Episode 1 - The Unstoppable Monsieur Pichon:

The title is an homage to how Marvel names its characters sometimes (Unbeatable Squirrel-Girl, Amazing Spider-Man, Invincible Iron Man) and, once I’d decided on “Unstoppable” Don’t Stop Me Now by Queen became the only song that fit.

Monsieur Pichon

Well, he had to show up somewhere, didn’t he? Mr. Pigeon in English was always one of the sillier villains in Miraculous, but I have to admit, I have a bit of a soft spot for him, because he is utterly ridiculous.

While I was writing the first draft and not watching the show, it released a self-parody episode with Mr. Pigeon 72. Just another example of how I had written some things and had unexpected synergy with the official writers. As I mentioned in last season’s commentaries, in the first draft, after I made a big deal out of Mayura’s return, I basically did nothing with her until this episode. I fixed that up in the second draft of Season 3.

Star-Pigeon

If you know, you know, but just in case, Star-Pigeon is an extremely unsubtle reference to Starscream from the original Transformers. Technically that cartoon was a bit before my time, but I used to watch it when I was a kid. I imagine Star-Pigeon as basically looking like the original design of Starscream, but made to look like a pigeon instead of an F-16. Or maybe an F-16 made to look like a pigeon.

Scarabella

Fairly obviously, this wasn’t in the first draft. As I’ve said multiple times, I didn’t watch season 4 and 5 while writing the first draft of Miraculous: Contingency, so I didn’t know about Scarabella yet. In the original draft, Marinette, Adrien, and Kagami were going to see a play in Paris and, when she got the message, Marinette got frustrated and just sent a message to Alya asking her to cover until the play was over. It was out-of-character and I never really liked it. So, when we got the idea of Scarabella, and I made the timeline for Miraculous: Contingency, which showed me it was nearly KagAdriNette’s second anniversary, I decided that, instead, it would be Marinette experimenting with letting a teammate stand in for her.

The way I changed the point of view when Marinette and Alya handed over the Earrings to each other was partially based on that old show, Scrubs , where it swapped the narrator’s voice from being the main character’s to one of the other characters in special episodes when something passed between them.

The Meeting

This is the beginning of the end for Miraculous: Contingency. I didn’t like how Fu handed off the Guardianship to Marinette in the show – the man had already press-ganged her and Adrien into becoming child-soldiers at 14, and made her feel like she was the only person who could possibly do this, so adding the responsibility of being the Guardian of the Miracle Chest as well was just cruel.

That’s why I had Kagami so vocally oppose the plan, as well as the personal reasons that she has for not wanting her girlfriend to risk forgetting about her. Their solution isn’t perfect, but it’s the one they’re working with for now. One of the big questions through season 4 of Miraculous: Contingency is who will eventually assume that mantle, although I don’t really return to it often enough.

The second part of the meeting, where Kagami brings up her thoughts for how to finally end everything is the main over-arching theme for the whole season. One thing that is important with plans in a narrative is don’t reveal too much up-front. If I described what her plan was here, then proceeded to just carry out that plan, then it would just be repetition. What normally happens is, if the characters reveal their plan during the planning stages, something goes wrong. So, in this instance, we as the audience don’t hear the plan now. If you’re reading this commentary, I hope you’ve read the rest of the season, so you know how well the plan goes in the end.

Lila Remembers

In the first draft of season 4, I failed to adequately show the threat imposed by Lila still being out there. I didn’t think of having her show up in disguise in other episodes until I wrote the first draft of Meduma so I didn’t have all the cameos in place. Before I started writing the second draft properly, I made notes for where I wanted Lila to appear, but pointedly I didn’t want to openly state that it’s Lila yet. If you’ve read The Last Play: The Lost Girl then you know that the red-headed Texan tourist was Lila in disguise, intending to spy on Fu’s shop.

The letter from Brazil contained a dead Black Witch Moth, which is one of the largest moths in the world. It felt like a good threat to have a dead moth and a cut up peacock feather. In the original draft, and even in the second draft before I went back to tidy it up, I implied that the letter had somehow got into Gabriel’s office by itself, suggesting that Chamela snuck in to deliver it. That didn’t really make sense, given she posted it to Brazil and back to make it look like she’d left, so I tidied that before publishing.