“I guess it’s pretty bad, but what’s a regular old guy like me supposed to do about it?”

Heyyyyy Ronaldo.

Y’know, this episode isn’t as bad as I remember. Watching it the first time, it stuck out mostly for its terrible timing after an episode as powerful as Sworn to the Sword, and looked even worse when its Steven Bomb was done: Keeping It Together, We Need to Talk, and Chille Tid are not great company when you’re only a middling episode. Even now, I think it would’ve been smart to put this just before Reformed as a coda to the human-centric chunk of early Season 2 episodes, or right after Chille Tid as a buffer between Malachite and the Week of Sardonyx. But watching it again, I can admit that Rising Tides, Crashing Tides isn’t a terrible episode.

Now, it’s not great, but what it lacks in substance it (sort of) makes up for in comedy. Where Crying Breakfast Friends is self-parody in show form, Ronaldo is self-parody in human form—which by the way further solidifies placing this episode nearer to Reformed or Cry for Help, which both feature CBF—so he’s a great lens to show a human reaction to the Homeworld Gems’ return. And if you’re going to use a gimmicky character, you might as well use a gimmicky format.

The saving grace of this episode is its lovingly accurate portrayal of a teenager’s crappy documentary. With the exception of the trying-too-hard reenactment jokes (the flopping fish for Nanefua and Ronaldo’s hand for the handship), I laughed way harder than I thought I would at its format-specific humor. Ronaldo’s terrible cutting is perfect, as is that weird but universal obsession with “official-looking” title cards (undercut by Comic Sans and plodding text effects).

But if you’re mining for comedy gold, look no further than the description assigned to each character. Some are general jokes (Kiki’s is “Pizza Heiress” and Mayor Dewey’s is “Mayor Dewey”) while others reveal Ronaldo’s perspective on his interviewees (Sadie’s is “Horror Movie Enthusiast” and Jenny’s is “Intimidating Teenage Girl”). Still, the obvious winner is Steven.

Still, the jokes directly from Ronaldo are, as always, hit and miss. Considering there’s not too much to talk about in Rising Tides, Crashing Skies besides the humor, I’d like to take a moment to examine what makes him so inconsistent.

Subtlety is where Ronaldo flies highest and falls hardest. I’m sure it’s difficult to use a light touch on such a broad character, but Zachary Steel is great enough at going full ham that he doesn’t need that much help from the writers. Ronaldo’s obliviousness is bound to make him say dumb things, but this sometimes makes incongruity itself the punchline when it should be the bare minimum for a gag. There’s a reason why everybody almost everybody grows out of “so random!” comedy, and it’s because there’s no depth to it beyond the standard surprise that most jokes have.

Still, this shallowness isn’t limited to lolrandom humor. Take, for instance, Ronaldo’s narration over his nighttime exposé. He looks right at the camera and talks about how brave he is to be sneaking around with a camera. You see, normally a hero doesn’t have to say they’re being brave, so we wouldn’t expect someone to say that they’re brave. But he does. That’s, uh, that’s it. That’s the whole joke.

There are tons of ways to show that a character is self-important that don’t involve them essentially telling us “I am self-important.” And Steven Universe usually does just that: Ronaldo’s brooding in Full Disclosure, his smug yet incorrect explanations of how the world works in Keep Beach City Weird, and smatterings of this very episode (like calling his home movie “an investigative report shot camera vérité”) all reveal how pompous he is. Which is great, but it only makes his “I’m so brave to be doing this” line more frustrating, because it’s not even teaching us anything new about him.

But on the flipside, the understated interviewee descriptions I mentioned above and small moments of Ronaldo acting like a real person as he futzes with the camera work so well because he’s usually so broad, and seeing him act like a real person is an incongruity that adds fuel to the joke (rather than being the joke itself). So you have to make him annoying and loud to make the quiet moments land, but not too annoying and loud because then we just hate the guy and the jokes get lazy.

Again, this can’t be an easy balance for the writers—and I haven’t even mentioned the additional pressure to provide constant humor with a flat character whose only role is to be funny—but that doesn’t mean I have to enjoy when the scales tip too hard on the obnoxious end. The reason Ronaldo works best in small doses is because the longer he’s on screen, the more likely it is that the writers will slip up and make him go full Ronaldo. Rising Tides, Crashing Skies does surprisingly well, but there are still plenty of moments where its hero is a pain to watch.

One thing that helps any wacky character is a straight man, and Peedee ably fills the role despite his own quirks. Atticus Shaffer hasn’t had much to do since Frybo beyond the occasional line, so it’s great to hear him spend a whole episode grounding Ronaldo with his signature blend of solemnity and anxiety. We already know from Keep Beach City Weird that Peedee understands his brother better than anyone, so putting him on the documentary team provides some much-needed commentary on an episode about commentary. I appreciate his introduction as an interview subject to reestablish his character, considering his lack of focus throughout the series, before making him Ronaldo’s semi-willing sidekick.

In terms of that whole subtlety thing I was going on about, I love that Peedee’s maturity and capability isn’t overplayed: he fumbles through filmmaking just as much as Ronaldo and spends as much time freaking out as he does calmly explaining things. Peedee is unusually responsible, and Ronaldo’s behavior makes him look particularly competent, but he’s still a normal kid and not a flanderized child prodigy. We already have one extreme character here, and I’m glad the crew doesn’t make the mistake of thinking we need another one to balance him out.

But it’s the third Fryman that gets the line of the episode, summing up what an adjusted adult almost has to be in Beach City. He’s aware of how powerless he is in a world of magic and monsters, but he sighs and accepts it instead of letting this knowledge cripple him. He’s got a family and a business to take care of, and he seems to be succeeding at both, so there’s nothing to be gained by worrying about things that are out of his hands. Most of the documentary’s interviewees have the same mindset, highlighting that Ronaldo is distinguished by his unwillingness to normalize weirdness rather than being the only one who notices it.

I’m surprised we don’t see Pop Fryman’s counterpoint, Kofi Pizza: Beach Party is an entire episode about Kofi facing a similar sense of powerlessness as Mr. Fryman with the same righteous rage as Ronaldo, so he’d fit right in (plus we see everyone else in his family, so why stop at Nanefua?). Perhaps having someone who actually agreed with Ronaldo would dull the episode’s message, but it would’ve been nice to see someone acknowledge that despite his many faults, our documentarian is correct.

The Crystal Gems are responsible for Beach City being a magnet for disaster, and seeing them from the point of view of an endangered civilian could make for a fascinating episode. Beach Party and Rising Tides, Crashing Skies come closest, and Lars’s own acknowledgment of how horrible such daily dangers can be in The New Lars is a turning point in his characterization, but otherwise we don’t see the consequences of being the Crystal Gems’ neighbors in a serious light until the end of Season 4. I feel like there’s a way to throw Ronaldo a bone in this regard, but considering it’s Ronaldo, I’m not gonna lose sleep over it.

Okay, what else. The Crystal Gems are obviously gonna be funny in a Ronaldo episode, as I don’t think I’ll ever get tired of seeing him treated with open disdain (so long as the characters aren’t actually cruel like Lars). We don’t get any introspection from empathy machine Steven about how dangerous the Gems are, partially because he already did that in Beach Party but mostly because this is a breezy episode despite its pointed criticism of our heroes. It’s great that Ronaldo only wants them back because he selfishly wants a weird city regardless of the risks; that is, it’s great in a character sense, because Ronaldo is despicable and this lack of concern for others is true to who he is.

I don’t know for certain if the final shot is a reference to Ronaldo’s polarizing nature, but I’d like to think it is. Especially because, despite myself, I’d be clicking the same button as Steven. If you hated this episode as much as I did when I first saw it, I’d suggest going back and watching it on its own: it’s much better by itself than it is as a dead stop to a marathon’s momentum.

Future Vision!

“Wait, so the hand wasn’t here to snatch up humans for a human zoo?”



Ronaldo brings up the Beach City Wind Farm, which isn’t a thing that we see at any point in the show, but Little Homeworld is will feature a prominent windmill, so maybe this is another proper prediction?

Still no word on if the Great Diamond Authority thawing out the cryogenically frozen pets of the one percent, but considering Ronaldo’s track record I wouldn’t be surprised. I guess if you squint it could be a reference to the bubbled Corrupted Gems, but his theories are usually more concretely proven.

(But seriously I think Ronaldo might actually have a future in intergalactic diplomacy.)

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

It’s not as good as Keep Beach City Weird, but that doesn’t mean Rising Tides, Crashing Skies is bad. In any case, it’s sort of an entity unto itself: it’s strange to categorize it as something other than a Ronaldo episode considering he’s the main character, but the unusual format puts it in a whole other category for me: this is the Documentary Episode, featuring Ronaldo.

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