Episode 10 - Firesaur and Big Monkey: Part 2

Now this was the easiest song to choose in all of Season 1. Godzilla by Blue Öyster Cult. Firstly, it’s a brilliant track, by a brilliant band, but secondly, it’s the one acknowledgement of what Firesaur and Big Monkey really are. The joke about Chloé not knowing King Kong or Godzilla/Gojira just seemed funny to me. My editor, Lee, genuinely didn’t realise that Firesaur was Gojira, or Big Monkey was King Kong, until Alya’s comment in this episode.

Firesaur and Big Monkey

Okay, unlike Farmer Fear, this one was completely deliberate. I needed two Akumas big enough to justify Ladybug bringing eight other Miraculous to New York with her, so what better than Gojira and King Kong. Then I get the extra layer of fun because Chloé was the one naming them and, as Ladybug pointed out, can you imagine Chloé watching that sort of film, or even paying attention to the nerd pop culture?

I tried to put hints all the way through that these Akumas weren’t properly under Scarlet Papillon’s control – they don’t go for Ladybug and Chat Noir, they just spend their whole time enacting out their original goal, i.e. proving once and for all which monster is the best. It’s not really Ladybug’s fault that she doesn’t put everything together until much later. At first, she was concentrating like mad on trying to defeat two of the biggest monsters she’d ever faced, then she was just exhausted.

There’s a brief hint about which monster I like most at the end of the fight.

Combat

Combat is one-hundred-per-cent the hardest part of these stories in a written format. In animation, it’s easy, you can watch some spectacular sequences, but there are only so many ways to format “Ladybug punched the Akuma in the face” before it gets boring. That made this episode especially difficult because, after the last episode being heavily character based, with interspersed Queen Bee combat sequences, this one is the opposite. I had to include moments like Bunnyx meeting her Contingency timeline older self for the first time, and Alya’s despair about Chloé’s Akuma naming skills just to break up the fighting.

I hope that I’ve balanced it well enough. It was fun having so many Miraculous working together, switching up between the different Akumas.

Episode Length

These two episodes are about 25% longer than the standard episode, although they look even longer than that because the countdown clock adds extra space between every scene. I know that the regular episodes are longer than most fanfiction chapters would be, but this is because I’ve always set out to write this as though they were chapters in a book. Long chapters, to be fair, but Season 1 Part 1 and Part 2 would work as a pair of novels.

Ladybug and Chat Noir

There are two important scenes in this episode between Ladybug and Chat Noir. One is the brief flirtation on top of the Empire State Building – it shows that, even though Chat Noir has been trying to move on, there is still a bit of affection there. The second is the moment on the plane, where Ladybug finally apologises to Chat Noir for making him feel bad while he was pining for her. That’s where Chat Noir finally puts the torch aside and allows himself to love Ladybug as a friend. Obviously we’ve got a lot more story to get through, so that won’t necessarily be permanent, but it concludes Adrien/Chat Noir’s character arc across Season 1.

What’s a little weird is how we don’t see either of them detransformed for the whole episode. That’s unusual, but it’s just a side effect of the narrative. They don’t detransform until the Maelstrom is over, so there’s almost three episodes in a row without seeing Marinette or Adrien.

Lucky Charms

Lucky Charms are one of the hardest parts of writing Miraculous: Contingency. Making them as convincingly insane as some of the plans that Ladybug comes up with in the show is difficult. For the second draft, I’d taken to using a random item generator, or asking friends to suggest a random noun, and then working backwards from that.

That being said, this is probably the most utterly ridiculous Lucky Charm in all of Miraculous: Contingency. Actually, the second most. Just wait for the Lucky Charm in Dakukani…

Chloé

I know Chloé has had a lot of mentions across season 1, but continuing her redemption arc was a primary driver behind why Miraculous: Contingency became such a big project for me. She spends most of this episode trying to recover – sometimes a two-hour powernap can really revitalise you – but she’s been the one who spent the most time fighting these Akumas, it made some sense that she’d put the clues together first, now that she’s had a chance to process everything.

That scene between Ladybug and Chloé at the end was what I’d hoped for from the show. They might not be good friends, but now they both know that they can rely on each other. From now on, Ladybug might be less cagey about bringing in Queen Bee, and Chloé might be a little more understanding when Ladybug doesn’t instantly ask for her help.

Cliffhanger

Woah, who knew attacking New York wasn’t really Scarlet Papillon’s plan? Who could possibly have seen that coming apart from every reader. We’ll be back in a couple of weeks to find out what happens next