The galaxy is at war. Again. This time, it’s not the might of the Galra Empire against everyone else, but Prince Lotor’s Galra forces who’ve teamed with Voltron and the resistance against the Galra insurgents, resulting in massive upheaval for just about everyone. But that doesn’t mean there isn’t a tiny bit of downtime for the paladins of Voltron to relax a bit. In the upcoming sixth season of Voltron: Legendary Defender–hitting Netflix Friday, June 15–there’s an episode where our heroes partake in some Dungeons & Dragons-style RPG playing, and in the following exclusive clip, we see the beginnings of this new party.
Oh, that Lance. Always trying to be cooler than he is. We spoke to Voltron‘s executive producer Joaquim dos Santos and co-executive producer Lauren Montgomery about this episode, and why it’s an important breather in an otherwise heavy season.
“I think from day one we always wanted to do a crazy RPG episode,” Montgomery explained. “We have our list of things that we’re like, ‘and then we should do this episode and this episode.’ I wanted to do a mermaid one.” (Which they did, in season two). Dos Santos interjected he wanted to do a pro-wrestling episode they never got around to, but also down there on their list was an RPG episode.
“We were kinda looking at our season and we knew we were about to head into some kinda pretty crazy, intense stuff,” Montgomery continued. “So we’re like ‘this is a good moment, before all the S hits the fan, to just kinda take a little bit of a time out.'”
As for how they decided which character type would fit for each character, the producers told us there was a bit of back-and-forth about that. “The first version of the script had Hunk as kind of a big bruiser and Pidge was a little magician,” Montgomery said. “But we wanted to go against type and more with their personality, where Paige is more of a relentless, never-give-up personality, so she’s more the brawler; and Hunk is the lover-not-a-fighter, so he’s a mage.”
Lance, of course, is a ninja, which is peak Lance through and through. “When you think about it,” said dos Santos, “Lance chose, like, a ninja-thief-assassin. He’s kind of every cool thing wrapped up into one, like a Naruto thing. It’s everything he always wanted to be but but maybe isn’t.”
And Shiro? Well, Shiro’s just Shiro, even if he’s role playing. “Always the leader, always the Paladin,” Montgomery mused. “It just cracked us up that he was kinda the most boring guy, that all he’d ever wanna be was the kind of person he already was.”
You’ll get to see more of the adventures in interstellar LARPing when Voltron season six, consisting of seven brand new episodes, hits Netflix this Friday, June 15.
Images: DreamWorks Animation
Kyle Anderson is the Associate Editor for Nerdist. He’s written the animation retrospectives Batman: Reanimated, X-Men: Reanimated, Cowboy Rebop, and Samurai reJacked. Follow him on Twitter!
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