Quintessa

Quintessa is where G1 got its creation myth, and it is a horrible place to have come from. It is the capital world of the Quintesson empire, ruled by five-faced judges who preside over a legal system that is a joke with teeth: every defendant is found either innocent or guilty, and both verdicts end with the accused dropped through a trapdoor into a pit of Sharkticons. The Quintessons' own dialogue makes the trial's outcome explicit before it begins.

Its debut in The Transformers: The Movie gives the film its bleakest sequence. Kup, Hot Rod and the escaped Lithonian Kranix are captured and put on trial, Kranix is executed by Sharkticon for the crime of surviving Unicron, and the Autobots only escape when Wheelie's arrival and a well-aimed shot turn the Sharkticons on their masters. The pit, the trapdoor and the chanting judges are the images that stuck.

Five Faces of Darkness then delivers the retcon that reshapes the whole continuity: the Quintessons built the Transformers on Cybertron as merchandise, consumer goods and military hardware, and the Autobots and Decepticons are the two product lines. The rebellion that drove the Quintessons off Cybertron becomes the First Cybertronian War. In Five Faces of Darkness, Part 3 Kup, Ultra Magnus and Spike are sentenced to the Sharkticon pit on Quintessa, Rodimus Prime and the Aerialbots mount a rescue, and the Quintessons detonate their own planet to kill the rescuers. The Autobots escape; Quintessa does not.

• The Quintesson judges rotate between five faces, each with a fixed role, and the design was created for the 1986 film by Floro Dery.
• Quintessa is destroyed by the Quintessons themselves, in their own third-season debut arc, which means the empire's capital is gone before the season is half over.
• The creator retcon in Five Faces of Darkness directly contradicts the Marvel comics' god Primus, and both accounts remain in circulation as G1 canon.
• The kangaroo court sequence is one of the very few G1 scenes in which an on-screen character is executed, and it happens twice in the same scene.
• Quintessa also names an entirely unrelated character in the live-action Transformers: The Last Knight, which makes searching for the planet unusually annoying.