Voltron: Legendary Defender “The Legend Begins”

OK, so after three full seasons, I finally know why Zarkon wants Voltron so badly even if he has other robots that seem stronger.

Also, yes, this third season sure was a short one.

You’d think Coran might have told the Origin of Voltron story before, but no.  He’s doing it now.  The original Paladins included Zarkon, Allura’s father King Alfor, and three other aliens of different species.  They started off as peacekeepers, but then one day a comet from another reality came through.  Alfor used the comet’s metal to build some robot lions that even he didn’t know what they did.

That sounds wrong.

Anyway, Zarkon was put in charge as the Black Paladin because he was the one with the best military mind.  But there was something wrong from the beginning.  Zarkon always wanted power.  True, he wanted it to protect people, but this was different.  Then he fell in love with an Altaean alchemist named Honerva, and the discovery of the Quintessence from the other reality leads to monsters, hence the reason they need Voltron, and also a problem.

See, Honerva wanted to experiment on Quintessence, even keeping the family pet alive a lot longer than it should have.  And, like taking the cat to a certain Pet Semetary, it doesn’t seem to have come back right.

Why won’t people stop going up there?  It never goes well.

But then Honerva, experimenting on the portal at the center of Zarkon’s homeworld, suffered a bad accident, and Zarkon wanted his wife back.  So, he tricked the Paladins into flying Voltron into the Quintessence portal to bring her back.

He sort of succeeded.  They both appeared to die, but they both came back wrong.  The only difference is Zarkon remembered his life before and the woman now known as Haggar doesn’t.

So, Zarkon wants Voltron because that’s the only way to safely harvest Quintessence.

Probably what Lotor wants as well.

So, yeah, that’s that.  It’s not about building a strong robot.  It’s about having a robot that can withstand Quintessence in order to…collect it for whatever it is Zarkon wants it for?

OK, so we don’t know everything.

Oh, but we do know something else.

Haggar got her memory back and used the same technique to wake her husband up again.