Recap / Miraculous Ladybug S03E22 "Cat Blanc"

My Akuma's here, m'lady... but it's already broken!

You know what they say. The wave of a moth's wing can set off a... Cataclysm!

—Cat Noir unknowingly sums up the episode's plot

Bunnyx returns to get Ladybug's help in averting a terrible future. Can a partner be saved, a reveal averted, and a secret maintained?

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Tropes:

• Abusive Parents: Gabriel crosses a new low when he blackmails Marinette into breaking up with Adrien in order to push her over the Despair Event Horizon and akumatize her, completely uncaring about the potential hurt he's putting Adrien through. Then he goes even lower once he learns that Adrien is Cat Noir, revealing his own identity as Hawk Moth to him and showing him Emilie's comatose body in order to push him over the Despair Event Horizon and akumatize him.
• Anachronic Order: Much of the episode has Bunnyx switching back and forth between watching Ladybug's battle with Cat Blanc and trying to determine how this Bad Future came about, giving the audience brief glimpses of the alternate timeline where Adrien knows Ladybug's secret identity.
• Angst Nuke: Upon being akumatized, Cat Blanc's Conflicting Loyalty between siding with Ladybug to protect the Miraculous and siding with Hawk Moth to bring his mother back causes a massive one that destroys all of Paris and kills everyone in it except for himself.
• Apocalypse How: Class 0 with the potential for Class X-3. Cat Blanc's first Cataclysm destroyed Paris, but as the Sphere of Destruction covered all of France, it's possible the entire country was destroyed too. The "potential for Class X-3" part comes in when he prepares a beyond galaxy-sized Cataclysm, which Bunnyx states could cause "the end of the world".
  • Even worse, his Cataclysms affect much more than what they touch, so when he says everything he means EVERYTHING- so even the Universe would have been gone.
• Bad Future: Bunnyx takes Ladybug to a future where, though a series of events, Cat Noir has been akumatized into Cat Blanc, destroyed Paris, and in the process killed both Ladybug and Hawk Moth.
• Be Careful What You Wish For: Hawk Moth hopes to akumatize his son and use him to kill Ladybug. He succeeds. Unfortunately for him and everybody in Paris, Ladybug is not the only casualty on that day.
• Beware the Nice Ones: Having bet her favorite plush on Marinette giving Adrien her gift, Rose snaps and threatens to cut off girl-time with her if she doesn't go through with it.
• Bittersweet Ending: The greater good is served, but only by Adrien being stuck in his abusive home again, ignorant of his mother still being (semi-)alive and that he could have a fulfilling relationship with the love of his life. Yay?
• Big Damn Kiss: This marks the first time that Marinette and Adrien share a real kiss that is witnessed by Marinette's friends. Unfortunately, this event takes place in the Bad Future.
• Bigger on the Inside: Marinette makes this remark about Bunnyx's Burrow.
• Break His Heart to Save Him: Once he learned that Marinette and Adrien are dating, Gabriel forces her to break up with his son or he will retire him from school. Cue to a heartbroken Marinette having to pretend to Adrien that she doesn't love him anymore. They're devastated, and that's exactly what Gabriel intended.
• Break the Cutie: Adrien suffers A LOT in this episode, from learning the truth about his parents, to suffering from a bad case of Sanity Slippage after accidentally killing everybody in Paris.
• Break Up Demand: When Gabriel learns that Marinette is dating his son, he orders the two to break up. He uses the excuse that their relationship was detrimental to his brand. But actually, he wanted Marinette to be in such a state of despair that he could easily akumatize her.
• Call-Back:
  • Ladybug temporarily dominates Cat Blanc with the same submission move she used against "Prime Queen".
  • When Adrien realizes that Ladybug is Marinette, he thinks back to few previous episodes, in particular to "Glaciator".
• Casting Gag:
  • In the beginning of the episode, Alix ends up winning Rose's favorite unicorn plush Princess Twinkle Peach after she loses her bet, and still keeps it in her adulthood. Alix's voice actress Kira Buckland is a well-known figure in the Brony fandom, and has voiced main character Twilight Sparkle in many fan animations.
  • Some Danganronpa 2: Goodbye Despair fans might realize that Cat Blanc's Nightmare Face gives him some Nagito Komaeda vibe, as Bryce Papenbrook is also a well-known figure in the Danganronpa fandom thanks to his role as Nagito. Coincidentally, they both share a similar hairstyle and pale skin tone.
• Conflicting Loyalty: How Hawk Moth akumatizes Adrien in the Bad Future: he reveals his true identity and goal to use the Miraculouses to bring back Emilie, making Adrien feel so conflicted between his love for Ladybug (guarding the Miraculous) and his love for his mother (siding with Hawk Moth to use the Miraculouses to bring her back) that the ensuing emotional distraught leaves him vulnerable to akumatization.
• Curb-Stomp Battle: Cat Blanc has full access to Plagg's powers as a god of destruction, while Ladybug only had limited access to Tikki's powers as a god of creation. As such, she never really stands a chance in a straight-up fight with him.
• Darker and Edgier: This is considered to be the darkest episode of the series, since Cat Blanc has destroyed Paris, basically killing everyone.
• Deadly Disc: One of Cat Blanc's tricks is to throw Cataclysm discs.
• Delayed Ripple Effect: Even though her future has been erased, Bunnyx disappears one limb at a time, just long enough for Ladybug to figure out the triggering incident and work up a solution.
• Detonation Moon: Cat Blanc's first enhanced Cataclysm fires a beam which cuts the moon in half.
• Didn't Think This Through: Removing all limitations on his son's destruction powers while he is in emotional turmoil probably wasn't Hawk Moth's best plan.
• Discovering Your Own Dead Body: Ladybug discovers her own Cataclysmed body right next to Hawk Moth's. When she touches it, it crumbles to dust.
• The Dog Bites Back: After months of his usual supervillainy, a lifetime of bad parenting and emotionally manipulating his son for his own selfish ends, Hawk Moth's Karma Houdini Warranty runs out big time when Cat Blanc reduces all of Paris into a lifeless flooded wasteland, Hawk Moth having been there at ground zero of the blast.
• Dramatic Irony: Several examples.
  • After defeating Cat Blanc, Ladybug correctly guesses that the point of divergence is Cat Noir knowing her identity because Adrien caught her delivering Marinette's gift and made the obvious connection, but then fails to make the obvious connection herself that this means Adrien is Cat Noir — she doesn't buy Bunnyx's story that Adrien "probably" blabbed it to Nino, who blabbed it to Alya, who wrote it on the Ladyblog, but she figures he probably told someone, and the information spread that way.
  • Cat Blanc's efforts to save his relationship almost destroy the chance his future uncorrupted self has of starting a similar relationship (because Marinette remembers the former and becomes even more emotionally closed-off than she was before). Apparently Destruction is so potent that it can seep between timelines.
• Finger Gun: Cat Blanc fires a low-power Cataclysm from his finger by flicking it. It's not nearly as destructive as the standard but still plenty deadly.
• Foreshadowing: When Ladybug asks Cat Blanc where his Akuma is the first time, she grabs onto his bell…
• For Want Of A Nail: The Bad Future results from Adrien learning that Marinette is Ladybug because she transforms to drop a gift off in his room and is caught leaving. The two start a relationship, which Gabriel tries to ruin so he can akumatize Marinette. Adrien sees the akuma heading for Marinette and transforms in order to save her, revealing his identity to both Marinette and Nathalie, who reports it back to Hawk Moth. Hawk Moth then uses the fact that Emilie is still alive to make Adrien conflicted enough to akumatize, which leads to Paris being destroyed (and Ladybug and Hawk Moth with it) when Cat Blanc can't bring himself to take her Miraculous. Ladybug corrects all this by erasing her name from the gift and then claiming to have delivered it on behalf of his fans in Brazil.
• Get Out!: When Gabriel blackmails Marinette into breaking up with Adrien, Tom tells him in no uncertain terms never to stain his bakery with his presence ever again.
• Godzilla Threshold: Adrien transforms in public to save Marinette from an akuma, because he knows that she's Ladybug and would be nearly impossible to stop if he let it happen.
• Go Mad from the Revelation: The shock of learning that his mother is alive but comatose, and that his father is Hawk Moth, is a huge part of what leaves Adrien vulnerable to being akumatized.
• Gone Horribly Right: Hawk Moth's plan to akumatize his son works and he finally gets rid of Ladybug. But he and everybody in Paris shares the same fate as her.
• Gray Rain of Depression: It's raining when Marinette goes to the Agreste mansion and is forced to to break up with Adrien. Ironically, she has the same umbrella he lent to her at the very moment she fell in love with him in "Origins".
• Hoist by His Own Petard: Hawk Moth akumatizes Cat Noir, only to be killed by his own creation when Cat Blanc's Conflicting Loyalty triggers an Angst Nuke that destroys all of Paris and kills everyone in it, including Hawk Moth.
• Invincible Villain: Cat Blanc has infinite Cataclysm power, meaning he could've just destroyed the whole universe at any point. The only reason he doesn't is because he wants Ladybug's Miraculous in order to wish everything back to normal.
• Kamehame Hadoken: Cat Blanc fires a Mega Cataclysm in this fashion. It snaps a building in half.
• Kick the Dog: Gabriel/Hawk Moth truly is at his lowest in the Bad Future.
  • Gabriel torpedoes Marinette's relationship with Adrien just so he can akumatize her. Later he attacks and akumatizes his own son. Karma bites him when this eventually leads to his death by way of his own akuma in Cat Blanc.
  • The first thing Gabriel realizes after he learns Adrien is Cat Noir is that he can use him as a pawn for his schemes. Not a Heel Realization that he's been fighting his son this whole time, but that he can use him as a tool now.
  • When Ladybug and Cat Noir confront Hawk Moth in his lair, he reveals Emilie and his true identity to his son to break his spirit and starts to beat him up. When Cat Noir is devastated enough, he akumatizes him and orders him to kill the girl he loves.
• Laser-Guided Karma: With a bit of Karma Houdini Warranty on the side. While most of Hawk Moth's akumatizations go unpunished, it is when he decides to be the terrible father that he is and take advantage of his own son by emotionally compromising him does it result in an akumatized villain that kills him, Ladybug and everyone in Paris and presumably destroys the Ladybug Miraculous.
• Letting Her Hair Down: The Bad Future version of Marinette wears her hair down after working up the courage to give Adrien a gift.
• Love Is a Weakness: Unfortunately, with villains like Hawk Moth around, it is. In the Bad Future, he freely exploits Marinette and Adrien's love for each other on two separate occasions in order to cause pain and akumatize them, and nearly succeeds.
• Love-Obstructing Parents: Gabriel tries separating Marinette and his son as an opportunity to akumatize her.
• Mood Whiplash: Hearing the unnamed-pet-hamster gag again is a bit different while Cat Blanc is saying it and doing his Cataclysm functional-equivalence of holding Ladybug at gunpoint.
• Motive Decay: In the Bad Future Hawk Moth crosses every line he once had. Not only does he try to ruin the relationship between his son and Marinette, he even goes as far as beating him up, tormenting him psychologically, akumatizing him and ordering him to kill the girl he loves. And he never shows the slightest regret.
• Nice Job Breaking It, Hero:
  • The Bad Future would not have happened if Marinette hadn't signed her gift and inadvertently given her secret identity away to Adrien.
  • The episode illustrates a fundamental flaw with Fu's "identities" rule: Adrien finds out Ladybug's identity, but doesn't tell Fu about this vulnerability because he likes working with Ladybug and doesn't want her to be replaced. Therefore, a rule that is supposed to prevent information leaks makes those leaks worse when they do happen.
• No Ontological Inertia: Averted. Cat Blanc still remains akumatized after he kills Hawk Moth with his Mega Cataclysm. To be fair, we've seen many a time that the creations of the Butterfly (and Peacock) Miraculous don't expire due to loss of transformation, distance, or even loss of the miraculous itself.
• O.O.C. Is Serious Business: Rose is uncharacteristically assertive in getting Marinette to actually tell Adrien how she feels, which is enough to get Marinette to actually do it, at least until time travel shenanigans force her to sabotage herself for the good of the future. This may be due to losing her favorite unicorn plushie in a bet with Alix.
• Perverted Sniffing: Ladybug becomes distracted by being in Adrien's room, even going so far as to remark on "Adrien's scent" with her face in his pillow.
• Place Beyond Time: Bunnyx's Burrow leads to a realm covered in small portals which she or anyone else can rewind or fast forward to any time or place in history, then travel through to reach those places.
• Poor Communication Kills: Adrien began dating Marinette dishonestly, never telling her that learning her secret was what changed his mind. Not knowing her cover was blown kept her from taking the proper precautions.
• Pragmatic Hero: Bunnyx leaves Ladybug to fend for herself against Cat Blanc, so she can observe from afar and deduce the leading cause of the Bad Future.
• Present Peeking: Used as an analogy — when Ladybug peeks at some of the time windows in Bunnyx's Burrow, Bunnyx sticks a bowl on her head to stop her and asks if she wants to know what she's getting for her next birthday. Ladybug admits she doesn't, which Bunnyx tells her is exactly the point of the bowl.
• Put Them All Out of My Misery: Cat Blanc is so distraught and unwilling to live with himself after all of the destruction he caused that when Ladybug refuses to hand over her Miraculous so that he can combine it with his own and use his wish to put everything back to normal, he opts to charge up a massive Cataclysm that would have wiped out the whole galaxy and everyone in it (including himself and the current Ladybug), rather than go on. Ladybug talks him out of it.
• Pyrrhic Victory: While Hawk Moth's plan works, he doesn't live to see the consequences. Neither does any Parisian (including Emilie).
• Ret-Gone:
  • Cat Blanc and everything that happens in the Bad Future. Bunnyx almost suffers the same fate, since she cannot exist if Alix is killed.
  • The unicorn plushie that Alix won from Rose vanishes (from when she bet that Marinette wouldn't deliver the present). Her Ripple-Effect-Proof Memory tells her she never had to give it back.
• Rule of Symbolism:
  • Word of God has stated that the bell on Cat Noir's collar symbolizes Adrien being a stray kitten who longs for a warm and loving home. In the Bad Future, Hawk Moth akumatizes Cat Noir's bell after revealing that his goal is to bring back Emile, making Adrien feel so conflicted between his love for Ladybug and his love for his mother that the akumatization works. In other words: Hawk Moth corrupts Cat Noir's desire for a warm and loving home.
  • Some fans noted that Cat Blanc's akumatization is a reference to the Marie Antoinette Syndrome, an alleged condition that causes hair to suddenly turn white due to stress, trauma or some fatal illness. This syndrome was named after Queen Marie Antoinette of France, during her arrest at the time of the French Revolution, which made these fans think that Cat Blanc is a symbolism of Adrien/Cat Noir's stress and grief.
  • When Marinette understands she'll have to obey Gabriel's Break Up Demand with Adrien, she lets fall the baking tray she is holding in her hands. This tray was covered of heart-shaped pink macaroons.
• Running Gag: Once again, someone brings up the theoretical hamster Marinette and Adrien could have together, but we don't learn its name.
• Sadistic Choice:
  • Gabriel forces Marinette to break up with Adrien under the pretense of it hurting his brand, threatening to remove Adrien from school if Marinette doesn't do as he asks.
  • He does the same later when he reveals his identity and motivation to restore Emile, forcing Adrien to choose between his love for Ladybug and his love for his mother, and Adrien is so distraught that the akumatization works.
• Sanity Slippage: His Trauma Conga Line and his months-long guilt of destroying Paris and his loved ones certainly traumatized Cat Blanc to madness. It reaches a breaking point when Bunnyx brings the main timeline's Ladybug to fix his, which results in him suffering from nasty mood swings.
• Saying Too Much: Ecstatic that Ladybug has captured Cat Blanc's akuma (and probably still rattled by witnessing the chain of event leading to the Bad Future unfold), Bunnyx almost reveals Cat Noir's true identity to Ladybug. Thankfully, Ladybug is too preoccupied with finding a solution to notice.
  Ladybug: It means that if I use my Miraculous Ladybug to fix everything now...
  Bunnyx: (to Cat Noir) You'll still have this memory of her.
• Secret Secret-Keeper: The Adrien from the Bad Future learns Ladybug's secret identity, and starts a relationship with Marinette without telling her he knows the truth because he doesn't want to risk them both knowing. He only reveals it when he has to transform into Cat Noir in front of her to save her from being akumatized.
• Set Right What Once Went Wrong:
  • This is the mission of Bunnyx. Aware that something has gone wrong in the timeline but not exactly what, she and Ladybug must work out the point of divergence (Ladybug's signing the present to Adrien) and fix it (erase the signature and make up a cover story for why Ladybug delivered the present).
  • Cat Blanc's motivation in the Bad Future is also this, in a twisted way. When Ladybug shows up out of a time portal, he wants her to give him her Miraculous so they can use its Reality Warper abilities to "fix all this", presumably to make it so not only did his akumatization and the destruction he wreaked not happen, but make it so his mother never "disappeared" either.
• Shout-Out:
  • The inside of Bunnyx's Burrow is white, covered in circular portals and, as Ladybug notes, Bigger on the Inside, making it look very similar to the early versions of the TARDIS.
  • A superpowered, traumatized young man unleashes an Angst Nuke that destroys the city around him and blows a hole in the moon. He then spends months living as a shadow of himself until he's reunited with an old friend who manages to bring him back to his old self. Are we talking about Cat Blanc and Ladybug or Vash the Stampede and Nicholas D. Wolfwood?
  • The first manifestation of Bunnyx being slowly erased from the timeline after Alix was killed in the past is her hand becoming transparent.
• So Happy Together: Marinette and Adrien clearly look happy when they are dancing together, and so on. Then Gabriel intervenes and ruins everything.
• Status Quo Is God: Adrien and Marinette learn each other's Secret Identity over the course of the episode, but thanks to time travel, those versions of them never exist. Ladybug never realizes that Cat Noir and Adrien are one and the same when fighting his future counterpart, and she makes sure Adrien will never realize that she is Marinette and possibly spread that secret.
• Suicidal Cosmic Temper Tantrum: After Ladybug refuses to hand over her Miraculous, Cat Blanc becomes so distraught that he creates a Cataclysm big enough to wipe out the whole galaxy (possibly the universe), himself with it, to Put Them All Out of Their Misery. He only relents when Ladybug (seemingly) agrees.
• Summon to Hand: When Hawk Moth's cane is knocked into the water, he draws it back to his hand to strike when Cat Noir is near.
• Superpowered Evil Side: Cat Blanc is essentially this for Cat Noir. He can use as many Cataclysms as he desires, is uninhibited by size or force of said Cataclysm and doesn't time out after using one. Furthermore, it would appear that Cat Blanc is able to tap into the full potential of his kwami, given he was readying a universal Cataclysm (taking his powers to the Logical Extreme). He is also completely unhinged, desiring the Miraculous to repair his relationship with Marinette and fix everything, and willing to kill to do it.
• Taken for Granite: Cat Blanc's Cataclysm leaves Ladybug and Hawk Moth as ashen statues that crumble at a touch, which the past Ladybug discovers.
• Tempting Fate: Tikki warns Marinette against using her powers just to deliver Adrien's gift, but Marinette reassures her that she'll be quick and nobody will ever know. Naturally, she turns out completely wrong — Adrien spots her on the way out and puts together that Ladybug = Marinette, setting the Bad Future in motion.
• Took a Level in Badass: VERY. Cat Blanc's Catacylsm has been upgraded to the power of infinite destruction. He has a wider range of abilities, no limit to their use, and can scale it to any size he desires, from flicking tiny projectiles to creating a galaxy-sized sphere of destruction.
• Twitchy Eye: For a few seconds this is the only thing Nathalie is able to do after witnessing Adrien transforming into Cat Noir.
• Unexpectedly Dark Episode: Despite the light-hearted beginning, the episode gets somber quite fast once Ladybug takes a step into the Bad Future: Marinette and Adrien are heartbroken over a Break Up Demand from Gabriel, then Cat Noir breaks down when he realizes his father is Hawk Moth all along. As a result, he gets akumatized into Cat Blanc before destroying Paris out of emotional distress. It's implied that Cat Blanc killed all people in France, and Ladybug and Hawk Moth's dead bodies are directly shown. Cat Blanc spent months all alone, and when he's reunited with Ladybug, it's a version of her who can't remember their love story. Even after time travel retconned this, it's implied that Marinette and Adrien just can't be happy together, or it would be the apocalypse.
• Unwitting Instigator of Doom:
  • While Hawk Moth did akumatize his son on purpose, the annihilation of everybody in Paris and the flooding of the city was not his goal.
  • Rose, of all people, starts the events that lead to the Bad Future's timeline by snapping at Marinette for coming up with more excuses to not tell Adrien how she feels.
• White-and-Grey Morality: The real villain- Hawk Moth- was destroyed a long time ago, but the power used to do so (although heroically motivated) caused a bigger mess than he ever did. Cleaning up that mess is the focus of the plot.
• Woobie, Destroyer of Worlds: Cat Blanc had been pushed past his sanity limit when he destroyed a large chunk of France, and threatens to destroy the universe. He is by far the most destructive akumatized villain Ladybug has ever faced.

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