“You.”

The night before I started writing this review, I had a dream that I was in the mood for pasta with pesto. I couldn’t remember if pesto could be bought in cans or had to be made, so I took to Google to search for the answer, but a hot new band named Pesto Sauce kept getting in the way of my search results. No matter what combination of keywords I used, I couldn’t find the answer I needed, and the stress grew and grew and grew as each of my tried-and-true research skills failed me. It was literally a librarian’s nightmare. I didn’t even wake up in the mood for pesto.

Dreams are weird—if you don’t believe me, ask Rebecca Sugar—and Chille Tid continues to display Steven Universe’s ability to capture their casual absurdity. Even the name of the episode is weird, stemming from a Norwegian phrase meaning “Chilling Time” that the crew saw in a Scandinavian commercial for Regular Show. Within the episode, the title is only stated once, and off-handedly at that; it could’ve just as easily been called Bunga-Cowa or Mashed Potato. It’s not just wacky, it’s deadpan wacky, and that mixture of normalcy with something that’s obviously bizarre in retrospect is so much better at reflecting dream logic than the bombastic acid trips that cartoon dream sequences often become.

I was tempted to use a similarly odd phrase for my header quote, but this isn’t any old dream episode. This is a bad dream episode, and Kimberly Brooks can make a single word the stuff of nightmares.

Jasper will get some actual development post-breakup, but all that Steven’s seen of her so far is a physically and emotionally violent monster (as opposed to a physically and emotionally violent monster struggling with abandonment issues). She, not the newly-christened Malachite, is who Steven is actually afraid of, and Chille Tid spectacularly displays why she’s someone to be feared, even in chains.

Lapis, on the other hand, is presented as someone to be saved. Her first appearance is the most frightening moment of the episode, jolting us out of the jovial tone of Steven’s sitcom dream with a silent weeping scream.

This only solidifies Steven’s mission to help, going back twice to rescue her, but between his empathy and the more obvious threat of Jasper, he forgets that Lapis has always shown a capacity for terrible fury. Her rage is usually justified—see how well you’d take being trapped in a mirror for thousands of years, only to find yourself imprisoned again upon returning to a home that you no longer recognize—but it feeds the darkest aspects of her personality.

To me, the most fascinating thing about Lapis is that she genuinely likes Steven. It makes some sense that she would: after all, he released her from prison and healed her gem, and formed a bond with her by befriending the Mirror. But Lapis is the product of millennia of isolation and abuse. She has every reason to lash out at everyone around her, and she mostly does; as we’ll learn in greater depth Alone at Sea, that’s certainly what she’s doing to Jasper. And she still snaps at Steven for interrupting, rejecting not only his help but the notion that she needs help. But despite all this, in a neat mirroring of Sworn to the Sword, she says that she wants to do it for him. Because at the end of the day, even though she has no rational reason to trust anyone anymore, and even when she’s using the language of anger, Lapis Lazuli is miraculously capable of love, and that’s what makes her a hero.

(Also, how great is it that when Lapis rejects her identity we can only see her face in her reflection?)

Alright, I kinda jumped the gun on the ending there, there’s a whole episode preceding the final nightmare. But honestly, despite being loads of fun, there’s not too much to say about the dreams themselves. I mean, I guess there’s plenty to analyze if we really want to go full Freud on this. Does Steven see the Gems as humans in his first dream because he still feels left out of Team Human in We Need to Talk? Is his hopeless pursuit of Dogcopter a metaphor for his seemingly unattainable desire to be a bigshot Crystal Gem? Does Pearl’s dream reveal her continued suffering in the aftermath of Rose picking Greg? (Respectively: maybe, probably not, and duh.)

But Chille Tid isn’t interested in clear-cut interpretations of Steven’s dreams, which is one of the reasons it’s so great. Not every dream has to be meaningful, especially because the vast majority of dreams in real life are nonsense. This is our first glimpse into Steven’s strange dream powers, and alongside non-magical dream episode Lion 3, it sets the perfect storytelling tone as these powers grow. If all of Steven’s dreams are loaded with plot stuff, there’s nothing special about interrupting them with even more plot stuff. The field in Lion’s mane and the pool in Malachite’s mind stand out because they contrast with your bog-standard mixed up movie dream, and I’m so glad the crew avoided the temptation to double dip.

So away we go to the waking world! Chille Tid brings back two major elements that have been missing since Full Disclosure. The first is Malachite, whom the Crystal Gems seemed to have forgotten about beyond some lip service in Love Letters. This is frankly Season 2′s biggest flaw: there’s a massive monster with absolute control over water trapped in the same water that borders Beach City, she really oughtta be Priority #1.

Admittedly, her absence is a slightly smaller problem if you watch the episodes in intended order (albeit at the cost of even worse pacing problems at the end of Season 1, in my repeatedly stated opinion). Still, watching in the Official Order gives us seven Malachite-free episodes between Full Disclosure and Chille Tid. That’s seven too many episodes! Even if the reference is small, as it is in Love Letters, Malachite at least deserves a mention or two, especially because we delve into Steven’s worries in Joy Ride and Sworn to the Sword and discuss the events leading up to Malachite in Rising Tides, Crashing Skies. I know she isn’t named until Chille Tid, and I know we can infer that she’s included in Steven’s concerns, but this is a huge threat that warrants a huge response.

While this puzzling lack of focus makes Chille Tid a breath of fresh air, it also makes the Gems’ seemingly sudden interest feel a bit off. An inciting incident within the episode would’ve gone a long way towards fixing this, but considering how well the tone of exhaustion is captured from the onset, this is a problem that would’ve been solved better with preceding episodes building up to it.

To be fair, the episodes we got are good to great; the show chose character over plot, which is a decision I generally agree with, but Steven Universe typically has its cake and eats it too. Oh well, at least Malachite won’t be completely forgotten again after Chille Tid is done, only to come back out of nowhere in the Season 3 premiere to clumsily interrupt another storyline!

The second element that returns in this episode is Steven acting as the single main character. Even including the reordered episodes meant for Season 1, Steven has either shared the spotlight or shunned it completely since Full Disclosure, and will pretty much continue to do so for the rest of the season: from here we get the Week of Sardonyx (which is the Gems’ story), then Nightmare Hospital (which is Connie’s story), Sadie’s Song (which is Sadie’s story), and the rest of the season dominated by the Great and Lovable Peridot.

Full Disclosure, Steven’s Birthday, and Chille Tid are all Steven gets as the solo headliner this season! Which is much less of an issue than Malachite’s absence, as Steven is hardly ignored in other episodes and you won’t see me complaining about developing other characters, but the occasional special focus on a title character that’s actually interesting is nice.

From his dead serious approach to life vests to his self-attributed maxims on sleep, our hero remains a reliable source of Steven-specific humor, but he also has room to explore his relationships with multiple characters instead of just one or two main friends. Where the Gems see Malachite as a threat that needs to be handled, he sees her as Lapis’s newest prison. He gets to be an expert on something that Pearl is bad at, flipping their standard student/teacher dynamic, but still hugs her for comfort after waking up from his nightmare. He’s the impetus for Amethyst at her goofiest when she’s holding him in the water, but also her sincerest when he reveals he’s seeing Lapis in his dreams. And Garnet’s concern for his physical and mental health is reinforced by her insistence that he take a break.



(So yeah, a solo Steven episode is actually more like a general ensemble featuring Steven, as compared to an examination of a specific non-Steven character or group. What can I say, this is a show about relationships.)

While Garnet and Amethyst get some great laughs in and out of Steven’s dreams (the winner is Garnet casually tossing away her life jacket, but Amethyst channeling the Pewter City Gym Trainer in re: light years is a close second), Pearl gets a little extra focus. She has her own nightmare, which may be presented as ridiculous with its pizza imagery and goofy music and Amethyst’s teasing, but highlights just how close Rose always is to her thoughts, and finally explicitly shows that she still resents Greg in modern day (the implication has been obvious for a while, but there’s a power to making subtext text). And this is on the heels of Garnet leaving Pearl behind despite repeated requests to join in, culminating in a telling and desperate “Let me…let us help you! We’re a team!”

Pearl’s actions in the Week of Sardonyx are in no way justified, but Chille Tid subtly lays the groundwork for her feelings of exclusion and desire to latch onto Garnet. I appreciate this especially because the show could’ve gotten away with not doing it, thanks to Pearl’s flaws being well established at this point; with this small bit of foreshadowing, we’re primed for Pearl going a step too far in dealing with her issues. But hoo boy we will get to that in the next few episodes.

For now, let’s just take it easy.

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



How oh how did nobody in the crew remember the Gem Sloop from Cat Fingers ? How is the show bible’s front cover not a picture of the Gem Sloop? Shame on every single person who has ever worked on Steven Universe . What kind of people present Chekhov’s Sloop and never set it out to sea again?



? How is the show bible’s front cover not a picture of the Gem Sloop? Shame on every single person who has ever worked on . What kind of people present Chekhov’s Sloop and never set it out to sea again? Bad people. The answer is bad people. Yes, this gets two slots. Lion may be able to run on water, and Greg may be able to afford yachts in the future, but there’s just no reason to use a generic raft when we’ve established that the Gems have a boat that they’ve bothered to give an official name. It’s not just a sloop, and it’s not even just a Gem Sloop, it’s the Gem Sloop. Pearl has had it in her head this whole time and hasn’t touched it since Cat Fingers .



Gem Sloop. Pearl has had it in her head this whole time and hasn’t touched it since . (Haters will say I’m only obsessing over the Gem Sloop because I like the word “sloop” so much, to which I say…yeah, obviously, so what?)

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

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: I’m a sucker for well-done tone. Although underrated Avatar episode The Chase is the standard-bearer for animated depictions of weariness, Chille Tid does a pretty good job too! It also does right by dreams and nightmares, even if it tries a little too hard to milk comedy from Pearl’s anguish and Garnet’s flippant episode-ending advice; I’d take her call to take a break a bit better if it actually led to any sort of attempt to find Malachite.

Still, this is a great one, folks.

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