Dark Blue

Lotor soaks in a bath of Haggarium while Maahox warns that the supply is running low, and Maahox promises to fetch a great deal more. Elsewhere, Vince cannot sleep and tells Allura he is not sure he is brave enough. When the Force detects a huge Haggarium shipment heading for Doom, Vince argues his way onto the mission as the only one with the natural power to counter it.

The Lions disable the Drule escort without firing, but Commander Cossack triggers the tanker's self-destruct sequence on Lotor's orders. Vince takes a pod onto the ship, reaches the mainframe and stops the bombs, but the tanker sinks into the ocean of Poseidus. The others dive after him through creatures infected by Haggarium, form Voltron underwater to stay together, and Vince becomes the head of Blue Center. The trident freezes the Haggarium into an iceberg.

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

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

"Strange is good, my lord." -- Maahox

"I'd call you an incompetent fool, but there's really no need to kick you while you're down, Commander Cossack." -- Lotor

"Being brave, risky, and slightly disobedient." -- Vince

"You're being very Daniel right now."

"Data not keeping me calm." -- Vince

"Completely alone. Add that to the list." -- Vince

"Those horribly freaky sounds aren't some monster. They're just the ship's natural sounds." -- Vince

"Another for the plus column." -- Vince

"We save you. You save us. We save each other."

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.

Some people are brave by throwing themselves at a problem. Vince is brave by making a list, and "Dark Blue" is the episode that finally lets the show say so.

It starts with the villains, which is the right instinct. Lotor is soaking in a bath of Haggarium, [1] which he prefers to radiation and injections, [2] and Maahox is trying to tell him tactfully that the supply cannot keep up. "I can feel myself becoming stronger with each bath," says Lotor, and then admits it sounds strange out loud. "Strange is good, my lord." We could happily watch Lotor soak all day! The spa is a joke that is also the engine of the plot. The shipment exists because the bath needs topping up, and the contingency order that sets the tanker's bombs ticking comes later, from the same man. When Commander Cossack's escort fails, Lotor's verdict is the cruellest sentence in the half hour: "I'd call you an incompetent fool, but there's really no need to kick you while you're down."

On the hero side, Vince cannot sleep, and confides to Allura that someone always has to put themselves at risk to save him. Allura answers that this is why they are a team, which would settle it, but an alarm calls her away. The convoy appears, and Vince argues himself onto the mission by pointing out he is the only one who can counter the Haggarium if something goes wrong. Someone approves of the logic, and someone adds that logic is king.

The joke the episode builds on is that Vince decides to be brave by acting like Daniel. When the tanker starts its countdown, he takes a pod aboard and tells the others he is "Being brave, risky, and slightly disobedient." Someone on the radio puts it more bluntly: "You're being very Daniel right now." "Exactly." What follows is the opposite of Daniel. Vince does not charge anything, but works a mainframe and talks to a computer, and stops the bombs by being methodical; then the ship sinks with him in it. Careful courage looks different from the reckless kind, and the careful person cannot see his own.

The standout is the long stretch where Vince is alone in the sinking tanker and Pidge, who is still on the line, coaches him to stay calm by sticking to data and things he can control. It works until it does not. The ship is leaking air and about to implode, and Vince tells Pidge, flatly, "Data not keeping me calm." Then the comm goes, and he is left to narrate for himself: "Completely alone. Add that to the list." He tells himself the freaky sounds are not a monster, they are "just the ship's natural sounds," and then says "Another for the plus column" when the ship hits something that might be the bottom. It suits the character, panic delivered as bookkeeping.

The weakness is the finale. The Lions form Voltron underwater and the sea creatures start showing the effects of Haggarium infection. Then the episode piles on the problems: a creature they refuse to harm, a swarm, a drained Voltron, Vince saying he needs time to gather strength. The Titanic Trident freezes the water around the Haggarium into an iceberg, and Vince, now the head of Blue Center, spends most of the sequence being a body part. His own power, so carefully set up in the control room, gets one short beat when it counts, yet the freeze comes from someone else's idea.

Even so, this is an episode built around a cadet, and it lets him carry it. The closing line, with the Lions drained and floating on the sunlit sea, hands the phrase "brave, risky, and slightly disobedient" back to Vince as praise. He did not need to become anyone else!

1 ^ Haggarium is the common spelling of the cargo; it is heard in several spellings in fan transcripts of the dialogue.

2 ^ The "radiation and injections" Lotor mentions at 0:22 are treated as established history; the episode does not explain them.

1. Daniel is only seen asleep on the bunk below Vince's in the opening scene, and fans on the Voltron wiki point out how little he is in this one. He still haunts the episode. It starts with Vince waking up to "And then Daniel had to save me. Again.", someone tells him "You're being very Daniel right now," and he answers "Exactly." Later, riding a sea creature, he thinks "Daniel could see this!"
2. Nobody calls Blue Center by name in the first eight episodes, and fans on the Voltron wiki count this as its debut. The twist is who gets the spotlight. Vince is riding along in Allura's Blue Lion, so when the call comes it is "Form Blue Center!" followed by "You're the head. Show us what you can do."
3. Fans call the trident form Voltron uses to freeze the Haggarium the Titanic Trident, but nobody says that name out loud here, it is just "Form Blue Center!" and then the trident appears. The name is spoken in Roots of Evil, where the call goes out to Allura, she is away from the Lion, and Larmina answers with "Wait! I'm not..." and then "Form Titanic!"
4. Lotor's cold open is a spa day. Maahox notes he has taken to his "Haggarium spa", and Lotor, who is soaking in the stuff, says "Increase my dosage!" Maahox's "Instead of your radiation and injections?" is the only mention of those earlier treatments we can find anywhere in the first season. The scene ends with Lotor asking for "a refill" and Maahox offering "a neck rub as well."
5. The Blazing Sword call starts ("Form! Blazing!") and gets cut off with "No! We can't harm this creature." The sea life is infected with Haggarium and treated as a victim ("It's not her fault"), and someone grumbles "Not sure this is the time to be an environmentalist." Brains draws the same line for the infected Boltons: "We can't hurt them. They're still Boltons."
6. Commander Cossack is named out loud here, and his dressing-down is a keeper: "I'd call you an incompetent fool, but there's really no need to kick you while you're down, Commander Cossack." "I appreciate that, sir. As long as you know it's implied." Fans on the Voltron wiki identify the Drule general in "Joyride To Doom" as the same man, though there he is only addressed as "Commander". He is thanked by name again in the first seconds of Crossed Signals.
7. The planet is Poseidus and Voltron is waving a trident, which sets up Pidge's best interrupted lecture: "Very Poseidon. Or is it Neptune?" He explains that they are "quite similar" but "one is Greek and the other is of Roman descent", and gets as far as "However, considering the planet we're on..." before "Not now, Pidge!"
8. The phrase Vince uses for his pod launch, "Being brave, risky, and slightly disobedient," is handed back to him as the episode's last joke: "our brave, risky, and slightly disobedient savior." It lands harder because the episode opens with him telling Allura "I'm still not sure I'm brave enough for this."
9. Dark Blue aired on Thursday, July 28, 2011, six weeks after the 90-minute Trilogy premiere on June 16 (Nicktoons billed the show as the first new Voltron in ten years). Only four more Thursdays followed, then a break until November 3, so this one sits near the end of the first burst of episodes.

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