“Is there anything that’s worth more?”

I’m not sure I’ve ever been as immediately excited about this show as I was when I realized Peridot was about to sing. Bear in mind that I’m saying this two episodes after The Answer.

The buildup is amazing. It’s straight out of a musical, blending spoken word with diegetic instrumentation and discussing music in a silly, informative way that all but guarantees an imminent song. Peridot gets a goofy sight gag with her key, showing the heightened reality that comes with the territory of bursting into song. And before her beautifully hesitant try at singing “Life and death and love and birth,” Shelby Rabara gets to read the most matter-of-fact “Do mi so ti” in the history of solfège to remind us of how much of a dork she is.

The song itself lives up to the promise we’ve been primed for: Steven’s burst of giddy laughter and encouragement after Peridot’s performance in front of the Crystal Gems says it all. Season 2 has been a pretty rough ride: we’ve got the Crystal Gems’ dramatic arc-starters of Reformed and Sworn to the Sword and Keeping It Together, then We Need to Talk to introduce our first explicit depiction of Rose’s deep flaws, then Chille Tid to stress Steven out too, then the Week of Sardonyx for the whole team to feel bad, then Nightmare Hospital to upset Connie, Sadie’s Song to upset Sadie, and all the anxiety and bigotry that comes with Peridot joining the crew. The Answer is happy, but in a serene, important way, before Steven’s Birthday brings us more angst. It’s about time we get an extended scene overflowing with pure, exhilarating joy.

It’s so marvelous, in fact, that we’re tricked into thinking the song’s central question is rhetorical. It’s a no-brainer for Steven and the Crystal Gems as they sing along, but for Peridot, is there anything that’s worth more than peace and love on the planet Earth? Turns out that’s a hard maybe.

The one thing standing in the way of Peridot becoming a true Crystal Gem is a test of resolve, an opportunity to abandon them and Earth, making her status as the newest Crystal Gem a matter of choice instead of necessity. And that’s exactly what we get. In Message Received. But until then, we get an entire episode between this joyous opening and the decision that pits Peridot’s interests against our heroes’, and it’s…okay.

Mainly, the episode feels real short. The Answer and Steven’s Birthday and Message Received have a lot going on, but It Could’ve Been Great is essentially an awesome song and then a load of setup. We get that setup in a cool new environment and with some nifty narrative tricks, but it’s still an episode defined more by exposition than an emotional arc. It just feels like the first half of something; I mean, it is the first half of something, but Mirror Gem and The Return are too, and are far more complete on their own. Even Cry for Help gets a resolution of sorts within its non-ending ending by addressing the difficulty of life’s lack of easy resolutions.

It Could’ve Been Great is still decent, largely because the table setting that it’s built upon never feels clumsy or boring. Even the explanation for why Steven floats on the moon flows naturally: Amethyst is not only the Gem most interested in goofing around, but the only one who’s never left Earth, so she neatly prompts the discussion. And exposition lets Peridot be snobby again after the sweetness of Peace and Love on the Planet Earth. Like the Pearlsplaining days of yore, the crew turns what could be a rote infodump into something that characterizes the speaker.

Moreover, we aren’t just setting up for what these characters are about to do. No, this is a huge episode in terms of the greater lore, starting with the fact that we finally hear the Great Diamond Authority referred to by name—too bad Ronaldo is stuck on Earth (but not really (but I actually would like to see him in space at one point (but not now))). We’ve seen the Diamond Authority emblem before, occasionally with the pink segment damaged, but its prominence here all but confirms that the last two Diamonds are Pink and White. Moreover, we see what must be White Diamond in the background as they climb, ominously wreathed by more planets than Blue or Yellow, leaving Pink the only unseen member of the quartet.

This sort of storytelling is similar to how the show peels back the layers of Onion’s family. We get a slow drip of concrete clues (that Onion’s dad is a fisherman with a similar speech pattern, that Sour Cream’s stepfather is that fisherman) and fuel for logical connections (Sour Cream and Onion go together, a Vidalia is a type of onion, Marty is into music and looks like Sour Cream) until we’ve solved the mystery well before the “reveal” that they’re all related.

We don’t hear Pink Diamond’s name until Earthlings, but that didn’t stop everyone from knowing she exists. Years passed between fans figuring out White Diamond’s name and her official name reveal. But the hints are rationed out in a way that lets us know what’s happening well before Steven does. It’s different than the Garnet-as-fusion or Rose-as-Pink twists, which also had plenty of clues: here the crew isn’t hiding anything, they’re just not spelling things out right away. It’s a tantalizing method of worldbuilding that I get such a kick out of, and makes the inevitable confirmation of facts we’ve deduced oh so satisfying.

Peridot’s devotion to Yellow Diamond has more immediate ramifications than the rest of the Diamond lore, but despite her gushing she’s surprisingly tactful when Garnet scoffs at the notion that all Gems live to serve the Diamonds. Past episodes would’ve seen her furious at this slight on her beloved matriarch, especially when the Gem she’s the least comfortable with is the one doing the slighting, but she instead cedes in awkward but neutral language that some Gems decided against lives of servitude.

This says a lot about how much Peridot has grown, but also about how pumped she is throughout their romp on the Moon Base. She’s nervously chuckling throughout her Perisplaining to Steven and while sneaking aboard the throne, but her best moment comes with a laugh that suggests Shelby Rabara might actually be a cross between a cat and a leprechaun with a whirring fan perched right by her mouth:

Perhaps this excitement is what makes her put her guard down enough to revert to her old self. After getting teased by a mystery room between the ground floor and the control center, Peridot gets one last moment of rule-breaking excitement when she takes a seat on a Diamond’s chair with Steven. But that’s just about the end of her rebel streak, as her enthusiasm flows right into session of nerding out about how awesome Homeworld’s plans for Earth were.



It’s not like we’re super far removed from Peridot as a villain at this point, and even if we were, all of her episodes showcase her antagonism. But after Peace and Love on the Planet Earth and a few minutes of friendly silliness, the show manages to make her fawning over a desiccated Earth feel like whiplash. There are a couple other episodes named for full lines spoken (rather than sung) within the episode, but this is the only one with no alternate meaning: When it Rains also evokes a common expression and describes an event within the story, and That Will Be All is a recurring phrase that also references the conclusion of this particular story arc. It Could’ve Been Great is unique in its extreme specificity, zeroing in on the most important line of the episode in a way I try to do in my own headers. And yeah, it probably would’ve been my header if the rotten crew hadn’t beaten me to the punch.

(Huh, I wonder what Pearl thinks of this evil plan to destroy Earth? Thank goodness the heroic Rose Quartz was there to stop her archenemy Pink Diamond from going through with it.)

Peridot’s problem is that she still thinks stripping Earth bare is a better alternative to its current trajectory. Part of this is the morality she’s been conditioned to believe her entire life, valuing Gemkind above all else. And part of this is a sense that the organic life on the planet is doomed anyway, so the Gems might as well have used it for themselves. But between her blunt lack of filter and genuine excitement about the horrific mutation of Earth, the Crystal Gems have every right to be upset. And then she goes and bashes Rose Quartz while unknowingly standing on her own chair.

It’s a line she hadn’t crossed before, and the worst part is that she’s actually, uh, right. Logically speaking. If Peridot hadn’t warned the Crystal Gems about the Cluster, Pink’s war would have traded the lives of an untold amount of new Gems for a few measly millennia of organic life only for all of it to die prematurely regardless. It’s telling that Garnet meets this logic with an emotional show of force, rather than any sort of counterargument; winning a fact-based argument with better facts would do nothing to address Peridot’s problem, which is her overreliance on logic. And it’s critical to set this worldview up so that she can be let down with Yellow Diamond, paragon of logic, turns out to be just as emotional as the Crystal Gems.

The final argument also lets Steven play mediator one last time before Peridot sneaks away the communicator. First he tries defusing the situation by calling back to Peace and Love on the Planet Earth, but Garnet isn’t in the mood to defuse, so he switches to a more direct plea for peace. Then when it’s just him and Peridot, even after her condemnation of his mother (which sparked his very first moment of visible anger all the way back in Lars and the Cool Kids), he tries once again to make her understand the Crystal Gems’ point of view with the power of heart.

While there’s no resolution in the episode itself, this late focus on Steven’s magnanimity towards Peridot is perfectly timed to make her betrayal hit hard. It saves Steven’s anger for the final shot of the episode: after vouching for her for five episodes and sticking up for her even when she goes as far as she does here, her loyalties still aren’t clear.

(Unless you watched this live, in which case Cartoon Network spoiled that Peridot would stay on good terms with Steven and that Lapis would join up by leaking a promo for an episode they wouldn’t air for half a year. All it took was five mistimed seconds to suck all the tension out of this cliffhanger. Ugh.)

There’s honestly not that much else to say about It Could’ve Been Great. The setup is great, but it’s practically all setup. We do get a weird moment of Pearl being super showy in her monologue about the Diamond Base’s location, only to shut Steven down when he matches her enthusiasm. So that’s something? And Lion is relevant to the plot for the first time in a while—out of the 26-29 episodes of Season 2 (depending on whether you count Open Book, Shirt Club, and Story for Steven), Lion appears in a grand total of six, and roartal hopping to the moon is by far his biggest moment of the season.

The good news is that there’s a ton to say about Message Received, but this is an episode-by-episode reviewing format, and as such I gotta say I’m a little disappointed. Together, It Could’ve Been Great and Message Received are spectacular, but when one of them simply stops without resolving, it just

Future Vision!



The Cluster was inserted beneath the Beta Kindergarten, which apparently is in the American Southwest and is much less impressive than Amethyst’s. Maybe one day we’ll see it and/or have a Wile E. Coyote cartoon set there?

Amethyst almost blows the Crystal Gems out of the Moon Base, but it’s Garnet and Pearl (as Sardonyx) who space Steven in companion episode Back to the Moon .



. Jungle Moon is an eerie and distant sequel that retroactively makes the projected plans for Earth somehow feel even more sinister.



is an eerie and distant sequel that retroactively makes the projected plans for Earth somehow feel even more sinister. When Peridot is trying to make the stairs appear, they happen to start working the moment Pearl approaches. Almost as if she’d been there before.

We’ll see more of the mysterious ignored room in Can’t Go Back and Now We’re Only Falling Apart. Turns out it’s used for spying! Just don’t call it spying, that would make Lapis feel bad.

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

This is a similar episode to Beta, where despite a conclusion that left me wanting, it’s salvaged by an early Peridot-centric sequence that ranks among the best scenes in the series. It Could’ve Been Great could’ve been great, but it’s still pretty good.

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