Gary

Before the titles, Maahox promises Lotor a beast that will get past the Castle of Lions' defenses and destroy the Voltron Force from within; Lotor, who has noticed his taste for high expectations, cannot see it. At the Castle, the cadets finish a simulator session while space mice infest the halls and Hunk builds a mouse trap. Vince, up at 2 a.m., beats the hardest challenge in Pidge's game and downloads a bonus prize: a cute long-eared creature he names Gary.

Gary multiplies into angry yellow copies that take over the Castle's controls and the Lions, one slips into the Black Lion's Nexus, and Voltron forms as Black Center against a giant Gary that is solid only while it crushes him. Pidge, Hunk and Allura turn the trap into a Gary bomb, the space mice carry it inside, and Lotor tells Maahox the failure met his expectations.

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

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

"I've noticed you enjoy setting very high expectations." -- Lotor

"I like to think big." -- Maahox

"In that case, it and you met my expectations exactly." -- Lotor

"You look kinda like Gary." -- Vince

"Its name is Gary."

"Look, Gary got here through my game." -- Pidge

"You don't think I feel bad too?" -- Pidge

"And since Gary is only solid when it's crushing Voltron..." -- Pidge

"Wait, did it just... kiss Voltron?"

"Our Princess can be very persuasive."

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.

Blame is the engine of this episode, and what makes it interesting is how long the script lets it circulate before it settles on the villain. Vince beats Pidge's hardest challenge at two in the morning, downloads his bonus prize, and finds a pale green creature with long ears and a sheepish grin. He names it Gary because it looks a bit like one. By the time the Castle is full of angry yellow copies with jagged teeth, he is certain he has doomed everyone. The team's response lands somewhere between kindness and a pile-on. Pidge, whose game it is, says he made it "to unite Voltron supporters" and now finds that Lotor has used it "to get at us from the inside". Somebody adds that it makes much more sense to blame this on Vince.

The scene that settles it is the one where the jokes stop. After Keith calls "Pilot switch, now!" the cadets take over from the pilots who are heading back to the Castle. Vince says it is his fault that Gary is even there, and Pidge, who has every reason to be sharp, answers: "Look, Gary got here through my game. You don't think I feel bad too?" He goes on to say that he cannot sit there and mope, and that to stop it he needs Vince to do the same. It is a short, plain exchange between two kids who are each partly responsible, and nobody tells either of them that they are forgiven.

Against that, the villain's side of the episode is arranged as a mirror. The cold open has Maahox promising Lotor a beast that will "finally get past the Castle of Lion's defenses and destroy the Voltron Force from within". Lotor, unimpressed, answers: "I've noticed you enjoy setting very high expectations." Maahox: "I like to think big." Lotor asks to see the monstrosity, and the last thing he says before the titles is "I don't see...". The ending closes the circle. "My latest creation did not quite meet my expectations," says Maahox, and Lotor replies: "In that case, it and you met my expectations exactly." The heroes spend the episode dissolving blame into a shared problem, but the throne room does the opposite and attaches it to a person, with a joke. [1]

The comedy lives in the setting. The cadets begin in the simulator, with Vince trying the Black Lion because he wanted to see what black was like, and the Castle is already infested with space mice. The cast cannot agree on them: one side calls them vermin, yet Allura closes the argument with "this is their home as much as it is ours." Hunk's mouse trap is the object the rest of the story hangs on. It holds the Garys in the Castle, then Pidge re-rigs it into a Gary bomb, and the mice themselves are talked into carrying it. The apology offered to the mice when the end seems near, "You're not vermin, I take it back!", is the funniest small turn in the episode. The plot treats it as a debt that gets paid. We will take a mouse apology over a mecha brawl any day! [2]

The weakness is the giant half. Gary reaches the Nexus through the hole in the Black Lion's piece, which Hunk and Pidge were mending early on. The battle then becomes a loop; the transformations are all messed up, Voltron forms as Black Center, and Gary, in Pidge's phrase, is only solid when it is crushing Voltron. It is a well-chosen rule, since it turns the monster's best feature into the pilots' worst problem, but it is also where the episode runs out of pictures. We get a red desert, a giant yellow blob, and the Lions heaped under a magenta sky. "Wait, did it just... kiss Voltron?" is a better joke than anything the fight around it contains.

This is a cadets' and mice's episode, and it sits comfortably beside the season's other stories about the new pilots finding their place. The closing scene goes back to the hole in the Black Lion that started everything, with tiny Hunk and Pidge at work on its back.

1 ^ The cold open runs before the titles; Lotor's "I don't see..." is at 0:31. The closing credits list one actor, Ron Halder, for both Maahox and Gary, which means the stutter of Gary's "G-G-Goodbye!" at 21:17 and Maahox's "Yes, my lord" fifteen seconds later come from the same performer.

2 ^ Hunk holds up the red device at 3:17, its first appearance; the subtitle track calls it Hunk's mouse trap at 17:26 and a trap that can keep "holographic creatures from escaping" at 12:13.

1. The title character is named on the spot. Vince looks at the strange little creature and says "You look kinda like Gary," and that is the whole origin story, yet later someone is lamenting being destroyed by "this... this... Gary" and gets corrected with "Its name is Gary."
2. This aired on Wednesday, February 29, 2012, leap day, the first new episode in 94 days since Ghost in the Lion went out the Sunday after Thanksgiving. From here Nicktoons ran the rest of the season on Wednesdays through April 25.
3. The first and last scenes are one joke. Lotor tells Maahox "I've noticed you enjoy setting very high expectations", and the closing scene turns it around with "My latest creation did not quite meet my expectations" and Lotor's "it and you met my expectations exactly." That last line reads as an early warning for Maahox, who gets sacked outright in Deceive and Conquer.
4. The space mice have been a running gag since the early episodes. In "New School Defenders" a Castle alert is waved off as "another false alarm set up by space mice or something", and in Wanted and Unwanted they are praised as "The galaxy's greatest natural resource." Here they finally do the heavy lifting by carrying the Gary bomb inside, and the episode even asks "Why are they even called space mice anyway?" without ever answering it.
5. Gary arrives through Pidge's game, the same game Voltron's quiet supporters use to talk under Wade's radar in Lion Riders Return. The team works out that "if that kid on Ariel could figure out that the game's best player was Vince" then Maahox and Lotor could too, so a channel built to unite loyalists becomes the way into the Castle.
6. Pidge and Hunk spend the first act trying to fix "the hole in Black's nexus", and the reveal is that Gary got into the Nexus through exactly that hole. The wound stays open into the next episode, Five Forged, which begins with "Every time we mess with the Black Lion's broken nexus, bad things happen."
7. "Pilot switch, now!" is a one-off: it is the only time we found anyone call it in the season. The cockpit panels afterward show Larmina, Keith, Daniel, Vince and Lance, so Keith and Lance stay put while the cadets take over the other three Lions and Allura heads back to the Castle with Hunk and Pidge to work on the bomb.
8. Vince is in the wrong seat from the first scene: "I always fly green. I wanted to see what black was like." The reaction is "So you want to be the Black Lion pilot now, huh?" and "And what if I did?" By "The Army Of One" Vince is told the team will be stronger with him "as the Green Lion pilot", and by the finale the Black seat belongs to Daniel.

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