Miraculous Watch-through 1: "Stormy Weather"

Among the first of approximately eight billion variations on this theme

Okay, here goes. As most Miraculous Ladybug fans will know, there are any number of possible episode orders for Season One depending on where you watch, but I will be sticking with that used on the British S1 DVD. For many of these posts, I'll be reviewing more than one episode each time, but for this first instalment I'll keep things nice and simple. As such, "Stormy Weather" will be the only episode discussed here. Bear in mind that these posts are not intended as complete reviews, just things I found interesting enough to pick out.

Spoiler policy for watch-through posts: I am assuming that everyone reading these is up to date for the first two seasons, including the Christmas special. That means there will sometimes be unmarked spoilers for those episodes. For example, I'll assume all readers know Hawk Moth's identity. However, I will not refer to spoilers about later episodes, whether leaked, rumoured or official. I deliberately don't follow Thomas Astruc's Twitter, for example. Please respect other fans by avoiding mention of those too if you leave any comments. Thank you. :)

So, on to "Stormy Weather" itself. This is a solid enough start to the series, with most of the important elements in place, with Alya getting things done and the ship teasing off to a roaring start. There is a little Early Instalment Weirdness, for example Hawk Moth's failure to say his "evilise her!" line and Cat Noir addressing his partner as "M'Ladybug", plus CN having very useful night vision we've never seen since. His intonation of "Cataclysm!" is a bit strange, too. I'm not sure Ladybug's yo-yo would have deflected a falling bus later on, either.

Straight away in episode one, we see that the peril to good characters is real

The first voice we hear, and indeed the first on-screen regular, turns out to be Alec, and (barring a blurry glimpse through a window) we also see Manon before Marinette appears. We're told later on that it's the "first day of summer", but we can't take that too seriously as S1 chronology is a bit weird. Still, we get our first mention of Marinette's infamous hamster dreams, so it's not all bad. Stormy Weather herself is a reasonable villain, and one who really keeps our heroes on their toes. She has a point, too: losing the TV final 82-18 and being teased about it by Alec isn't very nice.

All in all, then, Miraculous is off to a decent start. We haven't yet seen the characters at school, and we don't know much at all yet about the wider picture, at least not unless we're clever and work things out from the opening credits. These do, after all, feature Tikki, Plagg, Wayzz, Nooroo and the Miracle Box. Nor do we have a clue about Hawk Moth's identity, still less his motivation. The show is what it largely remains for some time: a villain-of-the-week action adventure. A good one, though.

Quote: Marinette: "Nah, forget the cat." – in her dream about a future with Adrien. It's surely no coincidence she has ambivalent feelings about cats!

Next time, I'll be rewatching "The Bubbler" and "The Pharaoh".