My Brother is a Robeast/Challenge from Space

There's a string of favorite episodes we're moving through.  I love the introduction of Pollux/Heracles.

My Brother is a Robeast

We open outside Castle Doom (GASP) with Zarkon speaking to King Kova, who is kneeling with several of his courtiers, including Avok, his son and strongest warrior.  Prince Avok will become a Robeast to defeat Voltron.  Lotor doesn't believe it, and does some boasting.  In the arena, Avok fights a completely generic blue robeast with a tail.  He finishes off the robeast to the Doomites' collective dismay.

Lotor leaps into the arena and draws his laser sword.  He pushes Avok back until his sister, Romelle cheers for him from the stands.  Unfortunately for Lotor, she looks like Allura and he gets distracted, disarmed and held at swordpoint.  Lotor agrees to help them with the plan.  Haggar takes him off to become a robeast.  Romelle and her younger brother Bandor claim Avok is the bravest.  Lotor leaps to the stands and leads Romelle around.  The king stands up and looks upset, but one of his courtiers assures him that his son is in god hands.

Zarkon and Haggar, as usual, discuss the plan for the benefit of the audience.  With Kova old and feeble(?) and Avok as a robeat, that leaves Bandor as the heir.  Lotor has designs of Romelle, which amuses Zarkon.

Lotor arrives on Pollux.  I like the design of Lotor's command ship, which we see close up for the first time (it was in the distance for a moment in "Yurak gets his Pink Slip").  Lotor disembarks with Romelle walking with Lotor's harem.  He describes the robeastification process to King Kova, who approves--Avok was a willing subject, which allowed him to absorb a large amout of super sizification.  He's now resting in a space coffin.

On Arus, the team views a challenge to surrender or fight from Pollux.  Allura's father had told her about the planet Pollux (when she was four?!)  It is the evil twin of Arus.  One ancient king had two sons, one good, one evil.  He banished the evil son to Pollux before he died.

Keith decides it's time to make peace/  Coran agrees and offers to go; Allura says, as princess, it's her place to go.  So they go.  They form Voltron and make their way to Pollux.  t doesn't take long beause the orbit takes Pollux close to Arus every hundred years.

Kova meets with his council of bodybuilders and they plot against Zarkon.  The blue cat is watching, and Lotor and Haggar are hanging out with the harem and watching Haggar's crystal ball.  Haggar mentions the cat has a transmitter.  What, NOW you decide magic is implausible?!

The Voltron force is sneaking through the sewers to the castle, doing a pretty good imitation of a SWAT team with their cover formation.  They see a fleet of Polluxian attack ships through a sewer grate, then swim across that body of water that's in the middle of the courtyard.  What is that?  Pidge leads them in scaling the castle wall using ultragrips they all have in their belts.  They basically make a ladder of hand and footholds out of them.  They jump into the castle and run down the hall.

Romelle and Bandor are in a room looking at Arus in the sky.  Romelle tells Bandor that war is nothing to be happy about, and that you can't believe everything Lotor says.  He hears a noise in the hall.  It's Pidge, who's backed into a statue.  Bandor confronts Pidge.  Allura runs up, and she and Romelle see each other for the first time.  Bandor takes them all prisoner--until Hunk just tackles him.  Unfortunately, the cat sees them, and Lotor's troops have the castle surrounded.

Oh, yeah, this is also the first episode in which we see Lotor's adjutant, Mogor.  Or Morgil, as he's usually called,  Who sounds like Yurak.  But has a uniform a lot like the evil Vikings in the old Rune PC game.  The team beats a covered retreat back to Voltron, and then they break into the courtyard.  Lotor's adjutant orders the robeast released.

The space coffin is launched from Lotor's flagship, and a purple, giant Avok emerges and locks two swords together and starts spinning them.  Huh.  I wonder if Pollux has fire dancers?

Avok knocks the blazing sword out of Voltron's grip, but then Voltron knocks the double-sword away with the spinning laser blade.  The two end up in a clinch.  Avok throws him, then goes to grab Voltron by the black lion head-visor.  Voltron breathes fire out of his human face, then they goes tumbling out of the courtyard into a lake.  Voltron electrocutes Avok, then Lotor loses patience and and sends fighters after both of them.  Avok, um, swims away.  Romelle panics, runs, and is grabbed by Lotor's men.  They just wound Avok.

Voltron demolishes Lotor's ship, but he escapes in an escape ship.  But he's low on fuel and blames Morgil.  The team tells a distraught Bandor that he'll have to land on Arus and will barter Romelle for repair help.  What th-?  Then they all hug.

Challenge from Space

The planet is called Heracles in Golion, and that kinda makes their toga-like dress and trireme-esque spaceships a little more understandable.  Still, though, the character designers had some weird fixation on horrifically short skirt-things for male characters.  Fascinating people, the Japanese.

The eldest Heraclean prince is named Samson.  And Daibazaal is not impressed with their proposal.  And Sincline is incensed that they claim to be even better warriors than the deathblack beastmen.

Samson basically disembowels the beastman.  We're not surprised.  Sincline's sword has a glowing effect, but no sounds.  Samson's sister is Amue.  Honerva's voice is super creepy when she takes Samson to her lab.  Prince Alor also has a creepy little-boy crush on Sincline.  And the Heraclean king is upset that sincline runs off with Amue.

The narrator explicitly states the preparations take months.  And Amue looks a bit downtrodden when she follows Sincline off the ship.  She averts her face when Sincline speaks to her father.  And Lotor's adjutant is named Gobra.

The design of the Heraclean castle is a lot more . . . castley and a lot less Enchanted Kingdom than the Altean castle.

Raible explains that Heracles comes close to Altea only every 15-20 years.  The story of the foundation of Heracles by Altean exiles is basically the same.

"Fighting, fighting, Golion!"  Yeah, it's the Formation V song as they combine.

Apparently, Golion has some sort of stealth barrier that allows them to inflitrate Heracles airspace.

Yeah, yeah, the Heraclean master plan is to defeat Altea as a scheme to ultimately defeat Galra.

Have I mentioned that I generally like the mechanical designs for this series?  Each society has it's own basic design philosophy, but you can intuitively tell the purpose behind most of the ships.

Huh.  The Voltron "ultragrips" are called "ultrahooks" here.  How can you 1) sneak up a wall that's within plain sight of all those troops down at the canal and2) sneak up a wall with tools that make a high-pitched *clink* noise all the time.

Amue tries to tell Alor that Sincline is "a terrible person."    And, amusingly, Amue and Fala aren't totally identical.  Fala looks more like Maetel from Galaxy Express 999.

The pistols used by Lotor's troops are a design we've never seen before.  And kinda neat-lookin'.  Aaand, another talkin' beastman.  Golion breathing fire from the human face is "Power Fire."  And Heracles' close-combat training apparently involved pro wrestling.  When Sincline gets irritated at the progress of the battle, he actually tells Gobra "to just blow them both up!"  The fighters blind the beastman, and the two either launch missiles or crash into him.  He turns from purple to normal colored, and then explodes.  His father, angry at Sincline, jumps into a AAA gun and gets blown up by fighters.  Amue gets grabbed and Alor is wounded.

Sincline stands on Gobra's head because he didn't get Fala.

Oh.  They're all standing around the grave of Alor's father.  Alor laments that he saw only Sincline's strength and did not see him for what he was.  And so, this is the second planet they liberate from Galra, sort of (though they didn't liberate them so much as end an alliance between them), and the first major allie they make.