A Pretty Spy
Coran announces an alert, and we get a groovy shot of some sort of RADAR or maybe DRADIS installation on the red parapet things on the castle.
Three green, red and yellow fighters (the Yurak standard) are chasing a gray ship Keith identifies as a Zarkon pursuit ship. Or maybe the fighters are the pursuit ships. They shoot it down in the desert, and Hunk goes out on a horse to investigate. The ship is a flaming wreck (and the fighters have apparently gone back to Doom). Hunk finds an unconscious but alive girl thrown clear from the wreck. She bears a Doom horned and fanged skull tattoo on her left forearm. Sign of a Doom slave.
Hunk takes her back to Nanny's ministrations. Poor kid. About time Nanny makes herself useful.
The team spends the sunset discussing the girl's escape. Some of them seem a bit skeptical.
The girl is conscious, and Allura is spoonfeeding. The girl introduces herself as Twyla. She fled Doom because Zarkon was going to torture her. We flash back to a Skull Galley landing. Twyla and her brother become slaves, and she flees in a spaceship (she says the same one, but it's the one that looks like a Klingon ship she actually flees in). Hunk is angered at Zarkon by her story. Keith looks at her suspiciously.
Hunk gets Lance and Pidge (as they hang out by the moat) to discuss a preemptive stirke on Zarkon. Keith airs his suspicions and gets throttled by Hunk. Huh. Character development--the team doesn't all get along all the time.
That night, Twyla awakens with red glowing eyes. This is always promising. She walks past the room that the team now apparently share communally and checks on them with her X-ray vision (Arus must orbit a yellow sun). Keith is awakened and peeks out the door, but she's gone. He goes to sleep.
Twyla runs to a door marked "Missile Block 4." She clasps her hands together and her eyes glow. She shoots energy from her hands and opens the door. She enters a room lined with various sizes of missiles. The space mice, are munching on a snack in there and watch from around a corner as she calls Haggar on the spooky-com (by raising her hand in a sieg heil kind of thing). She tells Haggar she is in the missile room, and Haggar orders her to set the bomb.
Twyla takes off her boot heel and pulls out . . . the bomb?
Haggar explains the situation to Zarkon and slow audience members (or ones who had their younger sister screaming that she NEVER gets to watch HER shows through the first half). Zarkon actually utters the episode title, calling Twyla a pretty spy. He later calls her a pretty fool. Cheddar goes to warn the team Pidge chases him off, but Keith awakens everyone with an order to "roll out."
Twyla sets the explosive device at the base of one of the missiles.
Cheddar tells Allura the story. Everyone runs to the control room where Coran is sleeping at the desk (!). He brings up the camera to the missile room, and sees what's up. Fortunately, it was on, um, something that can be ejected. Twyla flees and Hunk pursues her on horseback into the ruins, hoping to stop her from returning to Doom.
Zarkon again explains the situation to those of us with psychopaths for younger sisters. Haggar says that while the team chases the girl, there will be no chance to form Voltron.
Hunk catches up to her in the desert. She is now sans pig-tails, and gets Hunk's horse to throw him with her eye-beams. Hunk confronts her, and Twyla confesses that Zarkon would free her enslaved people if she enabled him to conquer Arus. Hunk tries to convince her that she's made a mistake, but she reveals that Yurak is bringing her brother to Arus in the form of a clawbeast. The space coffin roars overhead and lands in the ruins. The Rooster Frigate supersizes the space coffin, and the great clawbeast rises. A cyclops with a morning star.
Twyla orders him to destroy Arus. He chases the same Arusian girl with no pants who has already fled attacks in previous episodes (I'd probably chase her, too. Does that make me Robeast material?) The team watches the attack, then they all launch. The chute numbers look to be standardized by this point.
The clawbeast is stalking nto the desert when the lions appear. He scatters him with a couple swipes of his morning star. Allura screams.
Twyla looks on and begins to have regrets.
The clawbeast catches blue lion in the chain and swirls her around overhead until Keith frees her with a missile. The clawbeast attacks again as Hunk shows up. No foolin' around this time, they form Voltron immediately. Seriously not messin' around, they form blazing sword and slice the chain of the morning star (which sails over the horizon and explodes). The clawbeast tries to hold him at bay with bad breath, but Voltron disables him with eye-beams, and then finishes him with the sword.
And we suddenly cut to the people celebrating outside the castle as they explain Twyla has returned to her home planet and will live happily ever after. Well, good for her.
Girl of the Land of Evil
We open on a starscape, and have a few more seconds of the Galra ship stolen by the slave girl. It's color scheme is new (gray body with red canopy and blue and red details) but it looks close enough to the design philosophy of the Galra fighters that it's believable as a Galra design. Y'know, for mechanical design nerds like me.
The castle also readies weapon ports--enclosed emplacements, none of the manned machinegun-looking weapons we saw in the first days of the new castle.
Seido actually hears her heartbeat. He also proclaims that she's from Earth, then Hys chases them out, 'cuz you shouldn't stare at a sleeping girl. Ummm, don't tell my girlfriend.
We've seen the basic room the girl recovers in a couple of times already--or at least the skylight-style windows. The girl identifies herself as Lisa, and she says she's escaped the Galra empire. After the five escaped Galra, Daibazaal apparently continued to collect slaves from Earth. Kuragane, Seido, and Suzuishi are angry. Lisa appears to be suffering from post-traumatic stress. Kogane is suspicious.
Outside, Seido muses over the fate of his sister, of whom he is reminded by Lisa. Kogane voices his suspicions, and Seido has a freakout. Oh. That's why they call him hothead. Seido keeps screaming as the scene cuts to later, when Lisa awakens all redeyed and evil. Is this dorm room arrangement the team's response to Bambara's serpent attack?
Ohhh, Kogane wakes up because he's suspicious of her and her ESP awakens him. Huh?
Her official title, as she contacts the Galra empire telepathically, is Lisa the Saboteur. Honerva orders her to blow the castle to smithereens. She then explains the Earth girl's abilities to Daibazaal. Honerva also has this weird way of referring to herself--she seems to be saying "Old Witch" in the third person whenever the sub says "I." But my Japanese sucks. Is that right? Anyone out there reading this with more knowledge of Japanese than me (and by more I mean any?) Is this common for kreepy old witch ladies in Japanese entertainment?
The resolution on the surveillance camera is good enough that they can see the timer reading "30 seconds) on the explosive. And Raible doesn't even say anything, he just ejects whatever it's wired to, while the team frets.
We're treated to the "Mitchell" theme music again as Seido hunts for her. Lisa has her hair down, and the visual of the sequence where her brother's space coffin flies in over her head, her hair blowing in the wind, made an impression on me when I saw this as a kid. Something about that image, her hair blowing, the space coffin entering the frame and flying over her as she yells and points to it, then the cut to Seido as he watches it fly by--I remembered that vividly for years.
Apparently. when a human is "remade" into a monster. they're only a half-beastman. And this one is Half-Beastman Gagarl. Seido tries to appeal to his human side, but this is to no avail. Kogane tells him these two are a lost cause, having sold their souls to the devil.
Huh. In Voltron, Keith is shown riding the chairlevator into black lion. In this rendition of the episode, it's the green lion shot from the third episode.
Wow, the princess takes a beating. From Gagarl and from Suzuishi and Kurogane.
I really like the little "Hmph" they work into the shot of Kogane as he reacts to Seido's appearance and then orders the Golion combination.
The Gagarl design is sort of like a lazy interpretation of Galcia and Bambara. I don't like it as much as the first beastman or Deathhell. It's kind of a generic lizardy-thing. But I always liked the weird, exposed bits of red, corrugated . . . tissue. Like the beastmen have vinyl for skin over red vacuum cleaner hose.
Seido goes to confront Lisa after they destroy her brother, and she throws herself off the cliff instead of speaking. Oy. This show's kinda rough. The closing shot is the rest of the team and Raible overlooking Seido as he places a wreath of flowers on a cross marking the cliff from which Lisa jumped. Saburo Hatte, whoever was actually directing some of these episodes, had a talent for strong imagery.
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