New School Defenders

After the Galaxy Alliance decommissions Voltron as a hazard, cadet Daniel enrolls at the Flight Academy, where Sky Marshall Wade forbids any mention of Voltron. Daniel asks about Voltron during a guest lecture by Commander Lance, and he and fellow cadet Vince are sentenced to latrine duty for the rest of the first term and all of the second. They sneak into the simulators, where Lance catches them, and he leads them to a hideout in which Hunk and Pidge run a secret network under Wade's nose.

Lance's first assignment is to swap Wade's favourite four-stripe pin for a replica while his coat is off. The cadets pull it off with a snarling lion on their heels, and Lance then takes them to Allura and the Castle of Lions, where the pins turn out to be keys.

Elsewhere, Keith is betrayed on a beach and a masked infiltrator creeps through the vents of a station.

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 Coran: Ron Halder Sky Marshall Wade: Garry Chalk

"Latrine duty happens to be the only hole in Wade's security." -- Lance

"I need an army of obedient, ruthless fighting machines, not some saps who are going to hesitate to consult their moral compass." -- Sky Marshall Wade

"I hope this teaches you to scrub Voltron from your lives completely." -- Sky Marshall Wade

"Voltron was just a vehicle." -- Lance, in class

"You can just save my life sometime." -- Vince

"Do you trust me?" -- Lance

"Because if you don't, I can have Pidge erase this from your memory." -- Lance

"Toilet Scrubbing 101." -- Lance

"Of course, if all that wasn't about to change, I wouldn't be here telling you this story." -- the opening narrator

"Partially because you aren't ready to know." -- Lance

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.

Sky Marshall Wade runs the Galaxy Alliance Flight Academy under a No Voltron policy so absolute that a cadet who asks what really happened with Voltron is told there are severe consequences. The place is built on surveillance, but the premiere's sharpest idea is that the one person Wade never thinks to look at is the cadet holding the mop.

Getting there takes a while. The cold open is a dare followed by a long stretch of narration, and the narrator has plenty to cover: a victory celebration that ended in disaster, the Lions declared a hazardous threat and decommissioned without any attempt to fix them, and a public that forgot the good Voltron had done "as if they'd been brainwashed." It is a lot of backstory before the title card, yet we forgive it, because the narrator is plainly itching to go fast and has landed somewhere slow.

The story proper turns on a single exchange in Wade's office. A cadet offers to take full responsibility, and Wade shuts the offer down as a "sickening nobility card" and a liability in combat. He wants an army of obedient, ruthless fighting machines and not "some saps who are going to hesitate to consult their moral compass." Wade has decided that the instinct to cover for somebody else is a defect, and Lance is going to build his recruitment on it.

The punishment turns out to be the way in. Lance says as much once he has Daniel and Vince in the hideout: latrine duty is the only hole in Wade's security. The toilet-cleaning cadets have pretty much unfettered access, and a man who runs everything on an airtight schedule has never imagined that anyone on that schedule could matter. The mission itself is small and slightly absurd, a pin swapped for Pidge's replica while the coat is off [1]. We like that the script keeps it that size; it lets the real exchange happen at a door marked Private. A lion snarls there, and Daniel braces his hands against its open jaws while Vince cowers behind him! [2] Vince had asked for a favour in the latrine, "You can just save my life sometime," and by 20:00 the debt is being called paid.

Lance supplies the other half. In class he tells the cadets that Voltron was just a vehicle, a line aimed at a boy who worships the thing. The hideout scene recasts it as a cover story from an officer pretending to be the epitome of a good soldier. His reason for not simply explaining himself is cheerfully unhelpful: partly because they are not ready, but mostly because it is more fun for him this way. He also offers to have Pidge erase the scene from their memories if they refuse. Once the cadets say yes, somebody admits, with real relief, that no such device exists! It gets the biggest laugh of the episode and makes the argument too, since trust is the only security on offer.

The weaker thread is everything that happens away from the Academy. Keith's beach deal with a red alien broker goes wrong. A masked infiltrator with a glowing cyan sword and a small pink-eyed creature on his shoulder crawls through vents and tries to crack a keypad, but nothing comes of it. Each intercut visit deflates the cadets' story, and the dialogue around them, all traitors and returned money, goes unexplained.

As the opening chapter it makes the Academy feel smaller than the war outside it; the last scenes pay that off on a misty meadow where Allura waits and the pins turn out to be keys to Lions that have been sitting in storage. Wade's Academy exists to scrub Voltron out of its cadets, and the two he sentenced to scrub floors are the ones who deliver his keys to the Castle of Lions!

1 ^ The pin is introduced at 18:21 as a four-stripe decoration, with Pidge's replica shown in one panel while Wade hangs up his coat in the other. By 20:59 Lance calls them "more like keys than pins," and two green and gold keys are held up at 21:02.

2 ^ The lion is brown in Wade's trophy room at 9:05 and again when it charges the Private door at 19:44; at 19:04, by the coat shelf, it looks more tawny, presumably the lighting.

1. None of the first three episodes has the "Evil is back" narration that opens the other 23, and here Daniel narrates his own backstory instead, signing off with "if all that wasn't about to change, I wouldn't be here telling you this story." The regular narration first shows up in Coran, Coran. Our guess is that a three-part movie only needed the recap once, but nobody says so.
2. This is chapter one of what Nicktoons billed as the "Voltron Force: New Defenders Trilogy". The first three episodes ran back to back as one commercial-free, 90-minute movie on Thursday, June 16, 2011, and the network pitched it as the first new Voltron in ten years.
3. Daniel's opening wish is "Someday, that's gonna be me. I'm gonna pilot the Black Lion." It is one of the few wishes in this show that comes true, because by Black, the finale, he is flying the Black Lion on his first mission as its pilot.
4. The pin swap doubles as a trick on the audience: "More like pins. And more like keys than pins. The keys to the lions!" The episode ends on a question about the one key nobody has found, "Where's the black key?" Defenders of Arus pays off the fake pin at once, and keys stay physical objects later on, as when a thief makes off with Allura's Blue Lion key in Ghost in the Lion.
5. Lance says he will speak of the Voltron years "once and only once", then spends the rest of the episode running a secret network about them. His roll call also lines the pilots up for us: Hunk and Pidge are Tech Sergeants, Allura rules at home, and Keith is "a wanted fugitive and nobody knows his whereabouts". The very next scene cuts to Keith on a beach.
6. Wade brushes off chatter about "this mysterious Commander Kala" with "Lotor is dead!", which Defenders of Arus answers about as directly as it could. The ambassador he scolds in the same scene is Coran, a title that comes back when Allura says she will bring "Ambassador Coran" to the talks in Hungry for Voltron.
7. A guard blames an alarm on "another false alarm set up by space mice or something", and the masked infiltrator crawling through the vents does have a small pink-eyed creature on his shoulder. The mice become a whole plot in Gary, where we learn space mice were on the planet before the castle was built.
8. Latrine duty turns into a running gag. Wade's sentence is the rest of the first term and all of the second, and the cadets keep dreading it afterward: "Latrine duty? No way, bud. This is a much more adult punishment" in Joyride to Doom, and "We are so getting latrine duty when we get back" in Dradin, Baby, Dradin.
9. The show was announced in 2010 as "Voltron Panthera Force" and renamed before launch, with all 26 episodes planned from the start. The theme that kicks in just before the four-minute mark ("Let's go! All night!") is by Swizz Beatz.

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