‘Voltron’ Season 7 Release Date On Netflix: 2018 ‘Voltron: Legendary Defender’ White Lion Theory Excites Fans
The wait for the Voltron: Legendary Defender Season 7 release date will only be about nine to 12 million ticks after June of 2018 if Netflix continues releasing episodes at the same pace. The premiere date for the sixth season of Netflix’s Voltron TV show is scheduled for June 15, 2018, so it seems streaming audiences probably won’t have to wait until 2019 to watch the seventh season’s new Voltron episodes. What’s more, the producers at Studio Mir have been teasing fans about the White Lion and what to expect from Keith, Shiro, Lotor, and more!
Last year, co-executive producer Lauren Montgomery and Studio Mir director Joaquim Dos Santos talked about how the decision to break up the standard 13-episode blocks came from executive level meetings at Dreamworks.
“The idea is to get you more Voltron more often,” Montgomery explained. “It’s in smaller doses, but you’ll see it more.”
In a 2018 interview, Dos Santos explained how this decision changed their approach to storytelling. Apparently, the stories for Voltron Seasons 3 through 6 were written way ahead of episode production, so they had to “find decent places to split them up” because they went into production not expecting these episodes to be split up.
“So all these shorter drops are coming in what were previously longer form seasons and split up after the fact,” Dos Santos explained, according to Screen Rant. “We did try to find the most natural place to split them up but it wasn’t our intention going in initially.”
Warning: The following has spoilers for Voltron Season 5.
Serialized TV stories usually try to end on some sort of cliffhanger, but that was difficult to do when the seasons were not planned out that way. Season 3 ended in more of an information drop, while Voltron Season 5 had Haggar intending to travel to Oriande to confront her son Prince Lotor and the Paladins.
Besides finding a natural breaking point for the story, it’s also a “balancing act” to ensure that characters progress naturally and receive enough screen time.
“We see how many episodes we have to do it in and then we look for, as far as our characters are concerned, what character moments actually kind of fit into that story,” Montgomery said. “We don’t try to shoehorn in things that don’t fit.”
Dos Santos says the team has a “weird theory of checks and balances internally” that prevents the heavy drama from becoming too overwhelming. The writing team will “interject jokes in what are otherwise very dramatic moments, just to kind of bring some levity,” but sometimes an “executive review” will tell them that they need to lighten up the story a bit more.
The Voltron White Lion Robot Theory Is A New Fan Favorite
The new Netflix Voltron TV series often harkens back to the mythology of the original series. The backstory of Voltron and the lions has already been developed, but the producers have grown the mythology as the story developed.
“We got lucky, because the original show had kind of a murky sort of lore and history to it,” said Dos Santos. “So we knew after we had hit the pillars of what everyone remembered from the original show, that it was kind of an open book in terms of being able to take over and rewrite some of the history and build more lore than was there previously.”
In the 80’s TV series, Voltron: Defender Of The Universe featured an episode where Haggar tried to trap Princess Allura by creating a vision of a white lion. Allura believes this lion was Allura’s father, King Alfor, reincarnated. While the original white lion was a heartbreaking tale, Voltron: Legendary Defender uses the symbolism for a different purpose.
One of the pivotal moments in the fifth season is when Prince Lotor and Allura traveled to Oriande, which is where King Alfor mastered the secrets of Altean alchemy that allowed him to create Voltron. There, they encounter a guardian that takes the form of a White Lion. That revelation excited fans and there is already fanart showing Prince Lotor and Shiro as the White Paladin. Or, perhaps, even Keith could come back as the Guardian of Light?
Could a robot white lion robot be in the planning for the sixth season or even Voltron Season 7? After all, with Allura’s newfound abilities and Lotor’s transdimensional comet ore, it should be possible for the Paladins to build the White Lion of Voltron. It’s also not an unreasonable expectation since the crossover comic Robotech/Voltron did feature a sixth robot lion, although that White Lion never combined with Voltron to create a new form. The comic’s White Lion also had the ability to cross over between alternate realities, which is an important story point in Netflix’s Voltron: Legendary Defender.
Assuming a sixth lion is made, the next question is who would pilot Voltron’s White Lion. While Prince Lotor might jump at the chance, there’s good reason to think a different version of Shiro will be the White Paladin. Voltron’s fifth season made it plain that something odd is going on with Shiro. When the Paladins all see each other within the psychic realm, Shiro tries to give a message to Lance, but then Shiro does not recall saying anything later on. Shiro is even expressing self-doubt as if he knows something is wrong with him. Haggar also uses a visual spell multiple times to spy on the Paladins and it seems like her viewpoint comes from where Shiro is standing.
A popular fan theory says that Voltron Season 6 will show that the Galra replaced Shiro with a clone as part of Operation Kuron. That would explain Shiro’s odd behavior in addition to the fact that the art style for Shiro shifted over time. It would be interesting symmetry if the real Shiro comes back in the White Lion robot to replace the Black Lion of the clone Shiro, which is currently the core body of Voltron.
Revealing that Shiro is a clone would be a great cliffhanger for the sixth season, so hiding the robot White Lion until Voltron Season 7 would make more sense. However, when Montgomery and Dos Santos were asked about the meaning behind the guardian White Lion, they did not give any hint that a sixth lion robot was planned.
“On some level, we weren’t trying to logic it out too much, but you do sort of come to that idea of, ‘Why lions? Why are they lions?’ We’d also like to just point out that Alteans look a lot like humans and so do the Galrans, for that matter,” said Dos Santos. “So I think that maybe there’s just some scientific phenomenon that takes certain shapes throughout the universe. If that makes any sense. Lions and apex predators in general just go hand in hand across the universe.”
Voltron: Legendary Defender Season 7 Release Date
As of this publishing, neither animation production company Studio Mir nor Netflix has announced anything official about Voltron Season 7 release date, although this article will be updated as soon as the Voltron sequel’s premiere is confirmed. However, there can be reasonable speculation about when the Voltron: Legendary Defender Season 7 premiere date may occur.
The entire Voltron: Legendary Defender series will be 78 episodes, with each major story arc based on 13-episode blocks. The sixth season will end at episode 52, which is about two-thirds of the entire story. That leaves 26 episodes for Voltron Season 7 through Season 10. The series’ finale will most likely air in 2019.
The delay between the mini-seasons has varied between 10 and 15 weeks, while the gap between the 13-episode blocks has gone down. The wait for the second season was 32 weeks, but there was only a 20-week time gap between Seasons 4 and 5.
In the best case scenario, that means Voltron Season 7 will release in November of 2018. However, it could also be as late as January of 2019. Based on history, the Voltron: Legendary Defender Season 7 premiere date will definitely be on a Friday since new episodes have always launched on a Friday.
Voltron Season 7 Predictions: Is Zarkon Alive Or Dead – Can Either Shiro Or Prince Lotor Be Trusted?
The fifth season was shocking primarily because Prince Lotor apparently killed off his father, Emperor Zarkon, in a duel. What TV show kills off the main villain before the final ending and near the beginning of a season? When Montgomery was asked if Zarkon is dead or alive, she coyly responded, “We’ll never tell.” On the other hand, Dos Santos was pretty adamant that the main bad guy is dead.
“He’s dead. He’s gone, man. A giant piece of shrapnel through his body cavity – he’s donezo,” he said.
As “donezo” as the last time Zarkon seemingly died in the second season? Time will tell. The producers are definitely playing with audiences’ heads because it’s hard to tell if Prince Lotor is being sincere or not in his quest to reform the Galra Empire. However, the producers seem to be hinting that Lotor’s duplicitous nature will cause him to utilize people to their advantage or detriment depending on how he needs to achieve his goals.
When directly asked if the character was redeemable, Dos Santos compared the situation to how Star Wars‘ Darth Vader had redemption by killing the Emperor but lost that feeling of redemption when he was shown killing the little Jedi children. Similarly, there could be more something about Lotor that has not been revealed which will change how audiences view the Galran prince.
“So the story is forever evolving and you might feel redemption at one end of the story and maybe later on that will get swooped away and vice versa,” said Dos Santos.
“We’ll just have to wait and see how that pans out, because really, [Prince Lotor] could go either way. He’s just that complex and that interesting. You don’t know what’s going on beneath the surface,” Montgomery said. “Is he being completely genuine and does he want exactly what everyone else wants? Or is there something else that we have no clue about that’s just the worst thing in the world?”
That “something else” could involve what happened to Shiro. In the past, the producers admitted that they’d planned for it to appear like Shiro died in Season 2, but he was quickly resurrected in Season 3 because “Shiro’s gotta sell toys.”
“We weren’t allowed to from the executives. That’s it. He had to come back. That’s pretty much it,” explained Dos Santos in a 2017 interview with Den of Geek. “We wanted him to be gone for a much longer period of time and we weren’t allowed to.”
Shiro was supposed to be seemingly dead for several seasons, but the realities of the toy/TV show paradigm prevent that original plan. In the more recent 2018 interview, Montgomery said that Shiro went from this “super awesome, perfect hero guy in season 1” to someone who is suffering. Montgomery sees these character evolution decisions as “damage control” because they “needed to factor in something interesting about him so that he wasn’t just the perfect guy who solves everyone’s problems.”
Beyond the surface, it’s pretty obvious that the producers have something big planned for Shiro. Whether it has something to do with Prince Lotor, they didn’t say, but the sixth season and Voltron Season 7 will feature other character developments. Keith will be working on finding some “inner peace” now that a large void in his life is being filled with finding his mother, Krolia. Even Hunk, who already evolved from being fearful to finding a larger calling in life, will have “stuff coming up.”
“[Hunk] is probably the most evolved of all of the characters. He knows who he is and knows what he’s doing, so everything else that’s going to comes up for him is just going to be little sprinkles on top of the character that he is,” Montgomery said. “I think maybe people are expecting him to have a really tortured past that we have no idea happened and, y’know, not everyone’s tortured. I think Hunk is probably the biggest example of not everyone is tortured. He has stuff coming up, just don’t expect him to suddenly come from a fricking house full of murderers or something.”
Thankfully, audiences won’t have long to wait for the sixth season to find out what happens next. Let’s just hope the Voltron Season 7 release date is an early Thanksgiving/Christmas gift in 2018.
