Hey Leo! What do you think about Keith's "I can't explain it but I think we should attack the cruiser" in the last episode? I thought he had just deducted it but based on this line I guess it was another one of his gut feelings, sooo intuitive Keith strikes again? People say he's quintessence-sensitive, so do u think he somehow sensed Haggar's energy and then put 2 and 2 together and figured it out, or what happened there?
Okay so, I have been saying Keith’s quintessence sensitive from day one. It’s where I got the whole “druid Keith” idea from, and now that we know druids are more so a creation of the rift, well–I think Keith’s instinctive knowledge of certain things is inexorably linked to that other reality. And its magic. When he contacts Matt, he says, “I can’t explain why, but I know we need to attack that fleet.”
You know what else that sounds like? When he mentions he can sense the Blue Lion and says, “I can’t explain it, really. I was lost and kind of drawn out to this place. It’s like something…some energy, was telling me to search.”
Keith just inherently knows certain things, has a sixth sense for it. This goes well beyond good intuition. He was able to feel the Blue Lion’s presence a whole year before her own pilot–sensing her the same way Haggar did.
He was the only one able to connect with his lion over a vast distance–the only other paladin able to do this is Zarkon, and even then, only with the aid of a druid. In season 1 when that druid attacks him, Keith doesn’t get those same fatal, glowing wounds that Shiro and Thace and Antok do. He’s not as badly affected, and he’s able to heal himself by manipulating raw quintessence–something we’ve only seen from other druids.
The common denominator here? Haggar didn’t start off as a “witch,” she was a regular alchemist. A scientist. She acquired those abilities though exposure to the rift and all its pure quintessence. And the Lions and this entity of Voltron are from this other reality as well. So honestly? I think Keith was able to sense Haggar’s power and its malicious intent because he has some sort of connection to the rift.
I’d also like to point out that Keith seems naturally drawn to high concentrations of quintessence. Whether its the Lions or containers of raw quintessence, Keith won’t pass up the chance to investigate it. Keith is pretty much our introduction to quintessence and how the druids work with it. He sees the druids and the quintessence, wonders what’s going on, and decides to follow it. Later, he tells Coran he’s going to grab some of it. And later, when he accidentally crashes into a tank of it, he manages to heal himself. They could have used any character to narratively link to quintessence this way, but they chose Keith.
And then later, Keith starts taking jobs with the BOM tracking these huge supply lines of incredibly rare, pure quintessence. Keith is incredibly concerned about this, and keeps trying to convince Kuron that following up on those leads needs to take priority. Yes, he’s chasing them in hopes they’ll lead him straight to Lotor. But again, he’s following after trails of quintessence again. When discussing the mission, he also says “We have–” then stops, and corrects himself–“I have to take it. I need to be on that mission.” This is very much a personal matter. Even if he can’t fully articulate why, he feels like he just has to be there. And narratively speaking, I think it would be quite interesting if both our half-galra ended up being tied to the rift from opposite ends of it–quite literally.
So yeah. Considering how Keith seems to be drawn like a magnet to major powerhouses of quintessence, the thing with Haggar’s ship doesn’t surprise me
