Episode 7 - The Last Play

I picked the song for this episode because I thought it would be amusingly ironic. All By Myself by Celine Dion doesn’t fit Lila’s personality at all, she doesn’t care about being by herself, she only cares that she lost power when Gabriel and Nathalie turned on her. Now here she is for revenge against everyone.

Structuring

I’d always planned for this bit to be mostly told in flashback. In the first draft, I had a moment of King Monkey and the Rogues hunting the Camera-Geckos between absolutely every timeskip and, man, that was exhausting. When I sat down to do the second draft, I created a spreadsheet and worked out an exact schedule of everything that had happened with Lila since she’d been exposed in Chlophidian.

I decided to compress the Camera-Gecko chase/fight-sequence to four parts, one from each of the Miraculous’ point-of-view, and then added in a Bunnyx section at the beginning and the end. Then, around those, I put the Lila sections in groups that made logical sense to me (Fleeing/Returning to Paris/Setting up a new base/Several sets of spying operations/Interview day stalking Gabriel)

Lila’s Point-of-View

I’ve always tried to give Lila priority when I’m writing from her point-of-view. I try to keep her centred as the most important person in the narrative, which is how she sees herself. If she was aware of being a fictional character, she would definitely consider herself the main character. It allowed me to replay certain moments from a much colder, more calculating perspective.

Most of the episode is new material, but some bits are just carried directly over from her cameos in the previous episodes. We get to see the Miraculous from the point-of-view of someone who doesn’t believe in their hype and is actively working against them.

It also allowed me to rekindle the concern for Master Fu, who didn’t feature in the previous episode, save for Chat Noir brushing off Ryuko’s concerns. Stompp and Roaar disappeared straight into the safe before they could see what happened to him, now we know what happened from the outside.

I’m not sure about ending the episode on exactly the same line as the previous episode, but it was the only point that made logical sense. From an ongoing narrative perspective, though, I suspect it could be irritating to get to the end of the episode and the outer story hasn’t progressed at all.

Beginnings of Sequel-bait

Okay, so I’m going to come clean here. I was never intending to have a sequel series to Miraculous: Contingency. I’ll go into more detail on that during the Epilogue commentary, but basically here, after I decided that I would be, I was starting to add in some sequel-bait moments, most specifically with Lila approaching Chris Lahiffe and telling him that Ladybug has made a mistake. She’s putting pieces in place for a really long-term plan.

Camera-Geckos

These were odd – I needed an easy Akuma that would get split the Miraculous up a little, and I settled on turning some camera operators into laser-shooting lizards. I imagined them moving like some monsters that attack in the first big boss set-piece in Final Fantasy VIII: Remastered (I had to look them up, they’re called Iguions).

In the first draft, they just ran out into the city to cause chaos, but as I got to the second draft I realised that I needed to have more purpose there. Given what Papillon has just learned about Adrien, Marinette, and Kagami, sending them after Marinette and Kagami’s parents seemed like the most likely target. This actually played well with the fact that the Rogues were sent after them, because both Korvid and Tangle have been to the Tsurugi mansion, during The Maelstrom, so Tangle realised what was happening. Either of them, or King Monkey, could have realised the one heading for the Dupain-Cheng bakery.

Bunnyx

In the original, she wasn’t here much, she just turned up to get the Rogues back to where they needed to be next. Alix is too important to be reduced to a mere plot-device, so I fleshed out her part a lot. At this point the audience needs to know a bit more about the time-travel stuff happening behind the scenes. This is linked to what Adult Bunnyx told Ladybug back in Grendel, but in a little more detail. I often try to over-explain things, and I think having a basic explanation here is enough. Time-travel isn’t real, so trying to use real-world logic to explain how it works is just going to result in too much technobabble.

Suffice to say, the events of The Last Play have always been fixed, no matter how much Bunnyx wishes otherwise. If she’d tried to change the ending, it would probably have destroyed the entire contingency timeline.