
 * - Jero learns that he shouldn't have worshipped Astrotrain

Other Notes

 * Notes

Animation and/or technical glitches

 * Glitches

Continuity errors

 * Errors

Transformers references

 * References

Real-world references

 * References

Miscellaneous trivia

 * Astrotrain seems out of character in this episode, especially with him ordering Starscream around. It would seem that this episode may have been originally written for Megatron in the Astrotrain role and quickly re-written in order to feature Astrotrain (who was, not coincidentally, a new toy at the time).  This would explain Starscream's deference (and apparent fear) of Astrotrain, plus Astrotrain's Megatron-esque dialogue.


 * Strangely, the existence of a primitive humanoid civilization on Titan was never brought up again in official TF fiction.


 * This was one of several episodes subjected to the MSTF treatment at BotCon 1999.

Keywords
(separate by commas and link each one so a page can be created for it if it does not already exist)

Religion, Slavery