Voltron makes a great argument for short seasons on Netflix

The blue paladin, Lance, and black paladin, Shiro, grow in tandem. Lance was probably always destined to take a bigger role than his goofy ladies-man schtick just because he’s voiced by Jeremy Shada, Adventure Time‘s Finn, who has proven over that show’s long run that he can hold a show up almost entirely on his own when he needs to, while still working well with an ensemble cast. In Voltron, that’s also happening with his character, but organically.

Since almost the beginning of the show, Shiro’s dependability as a leader has been in question. One of his arms is built from Galran technology that no one in Team Voltron really understands, This season, we’re starting to see Shiro disintegrate as a leader, becoming more erratic and impulsive. Meanwhile, Lance is standing up more, defending his views better. The latter manifests when Lance is practicing alone and wills his Bayard – the shape-changing weapon each paladin wields – into a broadsword form that Princess Allura suggests hints that the traits of a leader hide within him.

This is brought together by a moment early on in the season when Team Voltron is trapped and forced to commune in Voltron’s mystical power. For a moment, Shiro and Lance are left there together, with Shiro trying to warn Lance about… something. A subconscious part of Shiro knows something is wrong, and he sees the fast-maturing Lance as the person to reach out to.

While all this is happening, the team is bringing about a power change in the Galra empire, the witch Haggar is spying and planning, and people affected by the millennia-long reign of the Galra try to rebuild with the help of Voltron.

The whole season feels compact, and nothing about it is left hanging. It’s full, from end to end, with meaningful changes for just about every major character in the cast. Now that Pidge’s story has had all its threads tied off satisfactorily, I do wonder what will happen with the character. At the same time, I look forward to seeing how Shiro’s relationship to the team changes, how Lance and Keith grow, and how Lotor and Princess Allura navigate their places of absurd power as the possibility of betrayal lurks in the background. We don’t have half a season dangling like we did with Luke Cage, or storylines that felt like they could’ve been edited out completely, as with Stranger Things second season.

Voltron: Legendary Defender has been an exercise in tinkering with nostalgia from the beginning. The beast we know and love from 1984 is two shows stitched together and heavily edited, with characters changed and combined in ways unrecognizable from the original. This new take on the series continues to show how the team behind it is respecting both our memory of the show and its Japanese origin at the same time, while finding ways to keep the story from being a simple rehash.

But while they do balance nostalgia and modern storytelling, they’re not force-feeding us in huge batches of episodes that we wait so long for that we’ve forgotten what’s happened. Seasons are coming, well, seasonally, and it’s working. The original Voltron series might’ve been an editing-room nightmare, but this new one should act as a lesson to other Netflix shows. Sometimes, indeed, less is more.

Article source: https://www.technobuffalo.com/2018/03/05/voltron-makes-a-great-argument-for-short-seasons-on-netflix/