The Black Paladins & All Good Things

THE BLACK PALADINS & ALL GOOD THINGS

On my rewatch of the Black Paladins episode, I had a weird feeling throughout the fight, but I shrugged it off, because I couldn’t exactly pinpoint what it was. I thought it was just my old feelings of wishing everyone was involved in the fight, and so I didn’t think more about it. But then I watched the next episode, All Good Things. This is where I got my first clue, and I started growing very suspicious. I’ll take you through it all in the order in which I found the clues.

Before we begin though, I have to say that I haven’t watched the Black Paladins since January 2019, which I couldn’t even finish because I felt very strongly that everyone should have been a part of the arc, because I was working under the presumption that this was a found family story. I argued in the main analysis why I no longer believe this, but I’m telling you this just to let you know the state of mind I was in when I rewatched the Black Paladins episode this time around, because it means that I haven’t watched All Good Things since Season 6 came out 7 years ago.

So, imagine my great surprise and shock when I rewatched All Good Things, and I could finally put my finger on what was bothering me.

First of all, on my first rewatch for this analysis, I was very surprised to see that the Black Paladins arc/fight doesn’t happen until midway through the episode. I didn’t remember that it was so short, in fact I remembered it as a full episode. But no, the arc starts around the 10-minute mark, when Keith lands on the other side of the wormhole that Shiro disappeared into. This was a strange choice to me, given the importance Shiro and Keith’s relationship has had to Keith as a character, but also to the whole show, so I found it odd that they only gave that whole arc half an episode. Compare it to the Blade of Marmora episode which lasted all 20 minutes, as well as Pidge’s episode in season 4, where she finds her brother, Matt.

Second of all, this is how All Good Things starts

With Keith opening his eyes. Huh. Why would he open his eyes at the end of the Black Paladins, just to close them again? Strange choice, but not entirely suspicious, let’s keep watching.

Then Keith starts by saying this: “Where are you, Shiro? Show yourself! [...] What is this place? Where are we? You—You were trying to kill me. The others! You— You said you…”

ummmm sorry but what the hell is Keith talking about here?? The last episode ended with Keith holding on to Shiro, and trying to save him. He had already cut his arm off, so he was out of danger. So why would he open with saying that Shiro was trying to kill him?? And why does he look and sound so scared and hostile?? I tried to excuse it, saying it’s probably because he woke up in a strange place and he’s still high on adrenaline from the fight. 

But then Shiro disappears mid-sentence:

And I realized that what we are hearing is dialogue from their original fight before it was edited. That’s right. The Black Paladins episode was edited and so was this episode.

And it’s not just the dialogue. Let’s dive into it.

Firstly, ummmm is it just me, or is the Black Paladins episode animation very inconsistent…? It keeps oscillating between art styles…

Let’s look a little closer.

Here are screencaps when the arc begins:

[13:00]

Nothing there. That is the Keith we’ve seen since season 1. Everything looks good.

And yup, that is Shiro as typically seen when his face is focused on. Compare to these screenshots from earlier seasons:

[Season 3, Episode 6, Tailing A Comet, 5:13]

[Season 4, Episode 1: Code of Honor, 6:26]

So far so good.

In fact, everything is fine until we get here:

um… okay… Keith and Shiro look a little. different. Not only that but the transition from Keith’s galra eyes to normal eyes is also… different:

I’ve never seen Voltron animate anything like this before… it’s almost in a whole different style… his hair moves with his blinking, which never happens on Voltron. They would have used a static shot and only animated his eyes, rather than his whole head. This is much more reminiscent of japanese anime than Voltron: Legendary Defender.

But it’s fine, it’s just one or two frames a little bit out of style, no biggie, we know they had to delay the release of this season, so this is probably just one instance. Actually, what I’m interested in is what Shiro says here: “That’s the Keith I remember.” Which is ironic because this is not the Keith I remember, but anyway, this isn’t about me, it’s about whatever the hell Shiro is talking about. Which… What is he talking about? This is a very strange thing for Shiro to say, because he and Keith have never been aggressive with each other, in fact Shiro usually calms him down.

“Oh, that’s just Haggar speaking,” I hear you say. “She’s trying to get a rise out of him.” Okay… but how?? What is she trying to imply here?? Shiro has never seen Keith’s Galra eyes, so… is he talking about Keith’s fighting style?? Why does he say this as if Keith has changed? and changed from what?? It just seems very misplaced… like it doesn’t belong here.

Okay, let’s chalk that up too as a rushed production. Let’s look past it, I’m sure there must have been a reason.

In this shot Shiro’s facial proportions are off, as well as in the next:

Compare the still frames again:

don’t know who these people are. and then we have this weird animation of their fighting…

It looks almost stilted and awkward. Keith and Shiro have a weird skip in their step, and when Shiro strikes him, Keith seems to float back… this looks nothing like Voltron’s usual animation. Compare to this fighting animation from season 2 and 4:

[Season 2, Episode 8: The Blade of Marmora, 10:34]

[season 4, Episode 1: Code of Honor, 03:38]

This sequence is also what gives us this frame of Keith, with his proportions completely off:

umm…. who the hell is this…

Not only that, but all of a sudden, Keith has scrapes and scratches on him, despite just ducking… We should have seen a fall here, or a fall and glide, to give him scratches like that, but we didn’t.

Then we have this jarring cut:

Almost as if the slow push in was cut short, especially as Shiro starts talking. Why was it necessary to cut to him speaking, when they could have animated his mouth here. It would have made what he said sound that much more menacing. The audio too is weirdly cut. I encourage you to listen for yourself, because I can’t show you through this document, but Keith barely stops talking before Shiro starts. In fact, you can hear him breathe in as if to say more just as Shiro starts talking. Dialogue was cut here. This never happens on Voltron, except when another character intentionally interrupts them. But the caption doesn’t show any interruption. Keith was meant to finish fully before Shiro started talking. Either they didn’t have more of the old animation to give his line breathing room, or Keith said something that would be at odds with the final cut. Compare also the still frames:

The first shot is clearly the style that we are used to, but the second is not. That is not what Shiro looks like from below. And we know this because we can compare to this frame from this same episode:

Then we have this shot of Keith:

um… I mean this in the most respectful way possible… but who the FUCK is this. Keith has never looked like this at any point in Voltron. His chin is much longer and broader than usual, and his hair is also much longer. Compare to this shot of him a little bit later:

Clearly inconsistent style here…

Not only that, but his mouth is also really weirdly animated:

Voltron has never animated mouths like this before. This is very out of style, especially in a show that is usually very consistent in their animation up until this point.

Neither has Shiro ever looked like this, but I will chalk this up to the animators wanting to make him look more evil. Fine. I can get on board with that, even if I think it looks inconsistent with this frame:

Then we have this shot of Shiro, where he looks like himself, if a bit younger…

And we have this frame of Keith, where he also looks like himself, again:

then we have this shot of Shiro, and this time, I can’t chalk up to the animators just wanting to make him look scarier, even if I think it looks inconsistent, because we have a very similar expression to compare it to:

And a little later on:

The first shot is clearly out of style, and doesn’t match the style of the second one.

Not only that but this whole sequence is weird.

Okay, first of all, the close-up shot of Shiro crying out is inconsistent with his pose and his fall. He had already fallen when he started crying out, but when he is crying out he is still falling. Second, the intensity of his expression and fall doesn’t match the previous nor the following sequence. Third, neither does the style… in fact, the style of the shot of Keith only matches the shot of Shiro crying out, but not the other animations of Shiro falling or him gritting his teeth. Fourth, we never see Shiro’s arm transition into what we get a glimpse of before it starts glowing. So this sequence of shots were all cut together from different animations Frankenstein-style.

Next we have…

Our Keith…

(Kind of) Our Shiro…

and NOT our Shiro. His body proportions are all off and his face is weird. I’ll chalk his face up to be more menacing, but WHAT is going on with his body. It has never looked like that.

Then we have this:

We see Keith free falling to the next platform, but he’s not animated at all, as in, his body doesn’t move, but rather, he’s a still image lightly rotated to emulate movement. This also usually never happens on Voltron. Compare to this scene from the same episode:

They took care to animate him properly even though he was far away from the camera, just like the previous gif. Yet in the previous gif he was not animated at all. 

Then everything is fine and dandy and the style matches what we’ve seen from them before, and is consistent. THEN we have THIS:

Look especially closely at the last two frames. Shiro stops talking, but then he OPENS his mouth as if to say more. But he DOESN’T. at least not immediately. Compare the still frames:

Here, Shiro has finished saying “anymore”.

and HERE, he opens his mouth to talk, but he doesn’t say anything until the next frame:

Okay…?? Why was it necessary to show that Shiro opens his mouth to say more, but then not show us his animation as he says it? Why are we cutting away from Shiro as he says his next line, especially when you clearly already animated it?? Well, I think it’s because they changed it. They cut this shot short because they changed what he was going to say. Actually. I KNOW they changed it, because then we have THIS:

Here we have the same weirdly animated mouth movement as we saw on Keith earlier. Their hands and swords are not animated in the same style consistently with their previous shots, just like when Keith’s eyes went back to normal. Compare before and after this shot:

But also… Without checking the episode or audio or transcript. What do you think he’s saying here? If you had to guess, what would you say he’s saying? I bet you can’t guess, ‘cause I sure fucking couldn’t as I watched this on mute and without subtitles.

Then we have another out of style shot of Keith, but a fan-favorite because he looks so pretty here:

Compare to the previous shot:

Okay, then we have this sequence:

What do you notice here? Well, everything moves around them, except for Shiro and Keith, which is again very unlike Voltron animation. Like, they don’t move at all, which doesn’t seem realistic, since the world is literally falling apart around them. They should react some way. But they never do. In fact, their positions are directly copy pasted from this frame:

Their positions in the gif as well as the disk they’re standing on is a still image being rotated slowly. The disk I can understand, we’ve seen that before in Voltron where they take big objects from the background and animate the rotation of the still image but not the object itself. This is used even in this sequence. But it is very unusual for them to do this with the characters, always taking care to have them moving in every frame.

Not only that, but the next couple of transitions are cut weirdly.

Firstly, we see the disk they’re standing on tilting very slowly. Again, this isn’t animated, it is a still image being rotated. The next shot we get is of the disk already having fallen, but we don’t see Keith and Shiro falling with it, nor do we see them even as a single dot, which they usually would have included, and then the next shot is of Keith and Shiro dangling from Keith’s knife. Usually, we would have seen that, as it would be a very tense situation to see Keith in the last second jamming his knife in the metal and halting their fall. This is very suspicious. We didn’t see them fall from the disk at all, a detail Voltron usually would have included. It seems like they cut something from the scene here.

Then we have more out of style shots of Keith:

These don’t look like the Keith we know… and both their body proportions are wrong from the usual Voltron animation of them.

The last time I saw something so inconsistent in animation was in LOK season 2, which was due to the crew switching between animation studios, due to production difficulties [Source]. But I can’t find any sources that say the same thing happened here, so I have to assume that all of the out-of-style shots and animations are due to time pressure, and/or difference in animation team. As in, all the shots and animations that are out of style, were added in last minute.

Then we have Keith looking at Shiro and having a flashback of when they met:

He looks incredibly sad, but resigned, and as they fall together, he sees Shiro lifeless underneath him, his expression changing, as if he realizes something. He closes his eyes, and the screen fades to white.

I find it very odd that in this sequence, Keith sees only images (images that are all from season 7 btw), but then when he closes his eyes and the screen fades to white, we get a whole animated flashback of them with audio. I believe this flashback and all the images were taken from season 7, because of one reason:

James is there. James is a character that isn’t introduced until Season 7, which the crew added and introduced because they were planning an MFE spin-off, and they used Season 7 to introduce the cast. It seems a bit incohesive to me to put this flashback here without any context. Besides that, they replay this flashback in season 7, Episode 1: A Little Adventure, which seems an odd choice to me, because we’ve already seen it. They rarely repeat scenes and sequences like this. I believe they put this flashback here to include Shiro saying “I will never give up on you.” which would justify Keith holding on to him and saving him from oblivion instead of letting him go. Otherwise, Keith was totally meant to let go. 

In fact, Keith referred to this line earlier, when he said Shiro made a promise, 

but notice how Keith isn’t in frame when he says that. Instead, we see Shiro looking menacing when that line is spoken, which we’ve established is an old shot, the original animation, because it follows Voltron’s style. That type of shot, a slow-pushing zoom on a character, usually doesn’t contain any dialogue but rather just crescendoing music as they cut to the B-plot. But here, Keith is saying a line out of frame. Wouldn’t it make more sense to show a shot of Keith as he says it, and see his expression, because it means a lot to him? Why are we looking at Shiro who doesn’t react at all.

Not only that but... The dialogue is very suspicious too, especially in tandem with the opening of the next episode, All Good Things...

In fact, this is how All Good Things starts

With Keith opening his eyes. Huh. Why would he open his eyes at the end of the Black Paladins, just to close them again? I am almost certain that Keith closing his eyes and the screen fading to white is where it was going to end right before he wakes up in the Astral Plane. I don’t think there was going to be a flashback of Shiro saying he would never give up on Keith, especially because the flashback contains James, who wasn’t introduced before season 7. I actually think the last half of this episode was meant to be paired with the first half of the next episode, All Good Things when Keith sees Shiro in the Astral Plane. Keith closing his eyes and the screen fading to white would have naturally transitioned into him waking up in the Astral Plane.

Furthermore, that is Keith’s design from season 7, not season 6. Compare the stills:

Season 6 vs

Season 7

Which one does this match more?

Clearly Season 7. That means this scene was animated in the same production era as Season 7 and 8.

And Keith starts by saying this: “Where are you, Shiro? Show yourself! [...] What is this place? Where are we? You—You were trying to kill me. The others! You— You said you…”

ummmm sorry but what the hell is Keith talking about here?? The last episode ended with Keith holding on to Shiro, and trying to save him. He had already cut his arm off, so he was out of danger. So why would he open with saying that Shiro was trying to kill him?? And why does he look and sound so scared and hostile?? 

Not one point in the last episode did Keith look so scared or hostile. He spent most of the fight looking sad and begging Shiro to wake up. So like, what is going on here?

“Show yourself!” He says. Why does he think Shiro is hiding from him? Again, they fell into oblivion together. He was literally holding on to him. And he also says, before he cuts himself off, “You said you…” which may refer to what Shiro said about taking care of the others, implying that he killed them. But Keith witnessed Shiro coming back to himself, because he saw, same as we did, that Shiro’s eyes stopped glowing and he said Keith’s name softly, looking worried. So, wouldn’t he have rather asked if he was okay, like he did all last episode ???

Not only that, but Shiro says, “Just let me explain. The thing that attacked you wasn’t me.” Yes…? Keith knows that. Because that’s what he told Hunk last episode:

[Season 6, Episode 5: The Black Paladins, 03:19]

So why does Keith need this reassurance here?

This dialogue would have made more sense if they had it mid-fight. If Keith was pulled to the Astral Plane in a clash against Shiro (maybe even in a fight between everyone and Shiro…?). It makes no sense to have this convo after he won, and after he saved him, because Keith should have been relieved or worried, not scared and hostile, almost like he’s ready to fight again.

I think we are hearing dialogue from their original fight before it was edited. Another clue is when Shiro disappears mid-sentence.

This is very strange, because nothing like that has happened in the show before. They’ve never cut someone off mid-sentence and then gone to the next scene. We never receive an end to their dialogue here, because the next we see of him is when Keith wakes up in the Black Lion and finds Kuron unconscious behind him. Furthermore, why does he disappear here?? If he was just going to disappear, why was the Astral Plane necessary? Why didn’t they just open the episode with Keith waking up in the Black Lion with Kuron behind him?? Why did Shiro disappear mid-sentence??

I think part of this is they needed to keep just the exposition in to explain all the foreshadowing they did in the past seasons as well as what happened to the original Shiro. They had to keep that part, in order to pay off the Kuron arc, because the episode they used to introduce that plot (Season 3, Episode 5, The Journey) basically tells us straight-up that he’s a clone, and pretty much everyone had guessed it correctly already from the release of season 3. Also, that’s what the whole episode was about. It would have taken much more work to take all the clones out of the episode. So, they couldn’t backtrack on Kuron, because they had already put it in there. Instead, they opt to cut Shiro off mid-sentence here, before he reveals any more information or starts saying his goodbyes.

Keith was supposed to wake up in the Astral Plane as they both fall to oblivion, after Shiro strikes him, trying to kill him, not after Keith cuts his arm off. Or, Keith cuts his arm off, but Shiro still tries to kill him by pushing him off the ledge. They were never supposed to dangle from the disk, and Keith was never supposed to have flashbacks of him that we see in season 7. And he was furthermore supposed to wake up in the Black Lion after he speaks to Shiro in the Astral Plane, gaining clarity in what happened to him and saying goodbye for the last time. That’s how it was supposed to go. Until they brought Shiro back from the dead. Again.

They joke several times throughout season 4 as to the reason Shiro doesn’t die either time…

[Season 4, Episode 1: Code of Honor, 08:45]

[Season 4, Episode 4: The Voltron Show, 17:29]

He’s a fan favorite, and I’m guessing that they needed him to stay alive not only for fan interest but also for the selling of merchandise. People don’t want to buy toys of characters that are dead.

In conclusion, The Black Paladins and All Good Things episodes were edited. Shots were cut, dialogue was changed, and scenes and shots were added mid-production. This is the real reason they had to split OG season 3 and OG season 4 in half, to give themselves more time to amend the story to include Shiro after season 6.