“We all gotta grow up sometime, right?”

Right off the bat, this episode’s greatest weakness is that we don’t see Baby Buck and the Baby Pizza Twins as we do in Lamar Abrams’s promo art. How dare we not have more baby teens?

Lack of infant variety notwithstanding, this is a great episode, if not a subtle one. Greg is no stranger to hammering out the lesson of a story, but here it’s made so explicit so often that it threatens to weaken the actual plot. Fortunately the plot does a good enough job of showing that it makes up for all the telling, but still, it’s so on the nose that Vidalia calls Greg out when he belatedly repeats the moral it in response to an unrelated statement.

(But to be clear, this is a story about growing up. Growing up is what this episode about. Gaining maturity is valuable. Emotional development is important. Taking responsibility as you age: good. Staying a kid forever: bad!)

As with Annoying Steven early in the series, this lesson is achieved by presenting us with Douchebag Greg. Douchebag Greg slums around and mooches off a single working mother, depriving her of her own food and taunting her for working to feed her child. When tasked with babysitting, he does what he wants instead of focusing on what a baby might need, and when the kid goes missing, his search includes a pit stop to the arcade to play video games.

This is the second episode where Greg is awful for the bulk of the runtime, and the first, House Guest, was so bad that it earned my inaugural “No Thanks!” rating (a brutal assessment, I know). By that metric you might think I’d dislike Greg the Babysitter as well, because boy oh boy is Douchebag Greg unlikable. But the key difference is the level of intent: even looking past the age and maturity gap between these two Gregs, the Greg of House Guest chooses to lie to his son despite seeing how hard Steven takes it, while Douchebag Greg’s actions stem from sincere cluelessness. Neither is great, and younger Greg is still old enough to know better, but ignorance is far more digestible than purposeful shadiness from this character.

Both House Guest and Greg the Babysitter stay somewhat true to Regular Greg by making him driven by love, whether it’s paternal or romantic. The problem of House Guest is that this emotional core is tainted by him wronging Steven in a way we’ve never seen before or since (compare his feigning of an injury to his negligence in Maximum Capacity, where he instead makes a mistake and is immediately regretful). Nothing in Greg the Babysitter diminishes any sense of authenticity about Greg’s feelings for Rose, because for all his flaws, he doesn’t take advantage of Rose or their relationship.

Moreover, I appreciate that his flaws come from the same character traits that kicked off this relationship, which so far has dominated his flashbacks: Greg is a dreamer and a romantic, which works great in Story for Steven, and he takes the relationship seriously, so he matures on that front in We Need to Talk, but now we see that he’s so focused on Rose that he’s ignoring every other element of life as a functioning adult.

This episode works because Greg is realistically irresponsible. His head has always been in the clouds, and now he’s in a relationship with someone that’s literally magic, so he has no incentive to reflect on himself barring a dire situation. But this episode excels because Greg’s decision to grow up has nothing to do with Steven. We get the groundwork for Rose wanting a kid, but Greg getting his act together is something he does for himself. It would’ve been so easy for this shift to be prompted by impending fatherhood, but it’s far more satisfying to see a character improve himself because he wants to, rather than out of obligation to others. It allows the moment he takes agency to be triumphant without being mixed up in a sense of begrudging acceptance of his duties.

Finally, while I still think it’s ridiculous that the Crystal Gems treat him like a total flake in Laser Light Cannon given his clear improvement since the Douchebag Greg days, it does make a little sense that beings unaccustomed to change would have a hard time getting past this first impression. If you go back and watch the second season of the series after Greg the Babysitter, it’s not hard to imagine which Greg they’re talking about. It’s a stretch, because they’ve seen plenty of evidence to contradict this impression, but if you’re looking to explain their behavior then it’s the best reason I’ve got.

Greg the Babysitter marks an unspoken milestone in the series: this is the last time we’ll ever see Rose Quartz before her web of duplicity begins to unravel. In just four episodes, we’ll learn that she bubbled Bismuth away and lied about it to everyone. In another three, we’ll hear that she shattered Pink Diamond. The veracity of that second part is irrelevant, because the truth only further proves her capacity for deceit. We’ve seen already that Rose wasn’t perfect, but this is her final appearance before the dominoes begin to fall. One last happy memory that directly leads to the creation of our show’s title character, in an episode that emphasizes how dreaming is nice, but reality will always force people to make a change.

We see way more of Rose in this swan song than we did in Story for Steven or We Need to Talk, and like Greg, her mistakes here can be attributed to cluelessness. She admits how confusing humans can be for her, particularly babies, so it’s hard to blame her for not taking good care of Sour Cream. It’s especially hard to blame her considering how excited she is for him to exhibit independence. And it’s impossible to blame her, at least for me, when she references one of my favorite dumb Simpsons jokes in regards to watching him.

The Pink Diamond revelation adds new layers to her explanation that Gems are made for specific purposes, but the funny thing is, it doesn’t add that many new layers: even before learning just how high up Rose was, we still knew she was rebelling against what she was made to do. I think the more interesting aspect of her speech is how it lines up with Bismuth’s repetition of her insistence that Gems could break away from their intended roles. Seeing Rose talk about it here, less than twenty years ago, is made fascinating by knowing she was saying the same thing thousands of years ago. For a Gem that’s interested in change, she hasn’t really changed that much. It’s one thing for her to know that and talk about it, but it’s another for us to see it in action.

I love how an episode that’s this unsubtle (about being a story about growing up, in case you didn’t catch it) manages to quietly explain why Steven exists. We see a baby, and we see Rose loves babies, and we see Rose admires the human capacity to change, and we’ll soon see that Rose herself stagnated there a little bit, but we leave it at that. Judging by the age difference between Sour Cream and Steven, it’s a few years until she and Greg make an actual decision, so it makes sense to not reference it too explicitly this early, but it’s still a direction the episode could’ve taken and I’m very glad it didn’t.

I’ve made no secret about how much I love Brian Posehn voicing Sour Cream with his regular grown man voice, so obviously the best part of this episode is his further use of that voice for Baby Cream. It’s the gift that keeps on giving, and by itself ensures that Greg’s dickishness can’t pull the episode too far down. As with Onion Friend, the strange connection between Sour Cream and Steven is left unspoken, but it’s wild to consider that this side character is a big reason why our protagonist exists. While I’d be fine with this continuing to be a quiet part of the backstory, I can’t say I wouldn’t be interested in seeing Steven and Sour Cream talk about it one day, even as a small gag.

Onion Friend was also the last time we spent any meaningful amount of time with Vidalia, and it’s neat to fill in some gaps between her debut cameo in Story for Steven and her modern iteration. Marty’s flakiness is further proven by her being a single mother from the start, but she’s clearly risen to the occasion and loves the hell out of her kid. Her patience with Greg is tested by his awfulness (and honestly makes said awfulness hard to watch, given how much is on her plate), but it speaks volumes that she’s so welcoming to the ex-friend of her ex. She’s probably the only human Greg knows in Beach City at this point, and I honestly wish we saw more of their modern relationship when we have such a vivid image of their history.

I Think I Need a Little Change might not reach the rocking heights of Comet or What Can I Do For You, but it’s catchier than either and has that wonderful twist on the double meaning of “change.” The wordplay speaks for itself, but it’s a cool trick to reveal that this musical montage is as diegetic as the other two songs: this is something he’s actually singing to people. We get a hefty break from songs after Mr. Greg, so that might be meddling with my opinions, but I think this is my favorite of the three. Puns beat electric guitar, and the song crystalizes Greg’s similarity to Steven come Change Your Mind.

And so we end Season 3, Act 2. We’ve had the aftermath of the Cluster, and we’ve had a series of slice of life episodes from this particularly magical life, but we’ll soon be back to the high-octane plotting of the Cluster Arc. It’s a bit strange that Greg the Babysitter comes between Alone at Sea and Gem Hunt, considering the Jasper of it all, but it’s nice to have this respite before we barrel towards the pivotal moment of Steven’s series-wide arc, especially when this respite tells us a lesson that’s about to become a lot more obvious in the coming storm:

Steven Universe is a story about growing up.

Future Vision!

Good thing nothing bad happened to Sour Cream, or else Greg would’ve had to pray that his space goddess’s magic could bring people back from the dead. That would be a ridiculous power!



If every pork chop were perfect, we wouldn’t have inconsistencies…

Vidalia got this top from the T-Shirt Shop where she works. This top has a collar. T-shirts do not have collars. It’s unresearched nonsense like this that makes Cartoon Network put this show on hiatus so often, come on people.

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



While I do enjoy this episode and stand by it being great, I don’t necessarily love things that I critically find great. Greg the Babysitter doesn’t do quite enough on the emotional level to make me truly love it, considering how much time we have to spend with Douchebag Greg. I appreciate the importance of his douchebaggery, and the importance of this episode as a whole, but this isn’t an something I go out of my way to rewatch. Sorry, Baby Cream. I still like it!

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