“Please understand.”

And here’s the part where we see how Pearl is doing. She’s doing bad. It’s great.

This isn’t to say that I enjoy watching Pearl suffer, especially when she’s this annoying. Seriously, she’s a nightmare; seeing her figuratively and literally step over people in a scramble to redeem herself would be vintage cringe comedy if Friend Ship was trying to be funny about it. Instead it’s a painful cocktail of awkward and pathetic that’s everything Pearl should’ve been in Historical Friction.

But it’s great that she’s this much of a mess because she should be this much of a mess. Not just morally—although yes, when you act as Pearl does in Cry for Help you ought to feel at least this bad about it—but in terms of what’s true to her character. This behavior is the natural evolution of Pearl’s manic devotion to problem-solving, amplified by being stuck in an unfixable situation. And because she’s gotten off the hook for terrible behavior before, she has no idea what to do when she’s finally called out for her actions.

The solution, her mind, is to shift to a problem she can fix: finding Peridot. I appreciate that her exact methodology, which has something to do with the escape pod Steven found in Joy Ride, is left unsaid, because it doesn’t matter how she does it. What matters is that she has spent a ton of time and energy on something that has nothing to do with her betrayal of Garnet. She wants to blame all her problems on some single enemy she can fight, and if that sounds familiar, then, well:

It’s not news by now that Gems aren’t so different from us normals, despite their immense age and alien magic. But even after a full season of watching them yell and grieve and hug and make mistake after mistake, the Week of Sardonyx sees them at their most human, because our three stubborn rocks are forced to make a change. Pearl, whose resilience has survived several cracks, looks ready to burst. Garnet, who’s been the solid foundation the team has always relied on, sees no path forward. And this episode sees both come out on the other side.



But a crisis doesn’t always break people down before they can get back up, which we see in the character that I’d argue changes the most over the course of the week. Amethyst, who craves approval from her elder Gems and is wracked with doubt, who’s been the lowest ranking Gem for the vast majority of her life and has proven to be a loving but insecure role model for Steven, is thrust into the role of emotional leader and rises to the occasion.

Amethyst is the first to realize what’s wrong. She puts aside her rivalry with Pearl to talk things out with her. She lets herself be vulnerable when she needs support from Vidalia. She prompts Garnet and Pearl to communicate instead of just waiting for the storm to pass. She takes the time to encourage Steven for summoning three shields in one day. And more than anything else, she shows a remarkable new capacity for patience, even with Peridot: her casual response to Peridot’s raving victory speech (“Hey, uh, this is Amethyst…”) is one of Michaela Dietz’s best-ever reads. This might not be her story, but she more than earns the arc’s exhausted final line. Neither Steven nor Amethyst realize it until What’s Your Problem?, but this is when she becomes the most mature Crystal Gem.

Speaking of insecurity and change and Peridot, yeah, is the last we’ll see of the clod as an unambiguous antagonist. Even if our next arc transforms her into one of my favorite characters on the show, I do miss how much fun the animators have with her bag of tricks. Her helicopter rotor/spider leg/laser gun fingers are magnificent comedy relief, and between the fingers and her telescreens and her detachable foot, we get the perfect antagonist for an arc about the Gems’ humanity: an almost literal robot.

That said, Shelby Rabara’s performance destroys the notion that Peridot is all machine. Where Charlyne Yi gives Ruby overblown but realistic bursts of rage, Rabara dilutes Peridot’s own sputtering frustration with portions of venomous ham, and it’s perfect. Even after she switches sides, she just sounds like a scheming villain when she’s mad (or excited or confused or really any big emotion but sad). I’ll get into it more come Catch and Release, but Peridot’s mechanical motifs pull double duty here, contrasting both the Gems’ emotional turmoil and her own imminent foray into humanity when she loses her limbs.

Now, all this stuff is fine and good, but the elephant in the flying saucer is that Friend Ship can be read in two wildly different ways, depending on how you interpreted Pearl’s actions in Cry for Help, and one of them makes this a terrible episode. While I don’t read Pearl’s betrayal as rape, if you read it that way then the resolution of the Week of Sardonyx is horrific: the lesson of Garnet’s talk with Pearl is that if your rapist feels bad then the onus is on you to make them feel better. Which is the kind of lesson that would shove this right beneath Island “Abuse is Okay Sometimes” Adventure as my least favorite episode of the series.

It would be absurd for me to say the solution to this problem is to just not interpret Pearl’s act that way, because I’m not the boss of how other people watch stuff. But because I didn’t interpret it that way, I can only see whatever negative reaction this episode creates through the lens of “okay, sure, I’d be mad too if that was my take, but that’s not what I think the message is.” Because to me, the great thing about Pearl’s betrayal being fusion-specific is that it makes the action show-specific, or more accurately character-specific. There are universal messages here about consent and forgiveness and talking things out, but at its core this is a story about Garnet and Pearl reaching a new understanding with each other, and when all’s said and done I always go with the interpretation that tells the better story.

The framing of their climactic conversation is fantastic. Joe Johnston and Jeff Liu lean into the cramped environment by focusing on meaningful parts of Garnet and Pearl as they speak: Pearl’s reedy arms hugging herself and darting eyes unable to look at the person inches away from her, Garnet’s angry fists unclenching to reveal her gems. And when we finally zoom out to see their full bodies in a tiny box in the middle of a black screen, Garnet tells Pearl something we’ve heard her tell Steven when she revealed a massive truth about herself, that we’ve heard Rose tell Pearl in a flashback to their decision to stay and fight on Earth: “Please understand.”

On their own, these two words are a decent turning point in the conversation, but with context they just kill me. I said it in Future Vision and I’ll say it again here: when Garnet really needs to reach someone, she emulates Rose. It simultaneously highlights that she’s a strong leader and that she’s still learning, and learning from someone that was hardly perfect. If Steven’s story is about what it’s like to be a kid growing up, the Gems’ story is about what it’s like to be an adult growing up. And as an adult growing up, yeah, it’s a hell of a thing to watch on a cartoon.

(For those of you who think Rose Quartz was an irredeemable manipulative monster, bear in mind that in Can’t Go Back, we get to see Blue Diamond’s version of the phrase: “You must understand.” Rose was far from perfect, but the shift from a demand to a plea changes everything.)

Nobody can change what Pearl did, but Garnet’s solution is to reach an understanding. To allow Pearl room to explicitly say how she feels, to illuminate her own point of view, and to clarify that there’s no way out, but there’s a way through. We see immediately that Pearl learns her lesson, asking for consent even when Garnet already suggested fusion and they’re literally about to be crushed to death, and we’re rewarded with a lovely understated reappearance by the week’s title character. The experience that was once showy and false is now serene.

And then they all yank Peridot’s foot off as a family because this is still Steven Universe and Steven Universe has a deep respect for silliness. Talking is important, but so is doing, and it’s neat to see the Crystal Gems get a concrete win against a villain who’s slipped through the cracks time and again.

Peridot’s missing foot will lead to her desperate final plan, which will lead to her conversion (brought about by Steven’s empathy and probably inspired by watching his friends overcome Pearl acting like a villain), which will lead to the world being saved. Small ripples can make big waves, and that’s important for the plot of the show, but it’s also important for the characters. Amethyst’s hidden depths have been revealed and will continue to inform her actions. Garnet will treat Peridot’s fusionphobia with grace and a desire to educate, when possible, instead of shutting down any possibility for an enemy to make a change. And Pearl has never again reverted to the toxic selfish sadness of Space Race and Rose’s Scabbard and Sworn to the Sword and Cry for Help, even though sadness itself will never truly be done with her.

It’s an imperfect ending. I do think that Pearl could’ve contributed more to the resolution, and that we would’ve had more time to flesh things out if her specific brand of frenzied anguish was established in its own episode. And Steven’s “Have a nice weekend!” is a weird misfire of a joke that’s too unusually unfunny to defuse the tension of the first act properly, which normally wouldn’t matter but really sticks out in such a dramatic episode. But we got a full week telling one story that has lasting consequences, and that sort of tight serialization is only going to get stronger as the show continues.

Future Vision!

According to Peridot, Earth has an expiration date. It turns out she’s not kidding!



The conclusion of Volleyball in Steven Universe Future sees Pearl turn from comforted to comforter in a similar fuse-to-escape sequence. It’s a gorgeous scene, enhanced by evoking Friend Ship without referencing it outright to show just how far Pearl has come.

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

Like I said, not perfect. There are some final episodes of storylines or miniseries that I relish in rewatching on their own merits (Over the Garden Wall and Book 3 of Korra come to mind, as does Steven Universe’s own Jailbreak), and this isn’t one of them. Still, I hardly hate it, and while this sounds like a backhanded compliment, it genuinely could have been much worse considering the load it had to bear.

Top Fifteen



Love ‘em



Like ‘em

Enh

No Thanks!

4. Horror Club

3. Fusion Cuisine

2. House Guest

1. Island Adventure