Code Lyoko S1E4 "Log Book" - TV Tropes

A small but important log book.

When Sissi finds and steals Ulrich's diary, he is blackmailed into being her boyfriend. During a trip to a swimming pool, Jeremie and Yumi have the opportunity to find it. The new electric bus that is being used for the field trip is possessed by XANA, with Odd and Ulrich on board, and starts acting bizarre as a result.

Yumi ends up finding Sissi's diary during this, and uses it to blackmail her into giving up the location of Ulrich's. XANA then turns the bus on Paris's petrol-chemical plant, threatening to blow up a sizable portion of the city. Yumi is sent to Lyoko to help Aelita but she is devirtualized in the process but luckily Odd manages to escape from the bus, leaving him to take Aelita safely to the tower to deactivate it, saving the bus full of students and the petrol-chemical plant.

This episode contains examples of:

• Artistic License – Physics: Odd should have been paralyzed from his jump off the bus onto concrete (or even worse), but he manages to get up and walk away with only a minor shoulder injury.
• Bait-and-Switch: Yumi thinks she has Ulrich's diary at last...only to find out it's Sissi's.
• Blackmail: Ulrich was blackmailed when Sissi threatens to put his diary in the paper. He wrote about Lyoko, as well. This is a part of the B plot. Yumi then flips the blackmail on its head when she finds Sissi's diary and threatens to put her dirty little secrets all over the front page of the school's paper via phone call unless Sissi tells her where she hid Ulrich's diary.
• Brief Accent Imitation: Yumi makes a high-pitched impression of Sissi, reading off one of her diary entries over the phone to her.
• Early-Installment Weirdness: The team is surprisingly nonchalant about the fact that Ulrich writes in his diary about Lyoko, considering how angry they would be in later seasons if someone accidentally leaked Lyoko.
• Five-Second Foreshadowing: While in Sissi's room, Yumi finds a diary and assumes it to be Ulrich's. However, it has a pink cover with an orange rhombus, which match the colors of Sissi's shirt.
• Green-Eyed Monster: When Yumi reads Sissi's diary, she finds an entry where Sissi admits to be annoyed to see Ulrich paying so much attention to Yumi instead of her.
• Homage: XANA's hijacking of the new bus which it sends it on a collision course with a chemical plant, is eerily similar to the plot of the hit 90's film Speed, though unlike the mad bomber (whose bus was destroyed), XANA's bus stops just seconds before it could collide with the plant, but much like the film, no one is killed.
• Haunted Technology: XANA takes control of the bus in an attempt to ram it into a chemical plant and dispose of Odd and Ulrich in the process. However, Odd gets away to help Aelita on Lyoko.
• Jerk with a Heart of Gold: Sissi. Despite using Ulrich's diary to blackmail him into dating her, she admits in her own diary that she knows that isn't very nice to do and after Yumi finds Ulrich's diary, Sissi sincerely apologizes to Ulrich for stealing it and asks him if she can help him, to which he agrees by asking her to relay Jeremie's messages to him, while Ulrich tries to stop the bus.
• Love Doodles: Sissi's diary has a page with several doodles of Ulrich's name around a picture of him.
• Out-Gambitted: Yumi recovers Ulrich's journal by finding Sissi's diary and threatening her with it.
• Sudden Soundtrack Stop: The dramatic music stops when Jim - who is checking the speedometer with the bus driver - tells the kids to sit back down and stay there until they get to the pool.
• Secret Diary:
  • Ulrich has a diary with a dark green cover in which he writes about Lyoko and his feelings for Yumi. Sissi steals it to blackmail Ulrich into dating her until Yumi blackmails Sissi to find it.
  • Sissi. She owns a pink covered diary in which she writes about Ulrich and her plan of blackmailing him with his diary. Also, according to Yumi, she also crititzes Jim's sports clothes. Yumi uses it to force Sissi to tell her where Ulrich's diary is.
• There's No Kill like Overkill: For the second time this season, X.A.N.A's plot is to ram an electric bus into a Petrol-Chemical plant, which much like the nuclear reactor plot from two episodes ago, would have destroyed most of Paris, France (though the blast radius would have been far smaller compared to the nuclear meltdown scenario from the previous episode), though it still would have killed a bunch of people aside from Ulrich.
• You're Insane!: Aelita calls Odd "out of [his] mind" when she finds they are running toward an edge in the middle of a tornado with a MegaTank in it.

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