Transformers 5 ending explained: What happens in the post-credits scene

The following post contains spoilers about the end of Transformers: The Last Knight.

The movie about robots in disguise fittingly ends with a robot in disguise.

Following the events of Transformers: The Last Knight—which may have killed Shia LaBeouf's Sam Witwicky off-screen and definitely expired Anthony Hopkins' Sir Edmund Burton on it—a mysterious woman is shown walking through the desert toward a scientific outpost near one of the many robotic horns that poked through the Earth's surface throughout the film.

"Don't touch him. He doesn't like it," the woman, played by actress Gemma Chan, tells an unsuspecting aide worker. Asked who the "him" is, the woman explains she's referring to the horns as part of Unicron and promises to show the unidentified male "how to kill him."

The woman? That's Quintessa, the evil Transformers maker who brainwashes Optimus Prime in the beginning of The Last Knight and sends him on a mission to kill Unicron, a planet-sized Transformer revealed to be Planet Earth. (Chan voices Quintessa in The Last Knight.) After Quintessa is vanquished but not killed in the film's final act, Optimus Prime and the Autobots save Earth/Unicron from being engulfed by Cybertron, the previous Transformers home planet. The post-credits scene basically sets up future Transformers movies (if there are ones) as being a battle to stop Quintessa from killing Unicron from the inside.

If that sounds a bit different from standard Transformers mythology, it is: Unicron is normally a big bad in the Transformers universe, though if the post-credits scene is any indication, the character will be on the side of the good guys—at least when compared to Quintessa. (Unless Quintessa is running a long con and Unicron is actually evil and she wanted to use him to destroy Cybertron all along.)

Speaking to ComicBook.com about the ending, producer Lorenzo di Bonaventura teased, "the mythology of The Quintessa is that she very well and was probably human. So when you go back in time and go through those 6 billion years of mythology, there's certainly a current of thought within it that says she was a human character and perhaps was actually the first one who built the Transformers. So ironically, if that's accurate, then humans built Transformers."

Transformers: The Last Knight is out now.