Dradin, Baby, Dradin

The Voltron Force has been working nonstop, Lance pushes for a vacation, and Manset calls to invite the pilots to a weekend at his renovated Leisure Drome resort on Dradin. He has only five reservations, so Vince, Daniel and Larmina are left to mind the Castle. They fly to Dradin anyway, and a local who can get them past the doorman asks for a ride in the Black Lion in return.

While they are off on the joyride, Manset is snatched by the goons of Boss Dredd, an ex-military Drule who defected from Doom and is muscling into his smuggling territory. The pilots chase Dredd in a hover-cycle pursuit and a limousine shootout, and Manset admits he lured them there to defend his planet. The Black Lion goes missing, the cadets turn up in the middle of the fight, and Keith decides they came to help.

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

Keith: Giles Panton Lance / Todd / Boss Dread: Andrew Francis Allura: Ashleigh Ball Pidge / Grease Monkey: Sam Vincent Hunk / Employee: Ty Olsson Daniel / Pedicab Robot: Vincent Tong Vince: Doron Bell Jr. Larmina: Shannon Chan-Kent Manset / Bouncer: Gary Chalk

"Even the defenders of the universe need some R&R, Keith." -- Lance

"The invitation was for Voltron pilots, not cadets." -- Manset

"I hate being told I can't go somewhere."

"Sorry, but you're not on the list." -- A resort bouncer

"Then where are your lions?" -- A resort bouncer

"Such a dirty word." -- Manset

"So, your criminal side business helped other criminals threaten your own legitimate business."

"Not the diamond encrusted bowling lanes!"

"You disobeyed orders so you could come and help us out." -- Keith

"A little misguided, but noble of you nonetheless." -- Keith

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 guest list is a small and petty form of power, and the funniest thing about this episode is how many people are on the wrong side of one. The pilots get an invitation and the cadets do not, because Manset has "only five reservations left" and the invitation "was for Voltron pilots, not cadets." At the resort door a bouncer sends the cadets away with a line the episode keeps for itself: "Sorry, but you're not on the list." Then the question "Where are your lions?" gets the quietly bruised answer "Don't have lions yet." We winced.

The structure that follows is a farce about people being kept out and then dragged in. The pilots want a holiday and are ambushed into a war; the cadets want in and get a planet of neon streets and hot-wired Lions. Keith gets a robo-cab that does not understand "Head north." What the script is really about, and Keith more or less says so near the end, is being generously misread. The cadets have flown to Dradin against orders, taken a stranger for a joyride in the Black Lion on his say-so, and parked it in an alley where it vanished. None of this is noble, and the episode knows it.

So the best scene is the one where Keith lets them off. He finds the three in a doorway and tells them, in effect, what they must have been doing: "You flew here when Castle Control signaled that the Black Lion was missing. You disobeyed orders so you could come and help us out." The cadets' "Uh... Yeah! You got us!" is all the defence they offer. Keith's verdict, "A little misguided, but noble of you nonetheless," is delivered straight. The joke is that it is both kind and an editorial, because he has written their alibi for them since it is more convenient than the truth. A commander who hands his cadets a better story than they earned is a decent character beat, and a mild comic one.

The adult half of the cast gets the lighter work. Manset is a smuggler who built his fortune on "import-export" and then says "Such a dirty word" about the correct word for it, and he is the most fully formed figure on the planet. His confession on the couch is neat in its logic. His criminal side business let a syndicate of defectors from Doom onto his world, and he invited the Voltron Force to a holiday because he needed muscle. A pilot's reply, that his criminal side business helped other criminals threaten his legitimate one, is the sharpest sentence of the episode. Dredd himself, a blue-skinned brute in a white suit, is serviceable but not much more. [1]

The weakness is the middle. Manset's story arrives as one long conversation on a blue couch, and the shape of the scene is a run of reaction shots over exposition. Meanwhile the cadets, elsewhere, wait for a guide who is not coming back. The question one character asks late in the search, what Dredd's men are even doing with the Black Lion, is asked in the dialogue and then let drop. A comedy can get away with that, yet the episode wants a mystery and does not follow through on it.

The ending is a kind of repayment. The cadets get their convention after all, handed passes by a fellow attendee at the homebrew robot competition. The last minutes bring back the line about the list, though the subtitle track does not make clear whom it is aimed at. [2] Coming after the ordeal that precedes it, this is a breather. It plays its own title as a joke: the spoken line "Dradin, baby, Dradin" is followed by "You are so money!" and then "I don't know what that means." [3] It is slight and quick, but we are glad the cadets come out of it ahead!

1 ^ The closing card lists Andrew Francis for Lance, Todd and Boss Dread, so the limo scene, with Lance and Dredd trading lines, is one voice talking to itself. The card spells the name Dread; this page uses Dredd.

2 ^ The last "not on the list" line is at 21:34, and the speaker is not clear from the subtitles. At 21:26 Larmina and Daniel are in the theatre crowd, which would fit the line being aimed at the pilots.

3 ^ The title card reads Dradin, while the subtitle track spells the planet Drayden throughout; the resort is the Leisure Drome in the dialogue and the Leisure Drone in the garbled lines.

1. The title is a spoken line: "Dradin, baby, Dradin. You are so money!" The very next line, "I don't know what that means.", is the show cheerfully admitting that not everyone in the audience will get it.
2. The Voltron battle at the top turns out to be someone's footage: when it ends comes "So what do you guys think of my video?" and "I thought the music was a bit much." Vince wants to premiere his Voltron documentary at SciCon, and the closing scene is a screening where a viewer asks "Was that CGI?" and then praises the tactics. After the cold open nobody forms Voltron again.
3. "Latrine duty" is a running dread for the cadets. It is handed down as a life sentence in New School Defenders, braced for again at the end of "Joyride To Doom" ("Latrine duty?" gets "No way, bud."), and here it comes back when the Black Lion goes missing: "We are so getting latrine duty when we get back." It never arrives, because they are met with "A little misguided, but noble of you nonetheless."
4. The doorman asks "Then where are your lions?" and the answer is a long pause and "Don't have lions yet." The yet pays off fast: in The Army Of One, four episodes later, Larmina is greeted as "our new Blue Lion Pilot" and Vince is told the team would be stronger with him "as the Green Lion pilot".
5. Manset was introduced as a fellow prisoner in Wanted and Unwanted, and the "gone legit" thread comes from Clash of the Lions, where someone asks "Tell me the galaxy's best smuggler hasn't gone legit." Here he tells it himself: "I think it's called smuggling." "Such a dirty word." He has "been really trying to go legit", but he turned "a blind eye to the cargo", and some of it was the weapons now used by Dredd's network of "ex-military Drules who defected from Planet Doom".
6. A stolen Lion is becoming a habit. The local who talks the cadets into a ride says "The black one, to be specific." and then "Time for a little hot-wiring!", whereas in Ghost in the Lion the Blue Lion's thief bypassing the remote start earned "This dude is old school." When the Black Lion vanishes the cadets reason "they have no way to start the lion, so they must have towed it", even though the local has just hot-wired it, and the towing rig turns out to be right.
7. The resort is half casino, so when the Black Lion turns up in the middle of the fight the line is "Always bet on Black." The weekend's verdict, a little earlier, is "That's not a vacation, that's a staycation."
8. The wrecked resort has its own gag list: "Not the diamond encrusted bowling lanes!" and "The all-you-can-eat buffet!" are mourned mid-fight, Manset cries "Oh, the giant statue of me!" as the battle reaches it, and at the end his plan is "Starting with the statue of yourself, I'm sure." "Naturally." He has "a very generous insurance policy".
9. Dradin, Baby, Dradin aired on Wednesday, March 14, 2012, the third episode in the Wednesday run after the winter break, and it is a light vacation outing wedged between the Haggarium plots around it.

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