#idk what my point is except that i think tl s3 made the show completely lose any interest in watching or thinking about it again | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

thatgirlonstage · 6 years

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Hi, idk if you've watched season 7 yet, but as the originator of the "Sam Holt and the Galaxy Garrison are Evil" theory, how do you feel about the way they were portrayed?

[Sam Holt Is Evil theory]

Oh, I’ve seen Season 7 all right. I watched it the day it dropped. It’s WHY I’ve been on a Voltron hiatus.

Fair warning: this post is long, and I’m wearing an analysis hat, not my “here to have a good time” hat. It’s not wank per se, but, uh. I haven’t thought the writing in Voltron is the BEST lately, so it’s not really favorable analysis.

Let me be clear that I knew full well in S5 that the Sam Holt Is Evil theory was dead, I wasn’t still waiting for a reveal or anything like that. I was not judging the S7 Garrison against my theory. That said… I still like my idea better.

The strength of the evil!Sam theory always rested on two things: 1. the fact that Sam was, without explanation, getting deliberately less attention than Matt in Pidge’s quest to find her family, and 2. the way it would lead into the narratively inevitable attack on Earth. For the first point, I think we can now conclude that the creators knew they wanted to use him as a bargaining chip against Pidge/the Voltron team, so they simply shunted him aside until he became useful to the plot. In the end, it was just lazy writing. The second point is a little bit harder to discuss directly, because I came up with the possibility of evil!Sam way back before S3 had even aired. Obviously, a lot has changed - suddenly pulling a “the Garrison was evil the whole time!!!!” in S7 would have been major whiplash and totally unjustified. But the reason I say I still like my idea better, is because we could have built towards the conflict on Earth more smoothly and with more rising tension if we used Sam as a nexus. We could even have still sprung “Earth is in danger” as a surprise on the Paladins, using Sam/the Galra/the Garrison’s perspective to inform the audience of what’s happening while keeping the Paladins oblivious and us biting our fingernails in anxiety as a result (unless the goal was that the attack on Earth would be a surprise for the audience too, but… anyone with a lick of sense for foreshadowing could see an eventual “Earth is in danger” plot coming from S1 and certainly from the end of S6, plus they aired Sam’s distress message in the trailer, so they shot themselves in the foot pretty thoroughly from the word go if that was the idea).

Except for Sam, we didn’t go into S7 with any investment in any of the Garrison characters, so suddenly cutting to two whole episodes with ONLY them made the whole thing drag. Plus, we knew where it ended up, so those episodes just felt like the story ground to a halt for forty minutes. Sam didn’t really develop or change at all, and except for Veronica all of the new characters were pretty much just 2D cutouts. They were given a trait - the angry one, the quiet one, the socially awkward mathy (let’s be frank: coded autistic) one - and left at that. I didn’t care if any of the Garrison team died, because I don’t know shit about them. Actually, the only character that I felt did get some complexity (again, aside from Veronica) was Iverson. I liked him in this season, I liked that they showed he may be a gruff army general but he’s willing to recognize when he’s mistaken or in over his head, that he’s not a NICE person but he might be a GOOD person (I took his character in a similar-ish direction in my fic Written in Sand, so maybe I’m biased, but that feels like the right characterization for him to me). If we’d started to build a connection back to the Garrison earlier in the show, or even, discard my theory, if we’d even just seeded in some of the flashbacks earlier and shown more of the Garrison team, I think I would’ve cared a lot more about them.

Veronica is a well-written character, I like her. The difference is, I think, she’s clearly a character the writers came up with and the Garrison became the vehicle for including her in the story, rather than writing out a plot line and rolling out stock characters to populate it, which is what the rest of the Garrison team feels like.

Okay, now the elephant in the room: Admiral Sanda. She’s the show’s conclusion to the tropes I was reading when I came up with the evil!Sam theory. There was always going to be danger from within the Garrison; from the perspective of raising stakes, it just makes sense. And, I’m going to be honest: I detest Admiral Sanda. I detest that they tried to give her a last minute redemption, I detest that she was the trigger for the climax of the season. She’s very much another cardboard cutout - the hardline army general who thinks they know best and makes the wrong call so the day has to be saved by the plucky youngsters who still believe in hope. Nothing about what she did was surprising - I’m pretty sure when they “revealed” she’d sold them out to Sendak I just yelled at the screen “NO FUCKING DUH” because they’d been telegraphing that since her introduction. It’s not a twist so much as it is the writers using her to increase the danger against the Paladins, when it feels like Sendak should have been enough of a threat on his own. And her redemption moment is so hollow and pointless because… well, fuck, as much as I hate the guy, at least with Snape you’ve got SOME kind of investment in him by the time he dies just because you’ve gotten to know him. Even if that investment is vehemently hating his guts. I don’t know a blessed THING about Admiral Sanda except that she’s a hardline army general who thinks she knows best and made the wrong call. Does she have friends? Family? How old is she? What was her childhood like? Crucially, WHY does she think that making a deal with Sendak is the only way to protect the Earth, when to all appearances literally everyone else has decided to trust Sam and Voltron?

We the audience come to the show with a certain meta understanding of how these kinds of stories will go. We know Voltron will win. We don’t know exactly how, or how long it will take, or what sacrifices might be made, but darkness never falls over the land completely. Sauron was never going to win, Voldemort was always going to be defeated, summer was always going to return to Narnia. So characters like Admiral Sandra have to be dealt with carefully, because we the audience know they will be proven wrong. We may be able to distantly understand their position, but if we’re expected to empathize with her or find her decision difficult, we need MORE than a superficial “what if Voltron can’t win?” as justification for her actions, because we know the answer is “but they will.” As it stands, she just looks like an idiot for believing Sendak. The reason why I liked Sam as the traitor is because it brings personal stakes into it - even if we must make him hold the idiot ball to make it work (and I would argue we wouldn’t have had to, if we’d taken more time to explore WHY the Garrison might side with the Galra), it’s still affecting. Imagine Sanda’s death scene, and replace her with Sam. Suddenly it’s fucking gut-wrenching, right? (Not to mention making Sam a much more complicated character than he ended up being. Sam is... fine, he’s just kind of bland).

I guess tl;dr I found the Garrison sections dragged because they didn’t take the time to properly introduce and build up to the characters that suddenly took center stage for a significant chunk of the season, while the whole idea behind the Sam Holt Is Evil theory was that narratively, it could’ve brilliantly brought Earth and the Garrison back into the story as important forces and build up to the ultimate confrontation on the Paladins’ home planet without actually having to go back to Earth, at least not immediately. I liked Veronica because she felt like a full realized character, but no one else did (except Iverson a little bit).

As a sidebar, evil!Sam/Garrison was built on the assumption that the Garrison already knew something about the Galra at the very least by the time that Shiro turned up back on Earth - and I think the reveal that they really were just ignorant the whole time leaves plot holes, but if I start to go down the “let’s talk about the plot holes in Voltron” path we’re going to be here for a week.

#answers #voltron #voltron meta #sam holt is evil theory #sam holt #also this isn't relevant to your question but #don't you love how we went from pidge's main motivation being finding matt #to matt just fully disappearing for almost two entire seasons #and from sam being shunted aside for no goddamn reason #to sam just randomly becoming the protagonist with no hook #i know write good so characters much development wow #okay that bit was wank #yellowmagicalgirl

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