Escape to Another Planet

The five explorers eject from their crippled ship and come down on Arus with nothing but the poles from their ejection harness. A cave of Arusians too frightened to do more than watch sends them on toward a mountain castle, where Coran, introduced here as a diplomat rather than a mechanic, and Princess Allura are waiting. Coran tells them what Arus already knows: the witch Haggar broke Voltron into five lions and hid them, one to a volcano, one to a forest, one to a lake, one to a desert and one standing as a statue. The explorers are fitted for Voltron Force uniforms, shown the tunnels that run from the castle to each lion, and briefed, video and all, on how the five machines are meant to lock together.

Title and air date from the English Wikipedia list of Voltron episodes, cross-read against the Voltron Wiki plot summary for this episode; the synopsis and review below are otherwise built from our own extracted frames and this print of the episode.

Jack Angel, Michael Bell, Peter Cullen, Neil Ross, B.J. Ward and Lennie Weinrib are credited as the voice cast on this episode's own end-title card, matching the roster already on file for the block.

Escape to Another Planet is not really about escaping anywhere. The explorers already fell out of the sky toward this castle at the end of the premiere, and this episode spends its twenty-two minutes doing something far less dramatic than the title promises: paperwork.

They come down with nothing, no ship, no weapons, just the poles they were harnessed to on the way in, turned into spears before anyone on screen explains whose idea that was.[1] A cave of Arusians too frightened to do more than watch them pass is the first sign that this planet has already lost a war, and the episode does not dress that up or explain it further. Nobody says where the cave-dwellers came from or where they go once the crew moves on. They exist to show what Doom's occupation looks like from the ground, and then the show is finished with them.

The castle is where the episode actually gets to work. Coran and Princess Allura receive five strangers carrying spears, and what follows plays less like a rescue than a base commander walking new recruits through a facility tour. Haggar broke Voltron into five lions and scattered them, and Coran walks through all five hiding places by name.[2] The explorers get uniforms. They get access to the tunnels connecting the castle to each lion. They get shown, on something very close to a training film, how five machines that have never met each other are meant to combine into one.

An onboarding is what the episode is actually built around, a strange thing for a toy-driven cartoon to spend its second outing on when nothing on Arus has been fought for yet. Doom gets one scene of its own, a battlecruiser and its fighter wing sweeping low over a burning city in what plays as the same assault on Arus's capital that closed out the premiere, and Zarkon gets a single seething close-up that promises retaliation without staging any of it. Neither beat is the point. The point is five castaways turned into a standing unit between one commercial break and the next, uniforms fitted and assignments handed out, and the show does not undercut any of it with a joke or a moment of doubt from anyone on screen. It reads less like the second chapter of an adventure than the paperwork that has to happen before one can start, and to its credit the episode does not pretend otherwise.[3]

[1] The spear is not referenced again after this episode and is not an established Lion Force weapon; treat it as a one-time improvisation.

[2] Only the Red Lion appears on screen this episode; the volcano, forest, lake and statue hiding places are named but not shown, and this entry's screencap set reflects that.

[3] This entry is drawn from the English dub print in the archive. No English-language subtitle or script track survives for this specific episode among our sources, so no dialogue is quoted here; a companion Japanese-language fan translation of the corresponding Beast King GoLion episode exists but was used only as loose scene context, not as a source for the American dub's actual lines, since World Events Productions re-edited and re-scored its episodes rather than translating them directly.

Written by The voltronvault.com desk

1. Coran is introduced here as a diplomat, not yet the strategist title his own entry uses, and this is the episode that hands the crew their Voltron Force uniforms and lion assignments for the whole block that follows. The cave-dwelling Arusians who first meet the crew appear once and are never named or explained.

Lion Force block, adapted from an episode of Beast King GoLion.