Episode 8 - The Last Play

Last Look at Eden by Europe – hey, it’s a song by Europe that isn’t The Final Countdown. I picked this for what the title implies. This is the Miraculous’ last look at a world that they will never get back – they have gone public with their identities, they’ve identified the villain, and life will not be the same again.

Fifteen Minutes

I’ve sat down to think about it several times and I honestly think that the entirety of The Last Play: Who Holds The Cards and The Last Play: You Or Me? take place over a maximum of fifteen minutes real time. Considering I’ve always tried to write this story as though it was made of actual episodes of the show, that would be more than forty minutes (actually probably closer to fifty or fifty-five, given the extended runtime of You Or Me?) telling a story that takes place in less than half that time.

Sixteen Combatants

The main reason for that time-dilation effect is simply because there are so many moving parts in these episodes. There are sixteen combatants fighting on three different sides, and that’s before the Super-Sentis turned up. I’ve got several different combats happening over the stadium – with a lot of the team fighting Mayura Reál, Chat Noir and a revolving door of allies fighting Papillon, Ladybug & Ryuko, then Heikegana & Korvid fighting Chamela.

As I’ve done in previous ensemble episodes, I’ve tried to include at least one point-of-view section from all of the Miraculous present, so we get all the different perspectives. I didn’t use many of the heroes’ powers in this sequence, because it never felt completely necessary. We’ve seen Venom and a few Mirages. I probably could have thrown in a Lucky Charm or two – it would have been nice to borrow the moment from the show’s season 5 finale and drop a piano on Papillon.

One thing that was especially tricky was managing the Rogues. The three of them went into this fight with an ulterior motive; to rescue the Other Kwamis. For most of this episode, Korvid and Heikegana are working on trying to rescue one of them, but Tangle is getting more and more frustrated as Ladybug asks her to do other things. In the original draft, Tangle jumped up onto the top of the screen wall about half a second before Chat Noir launched Papillon through it and knocked it over. That was pretty poor storytelling, and I wanted to show how the Rogues are just as much a part of the team as the Core and Extended Miraculous groups, so I adjusted the timings a little, and gave Tangle a moment to guide her allies.

Still, she’s making mistakes at the end of the episode, when she tries to take on Mayura Reál by herself. All the frustrations got the better of her there.

Akumatise/Chat Rouge

This sequence was brand-new for the second draft – I literally only thought of it as I was typing the section just before it and had to go talk it through with my cousin. It made sense to me, normally Papillon uses a butterfly as a Transmission vector, but we’ve all seen the glow from his power as he does that. What would happen if he put that directly into a person.

This is yet another sign of how far gone Gabriel is now, when he sees nothing wrong with turning his son into a weapon of mass destruction. Obviously I didn’t go through with the Akumatisation, but the implication felt scary enough. I partially based the concept on Chat Blanc but, while Chat Blanc was created from Adrien/Chat Noir’s sense of betrayal and sadness, here Papillon was pushing on Adrien/Chat Noir’s anger. As Chat Noir observes to himself, that was insane as a tactic because how dangerous would an Akumatised Chat Rouge be with supercharged Cataclysms when driven by fury.

I might consider coming back to this one day, although I probably won’t go the full Chat Rouge route – we know from Chat Blanc that that would be an extinction level event.

Caline and the Gorilla

Back when I was writing the first draft of Season 4, I deliberately hadn’t decided who would become the Guardian of the Miracle Chests as Master Fu’s successor. Obviously I was leaving breadcrumbs to suggest it might be one of these two, but it wasn’t until I started writing The Last Play: All These Lies We’ve Told that I decided on it.

This was what I was trying to build tension for with Master Fu over the past three episodes, and now we have a moment breaking up the story following these two as they manage to free Fu and recover the Miracle Chest. Again, this was originally split up into more pieces and scatter through the episode a little haphazardly, but I consolidated it to make the narrative flow more cleanly. It also creates a pseudo-advert break which I think worked beautifully when it split apart the two halves of the Chat Rouge sequence.

Super-Sentis

So this is the big twist – I’ve had to work out so many rules of how this whole deal works – in the first draft, I’d only come up with names and animals for the rest of the Other Kwamis, and their powers were still vague. As part of the big structural rewrite, when I worked out the full timeframe of Miraculous: Contingency I also sat down and worked out the remaining five powers. That meant that when I got to the second draft of The Last Play I could adjust how the Super-Sentis fought.

In this episode we got to see

• Khaan, the Elk Kwami of Integration – she’s one of the two leaders of the Other Miracle Chest, her weapon is a pair of Sai (Raphael’s daggers from the Ninja Turtles), and her power is to act as a vector for other powers – as we see next episode when she redirects Queen Bee’s Venom

• Millsy, the Sloth Kwami of Expression – he has a lot in common with Orikko, his weapon is a Paint Palette which a Miraculous could use as a shield, and his power is to create a bubble which slows down everything inside it. Slothheart doesn’t use Millsy’s power in this one, because it would slow him down as well.