Everyone who gets access to time travel becomes immediately completely incompetent which is maybe a sign of why you generally shouldn’t introduce time travel powers into a setting. It is far too much of a escalation in terms of power creep.

The actual fifth series finale might have resonated emotionally a bit more if they had had these scenes with Nathalie in them after Monarch was defeated instead of a random press conference with the mayor but also they really did not need to recap the series finale at the start when they were literally going to show it again via time travel in the middle of this.

The fifth series was off to such a good start. Monarch, high on his victory in the previous finale, immediately returns to sucking shit and gets his ass kicked and loses the most powerful miraculous. And for a world-famous fashion designer who is this camp he is costuming is so, so bad. I love him. Other highlights this season were the episode that retcons that he was using the other time manipulation miraculous the entire time in previous episodes but is so bad at being a supervillain that all he manages to do is trap himself in a hyperbolic home for infinite losers and rapidly progress the crumbling of his body and the fact that his biggest, most evil villain speech in the show has nothing to do with being Monarch but gleefully spelling out the ills of the fashion industry to crush a girl’s dream of being a fashion designer.

But then the show does so much wheelspinning while teasing at an overarching plot that barely progresses before a very disappointing finale that feels like it is making everything up on the spot. Lila being this parallel mastermind (with a completely Flanderised Chloé being nothing but her patsy) which leads to her doing basically nothing but walking at the last minute, taking the butterfly miraculous and then seemingly getting it taken off her again in the stinger. Félix is a sentimonster I think? Or Adrien is? It is kind of an interesting idea but the exposition dump was so tedious to sit through that I zoned out a bit through it. And it has little consequence to the actual finale because Adrien gets completely sidelined and Félix just leaves of his own accord.

Adrien’s increasing willingness to try to kill people seems like it might have been going somewhere, especially with their powers getting unlocked towards the end, but it also doesn’t pay off and nothing is made of Marinette herself trying to cataclysm Gabriel as well. I did enjoy how the lucky charm immediately also becomes more violent and drops a piano on him and gives Marinette other weapons to hit him with. But then after all that, with the protagonist fully just trying to kill this guy now, we suddenly get the obligatory Gabriel redemption where he… wishes himself and his wife into heaven I guess? It’s dull. And then a press conference about making Paris solarpunk? So strange.

And then not only do they stills somehow not figure out each other’s secret identities but Marinette doesn’t even tell Adrien the truth about his dad at all so we can keep wheelspinning on this even longer.

I will keep watching but it definitely won’t be the same without failgirl in chief as the main villain any more.

They looked a lot better when they were evil.

It is kind of fascinating to take the premise of an existing show and make a Disney movie version of it. The plot beats, the pacing, the songs; it all feels so much like an imitation of Disney. They even have the standard issue green fire and fog for the villain song. Even visually it’s taking the basic designs from the show but animating them like Pixar. I can’t say I love the result—I like the show for how messy it is—but it was interesting to watch and especially to hear the same voice cast doing different takes on the same characters. Chloe especially feels very different at first to the point where I thought it might have been a different actor, sounding much more like a normal person up until she gets angry and then starts sounding like her television self.

This show has really wormed its way into me to the point where I’m second guessing whether I should have rated the previous series higher and I was too embarrassed to. But also it has vastly improved over time. It has gotten more complex since the purely monster of the week structure of the first series as well as funnier, more self-aware and much more queer, though the queerness remains strictly subtextual.

I love Gabriel Agreste and Chloe Bourgeois, they are such messy bitches. Chloe has ridiculous (utterly ridiculous) shōnen anime protagonist levels of willpower to break through any barrier and uses it only for drama. She was the first person to shrug off akumatisation and now that she has relapsed into a brat she openly invites Shadow Moth to give her superpowers when she wants them and then just breaks her own akumatised totem when she feels like it. It honestly reminded me of Vegeta and Babidi of all things. She is the one using Shadow Moth now.

The shows disposition to tease shipping and forward plot progress and and then undermine itself is still annoying, though. The forth series wastes no time in immediately breaking up the protagonists from Kagami and Luka and we get another episode dedicated to showing an alternative timeline to Marinette and Adrien learning their secret identities which immediately results in him getting evilised and the world ending.

Any rules or limits on how powers work seem to be completely thrown out the window at this point, too. The transformation time limits stopped mattering to the plot a long time ago but now we just have, playground-like, Ladybug making up the power to make anti-evil shields and Shadow Moth saying that well I can make super-hyper-mega butterflies that can break shields and also that multiple people can be akumatised at once and people don’t actually have to be near the thing that gets akumatised at all (one wonders why he ever does it objects people are carrying at all), and, with the power of the peacock miraculous, he can just make up a guy to get mad at something so he can evilise them! But he is also so, so endearingly bad at being a villain that his most successful plan does not exploit any of this but just relies trying his luck and hoping Ladybug makes a really bad mistake, which she dutifully does. Good for him. He needed a win.

Also Simpleman was so fucking funny.

Why is the dean from Community one of the superheroes?

The show actually having a plot in the second series was a novelty but it quickly settles into a frustrating rhythm of teasing some actual forward development and then pulling immediately back. No one is ever allowed to really learn any new information as the overlapping secret identities is too much part of the central premise. If they ever do it will literally cause the apocalypse. Mostly all we ever really get is the occasional new toy¹ as distraction.

Still, it’s fun. I really enjoy how much of an absolute freak Gabriel Agreste is and I don’t think a rich, famous fashion designer intentionally engineering situations to piss off a bunch of teenagers and their parents so he can evilise them will ever stop being funny to me. Also Kagami autistic as hell.

Fei has a red streak in her hair which basically makes her Shadow the Hedghog.

It’s so strange to come into the second series and immediately there is actually a plot! Characters learn new information! It is still mostly monsters of the week and it repeatedly pulls back when it looks like the story might advance in more significant ways, but it is less of a show for babies. I am getting into it the more I watch it. Partially is just layering more injokes with my partner as we watch it. Every time there’s a new hero transformation we shout “new toy!” at the television, we fistbump whenever the characters do. I also laugh every time at the face Hawk Moth makes during the transformation sequence he occasionally gets now.

Sometimes you commit to a bit too much and you end up watching two dozen episodes of a show for babies with your partner. It has mostly been enjoyable and I am told that this does get more complex and actually has plot development as it goes on, and there was a whiff of that towards the end of the first series, but out of twenty-six episodes only maybe five of them had anything going on more than the basic villain-of-the-week plot.