“Ground control to Steven Universe.”

Pop quiz: When was the last time we had an episode that was just about Steven, Garnet, Amethyst, and Pearl (not all alone, necessarily, but where they’re the clear primary focus)? Seventeen episodes ago, in Friend Ship. How about the last time we had an episode starring these four that wasn’t defined by tension?

Hmm.

Certainly not Chille Tid or Keeping It Together, which are both tense (oh and one is really about Lapis). Not Rising Tides, Crashing Skies, a townie episode. Not Sworn to the Sword or Reformed or Love Letters, each focusing on only a fragment of the team. Say Uncle? Please, even if it was canon its star is a character from another cartoon. Joy Ride? Nope. Even the three episodes I moved from Season 1 don’t fit the…holy crow, it must have been in Season 1.

But certainly not in the buildup to the invasion, where our heroes are dreading an imminent attack. Or right before Marble Madness tells us that Peridot is coming back, because that’s either Steven hanging out with humans, the show focusing on individual Gems, or the dramatic fare of The Test and Warp Tour. So, yikes, we’re going pre-Lion 3 (which itself excludes Garnet and Amethyst). Let’s see, not Watermelon Steven, that’s the whole town; not Garnet’s Universe, that’s just Garnet; not Fusion Cuisine or Keep Beach City Weird or Island Adventure, all focusing on humans.

It’s Secret Team. It’s been fifty-five episodes since the last time we just hung out with the four named characters in Steven Universe’s theme song and it wasn’t a dramatic affair. And even then, Pearl and Amethyst were fighting (as is the way of episodes requiring conflict).

This gap is a natural byproduct of the show’s increasing serialization and stakes, its focus on outside characters (including new Gems), and Steven himself growing up and realizing more and more that life is more complicated than a day at the beach. We get to explore deeper emotions as Steven grows more capable of exploring them, and as he slowly realizes the extent of his mother’s legacy, that legacy slowly catches up with him.

But still, it’s nice to get back to the basics every now and then.

Yes, we’ve come back to Beach City, back to our four leads by themselves, back to seeing Sadie and thinking fondly of other townies in a down-to-earth episode that’s literally about trying to come back down to Earth.

At a glance, this seems like a return to status quo, now that the world is safe and our new friends have wrapped up their initial arcs (Peridot becoming a Crystal Gem, Lapis coming around to the idea of living at the barn with Peridot) and are out of the picture again. Jasper is missing and the Yellow Diamond might want revenge, but for now things are back to normal. Garnet is quiet but funny, Amethyst is chill to a fault, and Pearl is panicking. All is as it should be.

Which makes it the perfect time to introduce Steven’s new power. This isn’t a show that really has a status quo anymore, it’s a show that despite varying speed is always moving forward. Steven Floats simultaneously settles back into everyday life for Steven while reminding us that everyday life for Steven comes with change, and it’s such a neat trick to pull off.

It’s not that Steven hasn’t gained new powers in a while: his dream possession of Watermelon Stevens in Super Watermelon Island and his extending limbs in Steven’s Birthday aren’t too long ago. But these are not only adaptations of his established abilities, but are given little fanfare when they appear. Floating is completely new, and merits a full episode’s focus.

As a maturing hero, Steven spends the episode figuring himself out on his own. Like his shield summon and his bubble, floating first appears as an accident, but this time he actually deduces how it works by the end of the story, and despite the Crystal Gems (or at least Garnet) knowing the answer, he does it on his own. Sure, the solution is so simple that he gets comically frustrated, because all of his powers are tied to his feelings, and it’s not breaking new ground to see him comforted by the love of his family. But Steven’s physical, emotional, and intellectual capabilities are shown to be far beyond anything he could’ve accomplished if he’d started floating in Season 1.

As I said, the other Crystal Gems are back to their core selves, but let’s not forget that these core selves work just fine. Amethyst’s casual dismissal of Steven floating away is great, and Pearl’s quiet admission that she wanted a hug is sweet, but their leader takes the gold medal of small character moments. Garnet’s method of “finding” a phone was already the episode’s best gag before the reveal that it’s Kofi’s, which presents two joke-enhancing possibilities: either Garnet has it out for Kofi, or she doesn’t even care and has messed with him again by pure accident.

Speaking of which, Steven Floats is the third episode of the series with a single storyboarder (Lamar Abrams soloed Onion Trade and Kofi’s own Beach Party), and while this doesn’t mean Paul Villeco had no help on this, it sort of feels like the result of one person’s work. I don’t mean this at all as a slight, this episode is neither undercooked nor sloppy, but weird little quirks that might’ve missed the cut in collaboration slip through, giving a sense of heightened reality beyond the normal confines of the show.

Part of that is a more stylized approach than usual, with the most obvious example being the Spongebobian extreme closeup of Sadie saying “fresh.” But I’m more talking about the way Steven thinks about Rose: she shows up as a still image, he decides against thinking about her, and he grabs the bottom of the frame and flings it up while falling. Or how his encounter with the airplane has that joke where the flight attendant calmly points out his appearance. Steven Universe acknowledges the fourth wall at times, but rarely breaks it to this extent in an otherwise normal episode (see Uncle Grandpa and Know Your Fusion for full-episode wackiness).

This tone is helped a lot by following Hit the Diamond, which itself is a weird episode. I think the focus on tone does make the plot drag a little—Steven’s fall takes up a huge chunk of the episode and most of it is spent on jokes that are good but sadly not as memorable as Hit the Diamond’s—but I appreciate that specific artists are still allowed the sort of creative freedom that Villeco clearly had this deep into the series.

We’re in the homestretch of episodes before Back to the Moon, so we’re going to spend this season preparing for Steven to learn the “truth” about Pink Diamond, and I appreciate more than ever how nuanced the show’s portrayal of her is even before this gamechanger. His moment with Rose is small here, but despite his powers evoking what we’ve seen of her own floating to the ground, he’s already admitting that the relationship is complicated.

In our last episode, a breezy plot had serious consequences, with the Ruby Squad tricked into leaving only to return in the aforementioned Back to the Moon and change Steven’s life forever. Here, a breezy plot results in Steven eating a donut. Not every episode needs to be Important, even episodes with big ramifications for our hero’s powers, and in that way Steven Floats is a great representative of Season 3′s general mood: our leads can still take things seriously, but as they know for sure after the Cluster, it’s not the end of the world if they take it easy.

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

This isn’t perfect by any means even beyond the slow pacing—Steven’s floating is only sporadically tied to his emotions in future episodes, and even here it makes little sense that his lack of happiness as he begins to slowly fall wouldn’t speed things up—but it’s a lot of fun and acquits itself well as a transitional episode. Plus, correct me if I’m wrong, but I believe this is the first time we see in-show that Beach City is in a state called Delmarva, which gives it extra credit as a grounding episode.

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