Not in it’s IDW form, that’s for sure. However, open-processor surgery can have similar results, and there’s probably something similar to the cortical psychic patch from TFP as well. I think it’s far more…unexplored territory, so to speak. TFA seems to be well behind IDW/TFP continuities in terms of certain advancements- they’re younger as a species, I think. I mean, at most, Optimus Prime is maybe a thousand, two thousand years old. At most. He’s at least a few hundred. But he’s certainly not even in his millions, yet.
Makes you wonder about age ranges for everything else…
I’ve actually been thinking about the shadowplay thing a lot, too, because I’ve been considering Chromedome in this setting- I believe he is, or was, sort of a combined programmer-brain-surgeon. Which would certainly explain how he winds up on the Lost Light. His job was to fix people whose processors and sparks had been damaged- he might have worked, previously, on other crewmembers like Sunstreaker or Skids, as part of their treatments.
Once they started asking him if he’d be interested using his skillset on, say, Decepticon prisoners or dissidents, he knew he had to get off Cybertron.
Don’t get too comfortable. You can still ruin, erase, and rewrite a bot’s memories- it’s just…instead of doing it with some little slips of the needles into the back of the neck, like
you gotta
….you know. Except presumably you either need a hell of a computer hooked up to the other end. Or you need to hook yourself up to the other end. And it’s more likely you’ll just scramble their processors irreperably or damage their spark in the process, instead of getting the results you want. Of course…technology is improving every day!
Cybertronian Database 