Episode 7 - Regretrix

I was really happy to pick This Conversation Is Over by Toehider as the song for this episode. Toehider is a two-person group from Australia whose music and artwork I absolutely adore. More people should know about Toehider. This song is a tirade against someone’s inflexible self-absorption, which turns out at the end to be the singer directing the words at himself. I think you can guess why this song fit my mind for this episode.

Chloé

Okay, in the first draft of Season 3, some of the episodes were in a different order, so the Chloé-Redemption plot wasn’t quite so bludgeoned into you. Unfortunately, I had to work out a believable timeframe which ended up putting all of these episodes in rapid succession. So, Season 3, Part 2 is very heavily about completing Chloé’s redemption arc.

I’ve always tried to acknowledge that Chloé’s behaviour from before Miraculous: Contingency was unacceptable. I tried to get some of the bad behaviour near the beginning, but it was meant to be set after she’d been improving (a little) in the show, then Ladybug started putting more trust in her again. Now we get to see that it’s not just everyone else who remembers those dark days, but Chloé is walking around with them inside her head as well, convinced that there is no way anyone will forgive her, and therefore refusing to forgive herself. But self-hatred can be a crutch, preventing you from growing further. Chloé needed to learn to forgive herself here.

The Birthday

I don’t think Chloé’s birthday has ever been established in the show’s timeline, but in the Contingency timeline, it’s in early December. Even though this is her second birthday since the timelines split, I like the idea that she still had an over-the-top celebration last year between Dakukani and The Reprise, although Maria wasn’t invited to that one (Maria chose not to go, because she wasn’t comfortable meeting all these new people yet), but now she’s settling down. We get to see that she’s got a few close friends now; Sabrina, Zoé, Max, and Maria all being there for a quiet celebration in the morning.

The birthday being the reason for Chloé being so touchy today was added in the second draft of the episode, originally it came out of nowhere, just because she was struggling with her revision. I think I’ve done better here, and I’ve tried to make the idea flow through the whole episode. Chloé’s now eighteen – after Kagami, Nino, Sabrina, & Alix, who are the oldest from the main cast (and ignoring Luka and Juleka, and the three Rogues, who are all around a year older)

Regretrix

I felt bad Akumatising Madam Bustier again, she tries so hard not to be a threat to her students, but it was just too much to resist both Papillon and Mayura. I really liked the difference between the powers the two of them give her – Papillon’s being high-tech and all-seeing, and Mayura’s being a staple of old upper-class culture, a hedge-maze.

I’d originally intended to have a sub-plot in the episode which would be contrasting Lila with Chloé, showing how Chloé is choosing to accept her flaws and learn from them, Lila considers nothing she does to be a ‘flaw’. It never really worked, in the first or second draft because, once you’ve got past the one appearance Lila does make, there’s only so many ways you can watch someone say “so what?” without it getting boring. I decided to have that one appearance as a nod, and as a final confirmation that she was definitely the one who robbed the banks that Thérèse Charpadeur got arrested for in Rubber Robber.

The element of punishment that Papillon was dictating Regretrix to direct towards Chloé was always the plan, but it really gets across the point I made back at the beginning of the Season – Gabriel is losing the last vestiges of his morality over this season. Now he’s choosing to believe that an 18-year-old girl who simply refused to be his puppet is deserving of this completely disproportionate punishment.

Chloé and her Friends

Here you can see all the threads I’ve been adding over the past episodes: Max’s friendship, Sabrina’s more comfortable friendship, Kagami’s almost-mentorship, and Zoé’s actual sisterly relationship. They were all there to support her when this punishment got bad. Chat Noir gets incredibly defensive of Chloé as well and even Ladybug and Alya are starting to see what this means. It turned out that this caused exactly the opposite of what Papillon had planned. Instead of showing everyone how awful Chloé is, it showed them all how much she’s improved.

The ending, with everyone going to an impromptu, low-key birthday party in Chloé suite was, obviously, brand-new, but I adore the scene.

In case anyone doesn’t get the reference Max makes to a “video game dragon”, it’s Paarthurnax from The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim. I was only reminded of the quote because of the music video to another Toehider song, How Much For That Dragon’s Tooth. If nothing else comes from Miraculous: Contingency, maybe I’ll have got a couple more people to listen to them.

Nathalie and Gabriel

With both of them struggling with their sanity at this point in the story, this moment was more or less inevitable. It’s a doomed, unhealthy relationship – if they’d tried it a long time ago, and agreed to let Émilie die as she wished to, then maybe it would have been healthier and Adrien would have had the parents he deserved, but they didn’t. I will say that the text is correct: this offer was solely from Nathalie’s true personality, without any prompting from the parasites