Lotor . . . My Hero?

Lotor  . . . My Hero

Optimus Prime brings us in to Doom with a tone poem about vultures, greed, and envy.  Merla is giving Zarkon a back rub.  And then Haggar takes over and Zarkon freaks out and talks about how he can't remember when Haggar was beautiful because his memory only goes back a thousand years.  And Lotor is waiting in the wings to take the throne.

On Arus, a woman has asked the Voltron force to help her suddenly fever-ridden mother, who was apparently cursed the day before by Haggar in the form of her red-dress wearing self from Fleet of Doom.  And the only cure for the accursed fever is a flower that only blooms once every thousand years, and there's only one.  Oh, and Alfor ex Machina is the one who tells Allura about the Cadmium flower. 

The team takes a hover-bumper-car back to the castle with Sven with the flower they've somehow found in five seconds.

Lotor sharpens his "stun-sword" and sneaks up on Zarkon, but is caught.  And then he tries to claim it was all a game.  Lotor is imprisoned with some goofy hissing centipedes.  Lotor sweats.  Zarkon tells him the millipedes (my mistake) can chew through steal.  They chase him around the cell, and then they chew a way to freedom for Lotor.

Everyone at the Castle of Lions is waiting for the Cadmium flower to bloom.  And it does it in style.  They wait for it to open into a real flower.  Pidge finds Cheddar building a house to protect the flower.  Then the mice trip.  Silly mice.

Zarkon lands his blue flagship in a ravine right on planet Pollux.  Haggar introduces him to new robeast material.  Some Polluxian scouts are watching.  And then Haggar looks at the Cadmium flower in her crystal ball, and sends the cat to disrupt things.  The flower opens, and the blue cat charges the mice and steals the flower.  The team--and the mice--pursue.  They don't catch the cat.  There's much weeping and wailing and gnashing of teeth.  Haggar takes off in her space coffin.  Keith orders the team to follow her.  They launch the lions.

Haggar leads the Voltron force away while Zarkon plans to launch an attack from Pollux.  Sven and his men stage a commando raid while Bandor goes to warn the Voltron force.  The Voltron force peels away from their pursuit of Haggar and Sven and his men disable robots and commandeer a skull tank to destroy the Doom Base.  Zarkon is pissed.  Haggar says she'll be right on her way.

Bandor blows things up with a slingshot.  A Doom fighter chases him.  Sven blows up the horribly miscolored monstrosity with his tank.  Then reinforcements arrive and disable Sven's tank.  The lions show up and perform horribly miscolored attacks on the Doom forces. 

Zarkon tosses a millipede in his robeast super-sizer.  It turns into a robeast only Floro Deiry could love.  Then Haggar arrives and starts ordering the robeast around.  It takes red lion out of the sky.  Green and yellow lions launch weapons at it, then Keith launches the lion wing attack from right over Haggar.  The robeast disables black lion with a flamethrower, then grows new claws or something in another poorly animated scene and throws green lion around.

Haggar shows Zarkon the Cadmium flower.  Then she goes on the ultrawave and taunts Coran, Allura (HOW THE CRAP ARE THEY BACK ON ARUS SO FAST) and the daughter.  Zarkon and Haggar destroy the flower.  Oh, but Keith, Pidge, Hunk and Lance are still on the planet.  I guess Allura didn't go with them?  I totally didn't notice.  The guys start fighting Doom soldiers on the ground.  Keith is about to get smooshed by the millepede robeast, but then an identical robeast starts fighting it.  The two robeasts destroy each other.

Then Lotor shows up.  A moment that could have been awesome is ruined by Zarkon quipping that he never should have given Lotor the keys to the spaceships.  Lotor declares war on his father.

Allura apologizes to Deborah (oh, that was her name) and suddenly Cadmium flowers bloom out of nowhere.  Alfor tells them they were borne from the love they all share. The mice make a potion out of it.  Deborah's mother is revived by it. 

This episode actually has sooo much potential, but it falls apart thanks to a bunch of poorly explained, rushed-seeming sequences and some of the worst animation of even this second season.