Voltron Season 5 Review (Spoiler-Free)

You are not prepared for Voltron season 5. It comes at you fast and doesn’t stop. Reveals are dropped every episode. There isn’t a second for a status quo to set in.  It’s so dense and yet it blasts right through the gargantuan amount of plot it has to get through. This is both the seasons greatest strength and its biggest weakness.

Like a train careening down the tracks, Voltron season 5 nearly flies off the rails. There’s too much happening. After a somewhat slow first episode it’s just nonstop from there. It’s almost as if they took what was supposed to be two seasons worth of plot and crammed it into six episodes. This means the big twists come at you nonstop and while many of them are great I wish the season had taken some time to ease up.

Voltron excels at small character moments and sadly this season doesn’t have that many of them. The ones it does have are great but since it’s constantly feeding you plot we don’t get to check in on many of the characters. This season knows it’s a speeding train and has thrown out anything that won’t get them to their destination. 

That means some of the “twists” will leave you confused and others will seem blindingly obvious. Most though are damn effective, they just would have worked better if they had been spaced out. Still, the season mostly stays on the rails and it all pretty much ties together by the end. You’ll be left breathless but very satisfied. 

Up that satisfaction by about twenty percent if your favorite character is Lance. There’s a strong argument to be made he’s the focal character with many of the bigger and smaller moments devoted to him. They’ve also toned down on his “loverboy” ways and he’s starting to get more introspective, which gives Lance some development he’s really needed.

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With only six episodes it would be impossible for everyone to get a focus episode but everyone does get a nice moment to shine or get a laugh in. A throwaway line might also add fuel to a very small ship’s fire.

We also thankfully get a better look at the universe as a whole. While seasons three and four squandered some of the groundwork laid to explore the universe, season five beautifully runs with it. If you’re all about the politics of alien races this season is for you.

There’s so much to process after this season it’ll keep fan discussion alive for months to come. I just hope the next season pumps the brakes a bit. The more we see our characters deal with the fallout of these big reveals the more engrossed we as an audience will be in them. Voltron knows how to get to where it’s going, I just hope it can enjoy the journey a little more instead of racing to get to its destination.

Shamus Kelley is a pop culture/television writer and official Power Rangers expert. He’s still breathless from watching all of these in one sitting. Follow him on Twitter!