Editorial - My thoughts on Voltron: Legendary Defender Season 3

Just a heads up, this is probably the last of these editorials I’ll be doing for Voltron, I’m going to be doing full on retrospectives on a lot of Netflix stuff come the New Year, and of course Voltron is on my list. I may do a s4 but I don’t have it locked in and it may be a while since I’m basically locked in until April at this point. Yes, I do a lot in advance. But since I’m not going to be doing Voltron until the summer anyway, here are my thoughts.

Because of reasons Netflix decided to split the 13 episodes that would've been season 3 into 2 smaller seasons, one of which premiered in August which I’m covering now, and one which will be coming out the day after this review.

After their defeat of Zarkon in the previous season, he’s not in a good way and Prince Lotor has to stand in his place. He’s initially unpopular with Galra generals, but when one tries to spark insurrection at the arena, Lotor challenges him. He wins, of course, and tells the generals how he plans to allow worthy people from planets they’ve conquered to join their ranks, gaining allies of their own in the fight against Voltron.

Things aren’t looking great back with Team Voltron, without the Black Lion, they can’t form Voltron, and that’s not helping inspire confidence in people they hope to ally with. In addition, Keith’s taking the loss of Shiro pretty hard and despite Shiro wanting him to be the leader, he’s initially reluctant. Either way Princess Allura says they need to find a new pilot. Meanwhile Lotor has attacked one of the cities Voltron saved, gaining the Mayor as an unwilling ally, using his Galra-hybrid lieutenants.

They manage to lure the Lions into a trap. Keith accepts his position as leader, with some encouragement for Lance, surprisingly. Princess Allura wants to pilot the red Lion, not wanting to watch the others risk their lives whilst she does little. Erm, I say that, but she’s nearly died twice now! Anyway, the Red Lion doesn’t accept her, but the Blue Lion isn’t accepting Lance either. Allura realises that when Lance put aside his need for glory for the sake of a stronger team, ie accepted Keith as a leader, he proved worthy of being his right hand, the same way Allura’s father was. Lance moves to the Red Lion and the Blue Lion opens up for Princes Allura.

Lotor’s forces probe their attacks but upon seeing all 5 Lions withdraw. But Keith put a tracker on them and orders immediate pursuit, against the advice of most of his team. Lotor uses their inexperience to his advantage, out-manoeuvring them in his shuttle. He leads them to a gas planet that jams their radars and communication and has volatile areas that ignite when they fire lasers. This initially puts them off their game, especially as Allura has yet to fully connect to the Blue Lion. Fortunately, some time alone allows her to do so, and she gains a sonic cannon capable of forming a sonar map. With Voltron formed, Lotor retreats, with a new plan in mind.

They soon get a distress call, seemingly from an Altean ship. They find a ship, stuck in a wormhole which only Voltron can pass through. They do so and find that the Alteans aboard were killed whilst transporting a comet. But there are still life signs aboard, a guy who looks kinda like Shiro called Sven and a version of the scientist from the last season who hasn’t shown up yet this season. Yeah, Sven is a call back to the original Voltron series, right down to him taking a blast and saying he needed a trip to a space hospital.

Anyway, they meet the alternate reality Alteans, who have created an empire of peace by basically lobotomising those who would create war. The others are uncomfortable and certainly don’t want them waging this upon other realities so manage to get the comet away back into their reality, right into Lotor’s hands, he set up the fake distress call and gets away with the comet. Also, the person who voiced the Altean leader sounded remarkably like Zelda William’s Kuvira, it wasn’t even her.

Before we get to that, though, we need to deal with Shiro’s fate. He wakes up, somehow in a Galra ship, he escapes again, taking a shuttle and being shot down on an ice planet. There he’s captured by 2 freedom fighters, one voiced by Lars from Steven Universe. Anyway, after a while, he uses their shuttle to infiltrate a Galra ship to get close to Voltron as the ship goes to support Lotor on the gas planet. He misses them and lingers in space for nearly a week before the Black Lion finally rescues him. Oh and Haggarth has a spy follow Lotor but it doesn’t end well.

Shiro recovers almost immediately, which I think is a missed opportunity personally but what can you do? And is somehow immediately up to speed on current events. They manage to track the comet to a planet that Lotor’s forces are attacking, a Galra base, they discover that they’ve converted the comet, or at least part of it into a ship. More worryingly for them, they find a piece of the giant teledov they used against Zarkon’s ship in the s2 finale. Forced to choose between destroying the ship and the teledov, Shiro convinces Keith to destroy the teledov.

Wanting to know what Lotor’s plan is, we get some history. The original Paladins were a peace-keeping force, in alliance between various species across the galaxy. A meteor crashes into the Galra home-world of Daibazaal. King Alfor of Altea begins studying the meteor, whilst a scientist named Honerva begins studying a portal to another reality that it left behind. Soon dark creatures come through and they have to erect a particle barrier around them. Knowing it won’t hold, Alfor created the 5 lions that would later form Voltron. In the battle they manage to defeat the creatures but Zarkon and Honerva refuse to close the portal. It’s later revealed they’ve discovered pure quintessence, considering it a potential key to eternal life. But then Honerva, oh and by the way, she and Zarkon are married, falls ill and says that only quintessence can heal her, but their experiments have already destabilised the planet, and could put the universe in jeopardy.

Zarkon tricks the other Paladins into making the portal bigger so he can heal Honerva. But in doing so the planet is further destabilised. Alfor orders the planet evacuated and destroys Daibazaal, closing the rift. Zarkon and Honerva, who you might’ve guessed is now Haggarth, learn of the planet’s destruction and inspire the Galra empire to attack Altea, Alfor separated the Lions to prevent Zarkon getting his hands on them before perishing with the rest of the planet. Haggarth is using all her magics to try and heal Zarkon.   

This series may or not have been affected by the split. In my opinion, since ep 7 is largely standalone, it’s a good place to put an end to the series. That said, I have a couple of issues regarding pacing which I didn’t have in previous series.

My first issue is with Shiro. I like the episode dedicated to him, but his recovery from that ordeal happened too quickly. Him getting up to speed happened too quickly and him being in a leadership position happened too quickly. Hell, his entire return felt too soon, we’d only barely scratched the surface with Keith in a leadership position. In my opinion, the episode following his return should’ve been about Shiro getting used to not being in a full-on leadership position, instead it only emphasised how Shiro is a better leader.

My issues with the use of still frames to save on animation still resides in this season, I don’t think we’re getting away from it. But aside from that it does look beautiful as ever with smooth animation and a useful mix of 2d and 3d animation. Studio Mir continues to do solid work. And the same can be said for the voice acting, with Andrea Romano still being on top form with vocal direction.

I do like Lotor, and to a lesser extent his entourage as well, they all have unique abilities making for some interesting fighting. Lotor’s a more cunning adversary, using probing attacks to assess his enemies and actually ends up being somewhat more successful than his father. We are yet to really uncover the reason behind his exile and what feelings or grudges he bears against Zarkon but that might still be to come. He also knows how to play the long game, as he deals with the guy who sparked insurrection by sending him to guard the facility he was planning to attack, knowing Hagarth would kill him for his failure.

I also liked that Lance got a few character moments as he came to consider his place in the team, his accepting of Keith’s leadership and later coming to him, asking about his place in the team feel genuine and are well handled.

The rest of team Voltron are relegated in this half of the season. Pidge makes some progress tracking her family in the first episode but that’s never brought up again after. Hunk is… Hunk. and Coran is… Coran, Coran doesn't have much to do this season, aside from telling the backstory, also, where was he in all that? Aside from her gaining control of the Blue Lion and her battle of morals with the alternate universe Alteans, Princess Allura has little development also. Still, it was good to see her take a more active role as part of Voltron.

Season 3 has the occasional pacing issue, and it being chopped in half doesn’t help, but it still has strong character dynamics, a good story-line and gorgeous looking design and animation to allow me to see past those flaws.