‘Voltron’: How Does the Show Balance So Many Characters?

Voltron: Legendary Defender is a series with an expansive cast. There are six Paladins of Voltron at the heart of the show, and some could argue that not all of them have had their time to shine. And then there are the numerous supporting characters, villains, and others all competing for a pretty limited amount of screen time.

Some spoilers for Voltron: Legendary Defender Season Five below.

So how does the series manage a show crowded with so many great characters? Voltron: Legendary Defender showrunners Joaquim Dos Santos and Lauren Montgomery tell ComicBook.com that it’s all about maintaining balance.

“You have to take it into consideration, but a lot of times you go with where the story in a way pulls us,” Dos Santos explains. “We go with what the story needs.”

Dos Santos and Montgomery explained that the last thing they want to do is force a character or their important backstory into a “B story” where it either “doesn’t fit or isn’t needed.”

“Yeah, it’s just sometimes the things line up really well,” Montgomery says. “For instance, we didn’t know that from day one that we’re going to bring Pidge’s dad back in the story at this moment. We knew she’d find him. We didn’t know exactly how, we didn’t know, would he be alive, would he be dead? We were going to cross that bridge when we came to it.”

“It ended up working its way into the story perfectly here, where you’ve got two sides with two chips to play, and so it’s a little bit of give and take,” she says. “It’s kind of that way with the personal moments too, is this character’s arc lining up with the story, or is it out of left field? If it ends up clashing and not feeling right, then we tend to not go through with it because things just need to work together.”

Dos Santos adds that “[e]ventually the story starts to evolve on its own, so you are kind of along for the ride.”

Voltron: Legendary Defender Season Five is now streaming on Netflix. Voltron: Legendary Defender Season Six will premiere on Netflix in June.