Crossed Signals

After Lotor tests a Haggarium-boosted satellite, the Voltron Force answers an encrypted distress call from an Explorer ship that has been listed as missing for more than a hundred years. Daniel, Vince and Larmina are posted to guard the Lions while Keith, Lance, Hunk, Pidge and Allura board the derelict. Its recordings keep calling Keith by the name Cogaine, and the ship's guard drones carry off two of the Lions while the cadets play a telepathic prank.

On the bridge, a ship's log leads Keith to a hard conclusion: he is the great-grandson of a Knight of Arus, and the ship has taken him for the commander. Lotor rides a Haggarium suit into battle and Daniel forms Voltron without Keith, then is shaken by a Haggarium surge. The Explorer moves on its own to intercept a missile, and the cadets finally move to let Larmina in on their secret.

Voice cast, as credited on this episode's closing titles (role, then actor).

Keith: Giles Panton Lance / Commander Cossack / First Officer: Andrew Francis Allura: Ashleigh Ball Pidge: Sam Vincent Hunk: Ty Olsson Daniel / Comms Officer: Vincent Tong Vince: Doron Bell Jr. Larmina: Shannon Chan-Kent Maahox: Ron Halder Lotor / Crew Member: Mark Hildreth

"Sometimes I forget we have last names." -- Hunk

"So, does this mean we've answered a distress signal from the past?"

"Man, you gotta warn me if you're gonna do this telepathic thing."

"How does this ship know me?" -- Keith

"Everything's normal out here." -- a cadet answering Lance

"Sheesh. Everyone doesn't need to be so testy just cause the haunted ship knows Keith's name." -- Lance

"You weren't brought to Arus to lead the Voltron Force. You were brought back to Arus."

"Well, something's definitely gonna go wrong if you don't give this cadet a chance." -- Daniel

"Scratch that! He is the Haggarium power source!"

"Hey, Larmina. Can you keep a secret?" -- one of the cadets

Transcribed from the episode's subtitle track, which we checked against the audio, with misspelled names corrected. Speakers are named only where the dialogue or the picture makes them clear.

A distress call is supposed to find somebody, and the one at the heart of "Crossed Signals" seems at first to have found the wrong person. The Explorer ship the Force boards was listed as missing more than a century ago; its crew lie motionless across the consoles of a dark bridge, and its recordings keep addressing Keith as though he were somebody else. When the name Cogaine comes up aboard, Hunk asks who that is and is told it is Keith's last name. His answer, "Sometimes I forget we have last names," is a good small joke, but it also hands the episode its question. [1]

Underneath the ghost-ship business, this is an episode about messages that arrive at the wrong ear. The old crew's playback is meant for a commander long dead. Lance's calls to the cadets are swallowed by Haggarium interference until a hull breach lets one through. Daniel and Vince share a private telepathic link, and Larmina, who cannot hear their telepathic link, becomes the target of their prank. Lotor is the only person whose signal lands where he aimed it, since the cold open has his Haggarium-boosted satellite reaching for a Drule fleet on purpose, which gives a hundred-year-old plea a very present-day author. [2] Seen that way, we would say the title is more than a pun.

Our pick for best scene is the one on the Explorer's bridge, where the haunted-house gag resolves into something more serious. The ship's log speaks of a quest for the fifth planet involved in the creation of Voltron, and of a commander's grandson, Kenneth Cogaine. Keith says Cogaine was his father's name and that his family is from Earth. What we get back is a plain inference rather than a revelation: the ship did not attack him because it thinks he is Commander Cogaine, his great-grandfather, a Knight of Arus. The crossed signal was never an error. It was addressed correctly and delivered a century late. Keith's "I don't... I don't understand" is played small, yet we think the script wisely leaves the bigger emotion to the lines that follow it, "You weren't brought to Arus to lead the Voltron Force. You were brought back to Arus."

The cadets carry the lighter half, and this is where the one real weakness sits. Leaving the Lions to go for a spin around the wrecks is the very mistake that gets two of them carried off by the guard drones, and Vince's ultra-high-frequency fix is clever, but when Lance calls in the answer is "Everything's normal out here," and nothing comes of the lie. The episode then has Lance call Daniel "still a cadet" before that cadet forms Voltron without Keith, as though the lapse had never happened. One episode with a ghost story and a prank to carry has no room to make the two touch.

Daniel's turn at the head of the team is better handled than that implies. His reply to Lance, "Something's definitely gonna go wrong if you don't give this cadet a chance," is what a pilot in his position would say. The Haggarium surge that rattles him a moment later means he is not wrong to ask and Lance is not wrong to worry. "Center me, now!" and the Red Center magma pistols keep the fight moving. Lotor, who turns out to be the Haggarium power source rather than a man wearing one, burns through his supply. Maahox tells him that continued engagement might prove fatal, to him! Keith, meanwhile, cannot find the controls to steer the Explorer into the missile, and the ship steers itself. [3]

The ending repairs the smallest crossed signal first. Someone remarks that this is no time to tell everyone they can read each other's thoughts, and another answers that Larmina is not everyone. Then comes the last line: "Hey, Larmina. Can you keep a secret?" An episode full of messages for the wrong person finishes on one sent to the right one. It gives Keith a past and the Force a map to the fifth planet, and it does both with some charm!

1 ^ The subtitle track spells the commander's name three ways (Cogaine, Copaine and Kogain); we use Cogaine, the form it settles on, and Keith's surname elsewhere stays Kogane. The exchange begins at 4:49.

2 ^ Lotor says the satellite beam has reactivated the communication systems of "this missing fleet, as expected" at 13:09, which is the only place the episode confirms the plan was his; the cold open's own sign-off is "Begone" at 0:21.

3 ^ The Explorer is already moving on its own at 19:28, and the admission that the controls could not be found comes at 20:20. The episode never explains what moved it.

1. The Explorer's star map points toward "the fifth planet involved in the creation of Voltron," which picks up a count from Five Forged, where the team tallies "four trials for five planets" and one planet is "obviously the source of Voltron's energy." Here the guess is "That must be the energy planet!" and the episode ends on "the mystery of the ghost ship continues." No other episode returns to the Explorer or the map, and since the planned second season was never made after Black ended on a cliffhanger, the energy planet stays a mystery.
2. Daniel and Vince try their new mind link as a prank tool on Larmina ("Hey, wanna put this mind talk to good use and have some fun with her?"), a gag that grows out of the ending of I, Voltron. By the last scene they agree it is not "the best time to tell everyone we can read each other's thoughts", and then they pick exactly one person to tell. In Roots of Evil that person is complaining about their "weird telepathy thing."
3. The final line, "Hey, Larmina. Can you keep a secret?", echoes the last words of The Hunkyard, where the cadets close with "Hey, Hunk! Can you keep a secret?" before showing him their hideout, the Lair. Both episodes end with the cadets letting one more person in on something.
4. Lotor's suit is "compromised" and Maahox warns, "Your Haggarium supply is depleted." The worry goes back to the Haggarium baths in Dark Blue, where Maahox fusses that they are "running through our Haggarium supply far too quickly", and it gets an answer in the cold open of Roots of Evil.
5. The ship's records are full of "Commander Cogaine," and Keith's answer, "My family is from Earth," is overturned on the spot. What he is told instead is that his ancestors were explorers from Allura's world and that he was "brought home", and no later episode mentions it again.
6. Someone's reaction to the ship's call for help is "The Voltron Force of a hundred years ago?", which quietly says there was a Force before this one. The Drule attack on the wreck is just as old, and Lotor shows how long the Drule side has wanted the treasure: "My ancestors would not pass up an opportunity like this, and neither shall I!"
7. "Dude, it's our first official solo assignment in the Lions!" and "Is this another you-cadets-aren't-ready-yet thing?" make the point that this time the cadets have permission. The mix differs from the unauthorized flight in Joyride to Doom: there it was the Black, Red and Blue Lions, and here Daniel, Vince and Larmina fly Black, Green and Blue.
8. The title fits several threads at once: a distress call that is a hundred years old, a Haggarium satellite that wakes up a dead fleet, thoughts leaking over comms, and the ship that keeps calling Keith by another man's name. The team even beats the guard drones with a beam of ultra-high frequency and then jokes, "Even though there's no sound in the vacuum of space..."
9. Nicktoons aired this on Wednesday, March 28, 2012, the fifth episode of the Wednesday run that began on leap day. Four episodes were left after it.

Voltron Force, the 2011 continuation, in which the 1984 pilots take on cadets.