Episode 9 - Firesaur and Big Monkey

I wanted a song about King Kong for this episode, but I couldn’t find one I liked. Instead, I went with Left Outside Alone by Anastacia. It’s a very loose connection, but it’s tied to the fact that Chloé and Pollen don’t have any assistance for hours.

New York

I wrote the first draft of this episode long before Miraculous World: New York was released, and it was actually the first episode I plotted out, even if it wasn’t the first one I wrote. When the special came out it put me in an awkward position. Firstly, I really didn’t enjoy the special (although the subsequent ones have been much better) and secondly, the United Heroez really put a mess in my plots.

Luckily, I have a crutch I can lean on. We’ll find out more about the reason much later in the story, but when Bunnyx Prime created the Contingency timeline, a ripple effect reached back in time, changing one little thing in the distant past, which caused the United Heroez never to form. In the Contingency timeline, Magestia is just a cartoon character (honestly, like she seemed to be all the way through Seasons 1-3 of the show)

That being said, I did keep one character from the special – Aeon Hill makes a cameo as Zoé Lee’s first girlfriend.

Zoé

Because I started writing Miraculous: Contingency around Season 3 of the show, and I didn’t watch the new episodes until I’d finished the first draft, Zoé didn’t feature at all. Honestly, when I found out about her, I expected to dislike the character because of what she represented. When I finally watched Season 4 and 5, I actually loved Zoé as a character (although Vesperia is less enjoyable) so I decided to add her in during the second draft.

One rule I had was that Chloé would never refer to her as “my half of a sister”. Chloé in Miraculous: Contingency isn’t finished with her redemption arc, but she’s improved well beyond that point. I wanted to have a reconciliation between the sisters in this episode, and Ladybug’s instruction to behave like a hero at all times really helped me to structure that. When she realises what Audrey is doing, Chloé’s internal monologue actually flips from calling Zoé her half-sister to just her sister. As someone with a half-sibling myself, I never include the half unless I’m being technical.

Zoé being there to support Chloé made this episode so much easier. Originally we never saw that moment of vulnerability in the Empire State Building, but now I can’t imagine the story working without it.

Chloé

This is a big step for Ladybug, trusting Chloé to take Pollen to another country without supervision. It is intended to build on the improving relationship she’s been having since False Flag/Road Rage. Her instruction to be Queen Bee all the time, not just Chloé Bourgeois, comes back to bite Ladybug, but it gave Chloé the strength to fight on her own for so long. Chloé has been trying really hard to prove herself worthy of the Bee Miraculous, and this is the first moment where she can allow herself to believe that she might be.

That moment of vulnerability also shows that she’s noticed Maria/Tangle has got a crush on her. How she’ll cope with that remains to be seen.

The Countdown

That gimmick came from the fact that, in the first draft, I was really lax about a timeframe and locations. Before I settled down to re-write the episode, I worked out the exact timeframe for the whole of the double episode. Having the countdown also adds a layer of tension (at least I hope so) to everything. It’s obvious that this isn’t counting down to something in New York, so we have the worry about what’s really going on here.