#daaaaaaaaaaaang

In the first episode we have this flashback of Allura telling Alfor to activate Voltron to fight Zarkon, and Alfor refusing and instead freezing her in the cyropod. Later, we have Alfor’s AI confirming that she was right and that he should have trusted Voltron’s strength instead of giving up and sending the paladins away.

So my question is: how the heck were they even going to form Voltron? How was it even an option, when they’re literally fighting against the Black Paladin aka Zarkon? We can infer that, at this point, the Black Lion had already been interred inside the castle for its protection, and you ain’t gonna form Voltron without a chest/head.

So it stands to reason that, even with its Paladin still alive, the Black had made it known to the Alteans that there was another person it was willing to let pilot it. Someone who had natural leadership capabilities. Someone strong enough to make hard choices for the betterment of the team. Someone who knew the other Paladins well enough that forming Voltron wouldn’t be a problem.

Allura.

The options were for Allura to pilot the Black, or for Alfor to send all the Lions into hiding.

And he couldn’t do it. He couldn’t risk his daughter like that, so he froze her and cost the universe ten thousand years of tyranny.

When she wakes up her father is dead and her planet is gone and there are new paladins. She’s the Altean princess, she’s bonded with the Lions, she can sense them. Probably one of the first things she feels coming out of that pod is the Black, telling her that its found a new pilot and it’s not her.

She’s so tense those first few episodes, she’s so hard on them, and it’s because it was almost hers. She knows the Lions, she knew their paladins, she came THIS CLOSE to being in Shiro’s shoes ten thousand years ago, and maybe she would have been able to prevent all of this suffering. Instead these random earth babies have taken the places of her friends. That’s gotta be a bitter pill to swallow.

"Whether I re-entered that unhappy country or not was of little consequence to me. I would like to have told them that the sooner I was rid of that hate-beleaguered atmosphere the better, that I was fed up of America's insults and moral pomposity"