The good thing about smaller seasons of Voltron: Legendary Defender is you’re never too far away from a new batch of episodes. The bad thing about that is it’s over so quickly! Believe it or not, Friday sees the release of the sixth season of Voltron, and it’s arriving at a very tumultuous time in the storyline. Yes, Zarkon is out of the picture, and Lotor has won the right to lead the Galra Empire–a good thing for the paladins of Voltron–but this was done under much protest, and the Galra are about to embark on a period of horrible civil war. So, fun stuff.

We chatted with executive producer Joaquim Dos Santos and co-executive producer Lauren Montgomery about this latest outing for our heroes, and why the Galra just can’t get along.“Allura and Lotor are continuing their journey, trying to reunite the Galra Empire, quell the fission there, and then just continue to try to bring peace and set right what was wrong,” explained Montgomery. “Unfortunately it’s not just, ‘You killed Zarkon and everything’s great.’ They’ve got a lot of work to do and they’re just still plugging away at that.”

“Lotor is obviously doing right by the team at the moment, but there’s more there,” cautioned Dos Santos. “There’s more brewing. He’s not a traditional sort of villain archetype, but he’s a very, very deep character and he’s working with our heroes because he believes that’s the right thing to do. But there is a level of depth there that will be explored in the following season.”

But with Galra fighting Galra, you’re going to get a lot of big, similar-looking monolithic ships fighting each other with Voltron in the middle. How will the audience tell who’s who? “It’s very confusing,” said Dos Santos. “What you end up seeing is just a mass of Galra ships blasting away in space and I think that was kinda the point–that it really is a civil war of the same group of people. We didn’t do anything as distinct as what Lotor was visually compared to the rest of the Galra. This is definitely Zarkon’s armada split in half fighting each other.”

That fission between a once mighty and unified empire, even one unified through fear and a lust for power, is something that can happen in any form of government, which the Voltron production team realized mirrored real life rather nicely. “Lotor won and now we’ve got a weird situation in the Galra Empire that’s not that far off from the situation in our country right now,” Montgomery explained, “where you’ve got two very different sides that don’t all approve of who’s in charge.”

“Believe me,” Dos Santos interjected, “we would have not liked it to work out this nicely.”

Get ready for a whole mess of space action and political intrigue on Voltron: Legendary Defender season six, streaming now on Netflix.

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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