The Right Arm of Voltron/Death of Shirogane the Hero

The Right Arm of Voltron

Is this because Sven is like Keith's right hand man?  'Cuz he flies blue lion.  And blue lion is Voltron's right leg . . .  Oh, right.  Not dwelling on the obvious stuff.

Wew.  At least we don't open up with vultures and Castle Doom.  We see the Arusian coat of arms as the first image of the episode.  And we see Alura in her pink jumpsuit outfit (instead of the elaborate Renaissance Festival outfit).  They decide to celebrate with a feast.  And they have a secret storage room.  In the castle that just appeared out of the ground?  Better check the "use by" dates on those packages, guys.

Naturally, the space mice are the first ones in.  'Cuz, yeah, mice like cheese.  If they started shooting dogs and deer, I'd think I was watching Disney.  But this time, the mouse early warning system is even more useless, because Yurak catches even them by more surprise than usual.  Coran has the shiny new castle position it's "robot defenses."  All robots, all the time.  Except for the emplacement Allura uses.

Again, we only see Keith getting into chute 1 when they launch the lions.  We get a couple of shots of the energy and missile weapons that are part of the castle defenses holding off the Doom fighters.  Are the side sponsons on the Doom fighters air intakes or radiators or something?  We only ever seem them firing out of the top and bottom protrusions.

Allura takes a cannon emplacement over from a fallen robot.

They don't waste any time in forming Voltron this time.  No Robeast, just a lot of fighters and the Rooster Frigate.  The Voltron formation sequence has a weird bunch of extra clanky sound effects in this episode.  He immediately forms the blazing sword and takes a slice out of the Rooster Frigate bridge.

We're back to the victory feast, and yeah, Hunk and food.

Ah, now we're back to the obligatory "Castle Doom" intro.  Jack Angel has finally settled into his Zarkon voice, and Zarkon is now the bungling windbag we all remember.  Evil will always fail because evil is silly.  Haggar proposes lowering their sights to just taking out one member of Voltron rather than all five.

She goes out to the Pit of Skulls (still creepy as hell) and find the "magnificent blue fiend."  A slightly darker version of one of the Robeasts who got his ass kicked last episode.  Haggar and the Blue Fiend take space coffins to Arus.  Damn.  I'll never call airliners "mailing tubes for people" again, compared to the space coffin.  Well, the name says it all, I guess.

We cut to Galaxy Garrison.  Been a while since we last checked in with those guys.  At least two episodes.  Lennie Weinrib is doing Steele's voice in this sequence.  I think it's Lotor in disguise.  Oh, wait, we haven't met Lotor yet.

Back on Arus, the team takes a cart of food out into the city ruins.  We now see the same footage as yesterday; instead of insulting the Arusians into helping them, they're just advertising food.  Cheddar (?) helps Pidge coax the survivors out of the ruins.  They sure brought a lot of apples with them.  People start spontaneously bowing in from of Allura.  Haggar is watching, and sends the blue cat to, y'know, lure one of them.  The cat's got three toes on each foot and claws it can't retract.

Lance tears off after the cat and gets caught in Haggar's glowing net bag.  Fortunately for him, Sven comes up after him with a sword.  He cuts Lance free and sends him back for help.  Then Sven slashes at Haggar, but each cut just creates the illusion of more duplicates.  One of the illusions blasts energy at him.

Keith sends Hunk and Pidge back to the castle with Allura, and then he and Lance go to help Sven.

Sven does an ancient Swedish Ki trick and detects the real Haggar, but is distracted by the cat.  And then put down by the blue fiend.  Sven is real bad hurt.  Fortunately, they take him to the doctor on planet Ebb.  Too bad he doesn't do house calls--wait, the doctor is on a totally different planet?

The Rooster Frigate appears and supersizes the Blue Fiend.  In true Godzilla monster fashion, he tramples his way through the ruins.  What?  Keith even says Sven is Voltron's right arm.

They take the lions out after the Robeast.  They do a lot of crashin', then black lion uses the harpoon launchers.  The robeast retaliates with missiles from his kneecap and a launger on his right wrist.  The lead the robeast to a cliff, and do the old playground "I jump on your face while my buddies push you into lave" trick.

Yurak is upset at the beast's failure, but Haggar feels it was a success that they took out one of Voltron Force.  The Arusians now resume the feast.  Wow, that was an upbeat ending.  I feel good about myself and the world I live in now.

Death of Shirogane the Hero

Well, maybe the death of one of the original team members is so expected in the genre that the writers didn't see the need for, y'know, not blowing the big surprise in the title?!  This episode marks the last time we see Shirogane in the opening credits.  It's probably a good thing the princess starts wearing her jumpsuit in this one.  It'd be an awful lot of work to get into that dress just to wave at the camera for the opening.

The castle is known as "Castle Gradam."  Anyone know anything about this title?  Former Altean soldiers are returning to the castle to rejoin the princess' forces.  That's where all the dudes in the green uniforms come from.  At least they get to exchange their spears for more effective weapons.  Kurogane mentions the fact that Raible had all this food stored away in expectation of this day.  Naturally, the mice have always been in there.

Sadak's force appear.  Are the fighters carried in the Rooster Frigate, or do they just fly alongside it?  It's a good thing all those former Altean soldiers have had time to train on the weapons batteries, seeings as they've been hiding out with spears and arrows for fifteen years. 

Fala takes out at least one fighter.

During the fight with the fighters, the lions seem to predominately just ram them, though red lion uses some shoulder mounted missile launcher for the first time.  They go right to Golion, and we're treated to the theme song in full vocal glory while Golion combines.  No cries of "Juyoken" when they form the sword.  Maybe Kogane needs more practice?

Suzuishi tries to make friends with the mice.  Clearly to just betray and trap them later.  What're friends for?

The music that accompanies the POV switch to Galra totally makes me think of old Heckle and Jeckle and Quackula commercials.

Daibazaal and Sadak are actually discussing strategy.  Sadak says continued frontal assaults would be too costly.  Honerva brings up the image of Fala because this is the first time they realize a member of the Altean royal family still survives.

Honerva goes out to find her beastman, who's name is Galcia.  Galcia?  Ooo-kay . . .

Fala and the boys take the food truck out to the ruins/  When they go looking for people, they actually have footage specifically for this.  It's like the Voltron editors were really padding out this episode.  Why might that have been?  What did they cut out that would have reduced the running time so much?

Huh.  Fala was handing out lollipops.

Since Shirogane is about to bite it, let's talk about his voice actor.  Ryusei Nakao does a lot of crazy villain voices--I recognized him as Frieza from DBZ.  Yeah, that's a bit of a different  delivery than the one he uses for Shirogane.

I never realized from the Voltron footage, but that energy blast from Honerva's witchin' stick blinds Shirogane.  He's not closing his eyes to use his inner Swede, it's because he's blind.

Things they apparently teach at the Fuji Space School (where the Golion team all went to school--we learn this later): the use of swords (well, maybe they all took Kendo) and how to ride horses.

Once again, the editing here suggests more time between Shirogane's death blow and Kogane and Kurogane discovering him.  So it doesn't seem like Honerva and Galcia just teleported out to the desert to await Sadak.  Oh, there are scenes of weeping, wailing, and gnashing of teeth over their fallen comrade.  This must be all the time Voltron was covering for.

There's something I've always wondered about the name "deathblack beastmen."  In japanese, that's "Desaburakku Jujin."  When it's spoken, it sounds a little to me like "desaburak-Kaiju jin," Kaiju being giant monsters like Godzilla.  (The -jin suffix just means "race" or "being."  Like Saiyan-jin from DBZ).  Could this be a possible pun in Japanese?  I know that at least older terms in Japanese are full of puns.