“We won’t stand out if we play the roles we were made for.”

There’s nothing like a good heist. You’d think a plot with such a consistent formula (build a team, go over a plan, execute the plan and adapt to its inevitable failures) would get stale, but consider for a moment that Inception and Fast Five premiered within a year of each other, and are both heists following the same general beats, but they’re fully different experiences. I’m not gonna say which one is better, but only one of them has a car chase where a car is chained to a giant safe and uses it like a wrecking ball, so.

In some ways, Gem Heist drops the ball on what I want from a heist: there’s barely a planning stage, and the team is already together, so it’s all about the execution and the wrenches thrown at our heroes. But while it’s hardly the caper I hoped for from the title, I can’t help but admire how it takes the tropes associated with heists and uses them to comment on Gem society.

A heist is all about specialists with clear jobs. Safecrackers, getaway drivers, demolitions experts, con artists, the whole point is getting a bunch of talented people who are each essential to the group. This element is only briefly touched upon in the traditional sense in Gem Heist, with Steven referring to Pearl as “our hacker,” but in its place, our heroes must succeed by putting themselves into the very roles they escaped by becoming Crystal Gems. Sapphire is a wise advisor and Ruby a disposable bodyguard, and the two must be separated. Amethyst must be huge. Pearl must be lowly servant. And Steven, who can’t exactly take the leadership position of his Gem parent, must play the dumb human.

This conceit drives the episode and makes it unexpectedly solid in terms of characterization, given how bland its plot ends up being. This is basically an episode about walking through a hallway, and instead of a third act we just get two minutes transitioning Steven to the Zoo that could’ve been spent in our next episode (or heavily cut). Even Adventures in Light Distortion feels more meaningful from a sheer plotting standpoint, and that was literally just getting the Crystal Gems from Point A to B. But because of how fascinating the characters are to watch when forced into the positions they’d be stuck in had they not rebelled, I’m able to enjoy what would otherwise be a slog of an episode.

The surprise lead of Gem Heist is Sapphire, who takes charge of the situation right away and finally shines on her own. Ruby got a head start in Jailbreak in terms of screentime, and takes up more room when the two are together thanks to her louder personality, and has a whole squad of counterparts to define herself against, so I love seeing a focus on Garnet’s quiet half.

Sapphire’s serene baseline is portrayed so well by Erica Luttrell that she’s often played comically straight (her casually agreeing to call Steven “Esteban” is a great example here), but we already know from Keystone Motel that she’s more than just her calmness. It’s great to see her lose her cool so early in the episode, putting up a confident front while planning but getting frazzled with its inevitable failure before the team even disembarks. I wouldn’t quite call her a ham in the way Ruby and Peridot can be, but her overacting while narrating her activities to warn her friends of danger is wonderful. And of course, she gifts us with the universe’s cutest wink.

Charlyne Yi always brings a lot to the table as Ruby, and while she’s had more to do than Luttrell after Hit the Diamond, this is the first time since then that she’s voiced our Ruby. The line of the night is her furious declaration that Blue Diamond “hates fusion and love?”—it’s such a horrible thought that Ruby treats it like a question rather than a statement, because how hating something as good as love even possible? Still, Ruby’s bigger highlight is all in the animation as she runs up a locked door, claws at it while screaming, and admits defeat when this doesn’t immediately work.

Pearl also benefits from the visuals, which portray her humiliations in ways Deedee Magno Hall can’t in the moment due to her needing to be quiet. Which isn’t to say Magno Hall doesn’t do a lot with what she’s given, going from embarrassed and deferential around Holly Blue Agate to pissed off while alone with the Crystal Gems. And while Amethyst is the first Crystal Gem to go, Michaela Dietz picks up the baton from Yi and Magno Hall to play other amethysts; it’s neat to hear her turn down the playfulness for gruffness without completely removing the prankster edge from her voice. And what we do see from Amethyst is a reasonable amount of nervousness around a first encounter with her peers, which pays off wonderfully in That Will Be All (as does the actual sentence “That will be all” that Pearl will soon get the chance to redirect).



Steven is surprisingly low-key here, all things considered, but I suppose with all the focus he gets in the first two episodes of this arc, as well as our next one, it makes sense to look more deeply at the Gems; after all, they’re the ones who were born into an oppressive class structure that they must temporarily return to (give or take an Amethyst, but she still has plenty of issues stemming from societal expectations). He’s got some decent jokes, and dominates the last part of the episode when separated from the Gems, but the last part of the episode is so boring that I don’t really care.

Still, none of these characters would have the chance to shine without Holly Blue Agate, who comes in hot and seems physically incapable of chilling the hell out. Christine Pedi voices Holly in just two episodes of the original series, but boy does she know how to leave a mark. After seeing Homeworld loyalists from the bottom of the totem pole in Peridot and the rubies, a Homeworld loyalist who’s a known hero in Jasper, and two leaders of Homeworld in Yellow and Blue Diamond, we encounter perhaps the worst kind of zealot: middle management.

Holly Blue Agate is the Dolores Umbridge of Steven Universe. She’s not given the stage to become main villain material, but she sure knows how to be the most detestable kind of miniboss we could hope for. She’s a shameless sycophant whose worship of Gems she considers superior is matched only by her disdain for those she sees as beneath her, but because she actually has some authority, she’s able to be far more tyrannical than the likes of Peridot. She’s hardcore lawful evil on the classic alignment chart, but if we allow for variation to the classics, I’d consider her more petty evil than anything.

With one character, we personify the entire toxic class structure that the Crystal Gems were born to defy. And with every word, Holly Blue proves that our heroes were correct to abandon this caste system. She’s flippant in her physical abuse, and wears her bigotry as a point of pride, taking glee in enforcing the inferiority of every Gem around her but Sapphire, who earns the same kind of swooning she applies to Blue Diamond. This is all performed under the thin disguise of politeness, because again, this is Umbridge we’re dealing with. She yells that there’s no yelling allowed, then gets mad when an amethyst corrects herself by being too quiet. She either pretends to not understand human speech or genuinely doesn’t get that Steven is talking (I could get into a whole thing about the necessity of an unrealistic translator for the Gems, but first off they’re magic so unrealistic things are fine, and second off what’s clearly more important here is Holly’s attitude).

It’s almost a shame we don’t get more of Holly Blue, because she may be loathsome, but she’s the compelling kind of loathsome that makes an excellent villain. Aquamarine is similar in feigned sweetness and cruelty, but Holly lacks that Cartman-inspired awareness of how miserable she is, which makes her less extreme and more relatable to real-life monsters in our daily lives who are blind to their own awfulness. At least she gets one more episode to be horrible and receive some decent comeuppance for her behavior in Gem Heist.

As I’ve said, the actual story here is pretty dull. We get some hints at lore, as it’s now pretty clear that the Era 2 referred to by Peridot was separated from Era 1 by the death of Pink Diamond. We get further indirect characterization of Blue Diamond with Holly Blue Agate’s praise and Ruby and Sapphire’s scorn. And the final sequence, while feeling tacked on, at least gets some neat usage out of what looks like the same tech as Peridot’s gone-but-not-forgotten robofingers. But if not for the stark reminder of why the Crystal Gems’ ability to decide their lives is important, this would be one of the least consequential episodes of the series. Plenty of episodes have great characterization, this is Steven Universe after all, but most of those also bring more to the table.

I’ve never been to this…how do you say…school?

Second episode since Gem Harvest to feature the Floridoverse as the main promo, and while it’s a little unclear whether this is another Floridoverse promo where a new adult character is portrayed as a teacher (Holly’s uniform vaguely resembles Greg’s and Ruby’s) I’m gonna go ahead and hope the intent is for her to be a student because man, that vibe on a peer is in some ways even worse than on a superior.

We’re the one, we’re the ONE! TWO! THREE! FOUR!



Lousy plotting really knocks this one down, considering how great an actual heist could’ve been, but the character work barely scrapes this from an episode I don’t care about to one I enjoy. It straddles the line between Like ‘em and Enh, but I’ll be nice this time.

Top Twenty



Love ‘em



Like ‘em

Enh

No Thanks!

6. Horror Club

5. Fusion Cuisine

4. House Guest

3. Onion Gang

2. Sadie’s Song

1. Island Adventure