The Hunkyard

Hunk's barbecue is called off when a target appears on the radar, and Voltron is already fighting a Waderoid when Vince tries and fails to trigger a new reconfiguration. Daniel and Larmina are meant to be monitoring from the control room but have gone off to hunt Waderoids for sport, and Keith and Lance lecture them on teamwork.

Hunk, who has bonded with none of the cadets, is sent to teach their class for a day. He takes them to his secret scrapyard to build vehicles and break them. Meanwhile Pidge builds a Haggarium detector, and Waderoids powered by Haggarium swarm the yard before the scrap itself rises as a monster. Voltron forms, and Vince's power produces a new form with spiked wrecking balls to take on the monster. The cadets then invite Hunk to their own secret place.

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

"Build stuff, then break it." -- Hunk

"It's like you got to be grooving with the whole band before you bust into your solo!" -- Hunk

"All of our issues boil down to one simple fact. Five lions and eight pilots."

"If I had just become a driver from the get-go, I wouldn't have realized what a team effort it was." -- Hunk

"I'm tightening this bolt?"

"This is our day to bond, and I ain't sharing." -- Hunk

"My stuff. But it's evil now." -- Hunk

"I'm not doing anything!" -- Vince

"These transformations must be programmed into Voltron's core somehow."

"Hey, Hunk! Can you keep a secret?"

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 sulky teenager, a wrench and an adult who refuses to give a speech make a better classroom than anything in the Castle of Lions.

The episode opens on the old method failing. Voltron is already fighting a Waderoid in a desert canyon, and Vince, asked to try the reconfiguration power the team keeps talking about, gets close but cannot get back into the zone. Daniel and Larmina are meant to be monitoring from the control room. Instead they are out in the desert hunting Waderoids and keeping score, one accusing the other of cheating; when they are called in they have a position, which is that watching is boring and nobody needs them with a magic man like Vince around. Lance and Keith respond with lectures. Hunk offers a metaphor about grooving with the band before you bust into your solo, a perfectly good line that earns him a pat on the head for a valiant attempt! Nobody has yet worked out that a metaphor is the wrong tool.

The episode's real argument is made by the cadets themselves. "All of our issues boil down to one simple fact," one of them says. "Five lions and eight pilots." Everything afterwards is the show taking that complaint literally. Hunk, who has bonded with none of the cadets and says so, is sent to teach their class for a day. He takes them to a secret pile of scrap and tells them to build vehicles. "Build stuff, then break it" is the curriculum. [1] The cadets want their own machines and the episode hands them over, then sneaks the lesson in under cover of the work.

The standout scene comes next: Hunk and Daniel kneeling on either side of a bike wheel. Hunk has already asked whether the bike is really ready for action and been told of course it is, so he has concluded that the kid will learn the hard way. When the axle goes, he tells the story of the crush-car circuit and of years as a boy on his father's pit crew, building and fixing, and of the lesson he took from it: "If I had just become a driver from the get-go, I wouldn't have realized what a team effort it was. Probably would have been crushed." The trick is spotted at once, but Hunk, to his credit, keeps tightening the bolt and admits to nothing. The sequence is gentle and funny, and it is free of the preaching that Keith and Lance dish out elsewhere. [2]

Larmina is the harder case, because her objection is to cockpits rather than to teamwork. Hunk works out that the confinement is what bothers her, so he builds a ring-shaped walker rig with free range of motion, and the wall comes down over a shared taste in music.

Where the episode loses ground is the third act. The Waderoid swarm is long and the cadets' contraptions blur together in the sand. Haggarium is asked to explain the Yellow Lion acting up, Daniel's bike running away with him and a heap of scrap standing up as a monster, yet we never hear what it does to metal. "My stuff," Hunk says of the monster. "But it's evil now." It is a funny line over a rather generic fight. The Voltron sequence at the end has more bite. Vince insists he is not doing anything while the form assembles itself; Pidge concludes the transformations are locked inside the core with Vince as the key. Somebody whoops on discovering a wrecking ball swinging from each fist!

The final beat is the right one. Having been taken into somebody's secret place, the cadets offer one of their own: the Lair, and a project that could use his help. Hunk gets the bond he wanted, and nobody has to say so. It is a sweet, well-judged episode, and we are glad Hunk got a class worth teaching! [3]

1 ^ Hunk says it at about 9:05; the first sign of Haggarium trouble comes at about 14:55, when the Yellow Lion starts acting up. 2 ^ The scene runs from about 10:20 to 11:20. 3 ^ The Lair was first planned in the previous Coran episode, "Coran, Coran", where Daniel and Vince first talk about a secret HQ and a logo of their own.

1. Fans on the Voltron wiki treat this as the debut of Yellow Center, the form with the Yellow Lion making the head and chest and a spiked wrecking ball swinging from each fist. It has no name yet. The pilot at the head asks "What's my weapon?", calls "Form blazing something!", announces "I have wrecking balls!" and amends the name in the very next line. By Predator Robeast the call is "Form Yellow Center!" followed by "Wrecking Maces!"
2. The first Center formation anyone calls by name in the dialogue is the one that finishes this fight: "Form black center!", then "Form blazing sword!" The rest of the names trickle in over the following episodes. Red Center is named in "Lion Riders Return", Blue and Yellow in "Dark Blue", and Green Center waits until Inside the Music.
3. The cadets' complaint in the control room is arithmetic: "Five lions and eight pilots." It comes with a wish, "Sometimes I just think it would be easier if we had our own vehicles", and Hunk's scrapyard day hands them exactly that. The idea keeps growing. The cadets turn up on homemade bikes in "Predator Robeast", and by "Rogue Trip" their vehicles combine into Awesome-Tron.
4. The cadets' secret hideout gets its name in "Coran, Coran" ("The lair!"), and this is the episode where it stops being cadets only. The last scene has one of them telling Hunk, "We've also got a secret place. The Lair." That has a long tail: in Black the old hideout is called "our secret cadet lair" and somebody grumbles, "You guys told Hunk about your secret place and not me?"
5. Hunk calls the Hunkyard "my super secret place that none of the other guys know about", but back at the Castle the control room has it figured out at once ("Oh, yeah. The Hunk Yard."). Someone also marvels that the big guy thinks "a pile of scrap that huge wouldn't be picked up on our sensors", and later they note that "the yellow lion is still at the Hunkyard". The whole Castle has been watching the Yellow Lion's marker all day.
6. Reconfiguring is the running trouble. The episode opens with Voltron already fighting a Waderoid, and when Vince is asked to trigger the new reconfiguration power he gets close and misses ("Vince, you were so close."). The form only arrives later, when Vince is not trying at all ("I'm not doing anything!"). The explanation, "And Vince is the key", follows Joyride To Doom, which ended with Vince glowing and passing out.
7. Hunk and Larmina bond over music, and the band that comes up by name is Stereolactic ("Is that Stereolactic you're listening to?"). The band returns in Inside the Music as the festival everyone wants to book, and it turns out DJ Prong, who controls the band's holographic projections, is Pidge in disguise.
8. The Hunkyard aired on Thursday, July 7, 2011, the third Thursday after the 90-minute Trilogy premiere. The cold open drops us into a Waderoid fight, and the early grumbling is about a cancelled cookout ("Pidge, would you tell the cadets the BBQ is off?").

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