Voltron: Legendary Defender “The End Is The Beginning”

Well, I got to the end of Voltron.  And, good news, the last episode didn’t annoy me nearly as much as the rest of the final season did.

Oh, I was still annoyed.  Just not as annoyed as I had been up until that point.

Now, to start, as I probably mentioned way back when I started the Voltron write ups, I was not a Voltron fan growing up.  I have no explanation for that.  I dug Transformers, but not really the giant robot cartoons that came out of Japan.  I don’t know why.

However, that didn’t mean I wasn’t enjoying this new adaptation when I started in much the same way I wasn’t really a She-Ra fan but liked very much what I’ve seen of the Netflix revival series (mental note:  finish that show sometime).  The animation for this Voltron mostly worked, the characters were interesting at least at the start, the action was good, the bad guys were menacing, and a whole lot of other general goodness came along.

Then came season eight.

The series had, by then, already greatly expanded the cast beyond what it had been, and there were a bunch whose names I never learned and didn’t care to either.  But Haggar/Honerva wasn’t as interesting a villain as Zarkon or Lotor.  Zarkon had the sort of unstoppable and implacable aura around him.  Lotor was the charming guy you wanted to punch in the teeth before he revealed what a big time sociopath he was to the heroes (it was always obvious to the audience).  Honerva?  She was cray-cray because she couldn’t have her husband and son with her.

That seems…a wee bit sexist that it was the female villain who went that route.  Then again, she didn’t get much time to develop as a main villain.  She was always there, but she was likewise never in the spotlight as the true source of the series’s villainy.  That could have been different if the series hadn’t screwed around with silly or stupid episodes for so much of season eight.  One somewhat experimental or bizarre episode out of every 13 or so is one thing.  Five or six in a row in the final batch is something else.  By the time Voltron and the Atlas finally caught up to her, I didn’t much care anymore.

By the by, when Voltron and the Atlas merged with each other, what happened to the rest of the Atlas‘s crew?  Suddenly it’s only Shiro there?  I know why, storywise, they want Shiro and not all those other characters whose names I never learned hanging around, but still.

So, in the end, Allura and Honerva sacrifice their lives to save the multiverse, including bringing back both Altaea and the Galra homeworld.  And then, with just under ten minutes left, we get the surviving characters meeting up for a laugh and a dinner before the Lions just fly off into space because apparently they’re more sentient than I thought they were.  You know what would have gone better?  Making the dinner thing a separate episode to wrap things up instead of slamming it into the last eight minutes of a 22 or so minute episode and leaving the final battle for a full episode.  Sure, this series’s last battle was accomplished without blowing things up, but Voltron itself seemed to be consistently outmatched by most robots its size anyway.  And then we get the Animal House-style “what happened next” that at least included the cow and Shiro marrying some dude I don’t think I’d ever seen before.

If they did one less silly episode and did the epilogue by-itself plan I just mentioned, they could have expanded those scenes to something more than some still shots with some text.  Or even had an extra long finale.  Those aren’t out of the question, are they?

Anyway, I am glad this is over.  Seven seasons I generally liked followed by one I didn’t.

Wait, did I just describe Voltron or Game of Thrones?

Nah, I didn’t mind the last season of GoT that much.  If anything, it had the opposite problem of trying to rush through everything.  Normally, I give a lot of leeway for final episodes since they’re rough to pull off even for the best of shows.  But Voltron didn’t seem to get much of anything right in its final season.  GoT got at least two of its six final episodes right.

Damn, that’s harsh judgment for what was probably intended as a family friendly sci-fi adventure series.  Still, let’s say this one got 7.5 out of 10 Vehicle Voltron hints.

But now I need something else for Wednesdays.  Wednesdays are usually, with Thursday, the day of the week where I go for something that ran for a while so I don’t have as much changeover.  And there is one show that, Batman fan that I am, I have not covered for some reason.

So yeah, we’re goin’ down to Gotham.

I didn’t get past the pilot the first time, and Jimmy Impossible seemed to vouch for the show.  If I don’t like it, I guess it’s his fault.