Predator Robeast

Lotor, still not at full strength after his rebirth, is told by Maahox to be patient and is offered some entertainment: a set of Robeasts that pin the Voltron Force down in separate places. The cadets are left to guard the castle, and Vince stretches the force shield and redirects the cannon's power to a drone.

Larmina and Daniel, tired of training and promised a tour, slip out on bikes they built in secret and free Hunk, and the others are freed in turn. Once the five Lions are loose the Robeasts merge into a single winged giant that outfights Voltron in every form the team tries. With the Blazing Sword broken and Green Center impossible without Vince, the team plans to jump into the magma with the Robeast. Lotor recalls it before the jump, saying he will finish Voltron himself, and Vince turns up at the end in a tank of his own.

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 Maahox: Ron Halder Lotor: Mark Hildreth

"I am not good at waiting, Maahox." -- Lotor

"You must have Patience, my lord." -- Maahox

"In other words, stay home while you have all the fun."

"Presto, expando, away you go!"

"Thinking outside the box."

"That thing might be as big as Voltron, but there's only one Voltron."

"We haven't tried Green Center yet!"

"Now it is your turn to be patient, Maahox." -- Lotor

"When I am ready, I shall return to claim that honor myself." -- Lotor

"Hey, where did Vince get that tank?"

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.

What do you do with a cadet who has been told, twice in one day, to stay home? Larmina and Daniel's answer in "Predator Robeast" is to take the bikes they have been building in secret and ride out to free the pilots who were supposed to be protecting them. The story around that choice is about patience: who has it, who is ordered to practise it, and what it costs the one who does.

The idea is planted in the villain's scene first. Lotor, still short of full strength after his rebirth, tells Maahox he is not good at waiting. Maahox answers that he must have patience and offers some entertainment in the meantime. The entertainment is a set of Robeasts, yet the scene is oddly polite for a villain's opening, with nobody threatened and the plot laid out in a few lines of talk [1]. The cadets get the same advice with less grace. Told they may be called on to defend the castle while the team is away, one of them translates it as an instruction to stay home while everyone else has the fun.

The script sorts its three cadets by temperament, and this is where it is strongest. Vince likes the work. He expands the force shield with a flourish, and when the others wander off he stays at the consoles asking whether the cannon can reach further, whether the shield can change thickness and whether three defences can run through one station. His last question is what happens if Lotor's command ship enters the atmosphere, and the next cut answers it! Larmina and Daniel want the tour of her favourite places, and someone concedes that knowing the terrain around the castle is worth something in terms of tactics. The episode makes the concession literally true. The tour guide patter rides along with the rescue (here is the gold geyser, here is the desert, over there is some wildlife not native to this planet, ugly), and by the end of the sightseeing Hunk is out of his trap. The cadets have done more for the team than any lecture could, and it is the funniest stretch of the episode; we will say so happily [2].

Adam Beechen's script then treats the fight against the merged Robeast as a catalogue of Voltron's forms, but the catalogue is the thinner half. Red Center, Blue Center, Yellow Center with its wrecking maces, Black Center and the Blazing Sword each get a turn and each fail. Then the Blazing Sword breaks and someone asks how a Robeast can be stronger than Voltron. The answer is that Green Center has not been tried and cannot be without Vince, who needs to unlock that power. That keeps Vince at the centre of a fight he is not in, and all he gets for being left behind is a late arrival in a tank.

The weakness is the finish. The plan is to let the Robeast get close and jump into the magma with it while Voltron holds together in Red Center. It is set up carefully and never tested, because Lotor recalls his monster before the jump. He has not had enough entertainment so much as decided to save the kill for himself: when he is ready, he says, he will return to claim that honor. Keeping the villain for later is a fair demand on a long season, yet it leaves a fight in which the heroes were beaten by an opponent who then stopped. Lotor does get the best line, but only because he tells Maahox it is now his turn to be patient!

The recall is also the point, though. Lotor is the only character who obeys the instruction to wait, and his reward is a Voltron left asking what happens when the thing that was playing with them decides to stop. We end up with a lopsided scoreboard. The veterans finish the day beaten; the cadets told to stay home are the only ones with anything to show, including a photograph somebody insists was a slipped finger.

1 ^ Maahox's advice comes at 1:26 and Lotor hands it back at 20:54, near the start and end of the Drule scenes.

2 ^ The bikes are different builds: Larmina rides a cable-rigged machine with handgrips (9:28) and Daniel a rugged bike with a sawtooth wheel (11:17); Hunk is the only member of the Force who knows they exist.

1. Nobody here calls the monster the Predator Robeast. The name first turns up in The Army Of One, when one pilot says "Predator Robeast?" and another translates it as "As in, the only Robeast we haven't been able to beat?" Fan recaps have it finally destroyed there, which makes this the episode where it earned the reputation.
2. Four different Voltron forms are called in a single fight here: Red Center, Blue Center, Yellow Center and Black Center, followed by the Blazing Sword. None of the other 25 episodes calls more than three Centers. The finisher then fails them: "The Blazing Sword just broke?"
3. Green Center is the one they cannot form: "We haven't tried Green Center yet!" "And we can't!" "Not without Vince!" The thread is pulled later. In "Inside the Music" someone says "I have an idea, but we need to find Vince" shortly before "For Green Center!", and in The Army Of One Pidge swaps seats with Vince after "Going green didn't work!"
4. Lotor and Maahox trade a word in the cold open and give it back at the end. Maahox tells him "You must have Patience, my lord," and when Lotor recalls the Robeast, he turns it around: "Now it is your turn to be patient, Maahox." He also explains why he did not let an animal finish the job: "When I am ready, I shall return to claim that honor myself." In The Army Of One he is still on the same note: "That honor belongs to me!"
5. The cadets' scheme is the best part. The "secret vehicles" are bikes they have been building with Hunk, who is, as they say, "the only one who knows we have these wheels", which is why he gets rescued first. The tour starts with a stop at "the gold geyser. Erupts once every three years." The vehicle hobby carries on in Rogue Trip, where the cadets combine their vehicles into a giant robot and spend a while arguing about the name before landing on Awesome-Tron. The tour itself ends with "Hey, where did Vince get that tank?" as the last line, and "My finger must have slipped" for that last picture.
6. Daniel is told to power up and the team forms Voltron with "Flash form! Go!" instead of the full interlock routine. It is a callback to Flash Form Go!, the episode named after the technique, where someone has timed the usual formation at "36 seconds" and Daniel's speed power is what makes the instant version possible.
7. Lotor is told that Haggarium supplies are now arriving in "smaller shipments, less likely to be intercepted." That reads as fallout from "Dark Blue", two episodes earlier, where the Force goes after a huge Haggarium tanker heading for Doom and ends up freezing it into an iceberg.
8. Vince spends the fight being the castle's one-man defense grid. His "Presto, expando, away you go!" stretches the force shield, someone praises "Outside the box," and when the drone problem gets worse he repeats it as "Thinking outside the box." An earlier sign of Vince's knack for shields is the blue energy barrier he throws up in the catacombs of "Coran, Coran".
9. Predator Robeast aired on Thursday, August 11, 2011, the eleventh episode and the second of the last four weekly Thursdays before the break.

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