'Voltron' Season 3 Trailer Showcases Calculating New Villain

While the teaser for Voltron Season 3 focused on the team dealing with the absence of Shiro, the pilot of the Black Lion, the full trailer shows off the season’s dangerous new villain.

On Tuesday, the Dreamworks TV YouTube channel uploaded the new trailer, which focused on the threat of Prince Lotor, the son of Zarkon.

The trailer begins with Lotor making a rousing speech to Galra soldiers, saying that anyone who stands against them will be “crushed.” This is matched to a clip of Prince Lotor disarming someone in the Gladiator Pit, just to hammer the point home. We then move to Allura and the Paladins trying to figure out how to move on without Shiro. They’re clearly at their weakest point without their friend, teammate, and the ability to form Voltron. Lotor has no problem taking advantage of this. Later in the trailer, we see the Paladins getting ambushed by Lotor’s forces. And even with Keith rallying the Paladins to work together, the trailer ends with Coran shouting “No!” and the Castle of Lions being fired upon.

In an interview with EW posted on Tuesday, showrunners Joaquim Dos Santos and Lauren Montgomery provided some details about Lotor. In contrast to his father, who favored a “kicking down the doors” approach to conquest, Lotor is a character willing to ally himself with other planets to achieve his goals. He’s not “evil” in the same way his father is (or was, as he might never come out of a coma), and that makes him more unpredictable. He’s also surrounded by a group of partially-Galran generals. This is another departure from Zarkon, who was much more “Galra way! Galra blood!” in the words of Montgomery.

The Legendary Defender version of Lotor is a clear evolution on Lotor’s character from the 1984 Voltron: Defender of the Universe series. In the cartoon, Lotor had a harem (replaced by the aforementioned group of generals) and was obsessed with making Allura his bride (absent in this version). However, some aspects of Lotor’s character, like the tension between him and his father, are still the same.

We’ll see just how different Lotor is, and how much of a threat he poses to the Paladins, when the Netflix series returns this week.

The seven-episode third season of Voltron: Legendary Defender will be available on August 4.