“It scares me that you can’t talk to me.“

Sandwiched between the Week of Sardonyx and the Cluster Arc is the Mombo Combo, two episodes storyboarded by Raven Molisee and Paul Villeco about Steven and a friend dealing with that friend’s mother issues. This is the good one.

The great thing about Nightmare Hospital is that if you’re like me and you disliked Fusion Cuisine then it works as a strong second draft. We have the same beat of Connie lying to her parents about magic stuff, but she doesn’t force Steven to play along in a harmful way. Steven is still hurt by Maheswaran strictness, this time by getting Rose’s sword confiscated, but it was his idea to give Connie the sword (and her gracious attempts to talk him out of it highlight how well she knows her parents). Even though the stakes are high and we get a sense of how stressed out Connie is, her friendship with Steven is never in doubt. See? They can make a good episode about how Connie reacts to parental pressure!

Now, this doesn’t mean the episode is close to perfect. While I give it as much of a pass as I can for stretching the bounds of the show’s rules, the hospital itself is unrealistic enough to distract me. I get that this is a horror episode and we want heightened tension, but how does this hospital even function? We’re told in Chateau Maheswaran that it’s 7:05 in the evening, and there’s no way the kids spend more than thirty minutes preparing and then warping instantly to the hospital. Even if it’s dark out and the lights go dim after dinner, there’s no way it’s so late that a hospital would be this dead. And even if it was in full night shift mode, why aren’t there any nurses near a room with a convulsing patient? How does nobody notice that two children and a doctor are being attacked by screaming monsters? How did those monsters, who have too many limbs and not enough faces, get confused for humans by anybody, let alone medical professionals?

In a bubble, I can take Dr. Maheswaran being so stubbornly normal that she can’t see that the Cluster Gems are inhuman. She accepted Alexandrite without question, and her inability to acknowledge magic here makes for a nice contrast to Connie’s curiosity about the subject. But when you add that to every other element of the hospital, Dr, Maheswaran’s attitude comes across as just one more ridiculous thing that makes no sense.

Steven Universe is obviously in a different world than ours, but Nightmare Hospital feels like a different world than Steven Universe. We’ve seen so many great horror episodes that fit within the show’s broad atmosphere, so it sticks out when those loose boundaries of realism are somehow broken.

I can set this core problem aside when I watch the episode as a character piece, even though, yeah, Dr. Maheswaran straight-up saying “Mother knows best!” is pushing it. But as a horror episode, despite the Cluster Gems’ creepy movement and horrifying sound design, I’m too busy wondering why nothing makes sense to be scared.

Okay, maybe one exception. It’s not actually the scene where the monster finally jumps out at Connie, despite that being the image you’re looking at. It’s the buildup. The way we know something’s wrong about Dr. Maheswaran’s patient immediately, how it doesn’t have a heartbeat, how the covers move in a way that’s impossible for a human body to push, how it growls when Steven and Connie sneak in to get the sword. The foreboding works because we know that the other shoe is going to drop and have a good idea about what the shoe looks like, we just don’t know when it’s gonna happen. But when it does, all the magic disappears, and we’re left with two kids and a mom fighting two monsters in a hospital without any staffers or cameras or logic.

So, as much as I hate moving away from the horror elements of a horror episode that has the word “Nightmare” in the title, I think time’s better spent talking about what actually works.

Dr. Maheswaran is inherently fascinating for being the first mother we see on the show (not counting Nanefua, mother of grown man Kofi), and she’s such a stark contrast to Greg and the Gems and really every other parent we see that it’s always worth spending time with her. Stick-in-the-mud mothers are done to death in every medium, but Steven Universe features such a diverse array of moms that playing the old trope straight actually makes her stand out. This is a show where moms are people too, and like it or not, some moms are like this.



It helps that she’s low-key hilarious. Her strictness feels so ludicrous and yet so genuine for anyone who’s known anyone with that kind of parent, and Mary Elizabeth McGlynn has a knack for breathing realism into particularly mom-ish lines. I love that the term she uses for a member of a gang is just “gang member.” I love that she can say “internets” without sounding like she’s spouting an outdated meme. And I love how similar she actually is to her daughter: compare her aside about doctor-patient confidentiality with Connie explaining pretty much anything to Steven. Connie, bless her, has always been sort of a square when it comes to specifics, and it’s clear where she gets that from.



The cool thing about this episode, which would be cooler if the horror elements worked better for me, is that Dr. Maheswaran is facing an entirely different fear than the kids. We know that Connie can handle herself, but her mother does not, and it’s scary when your kid is lugging around a sword the size of a cello and you have no idea why. Especially when one of your first impressions of the friend she’s hanging out with was a phone call where Garnet Mom Universe said they were playing swords. (Sorry, playing with swords. Garnet really does her best to try and save Fusion Cuisine.)

It’s not ridiculous for Dr. Maheswaran to keep Connie away from the sword even when monsters are attacking, because what reason does she have to think her daughter won’t get herself killed with it? Connie has been lying about her training for quite some time, and when we see just how scheduled her life is it becomes clear that this lie is more involved than we might’ve thought. The mutual lack of communication comes to a head when Connie finally points out that her glasses don’t have lenses: not only should Dr. Maheswaran have noticed by now, but Connie should have felt able to tell her about her eyes.

All of this might make Dr. Maheswaran look like a terrible mother, but despite her draconian edge it’s clear that she loves her daughter. She shows little fear as far as the monsters are concerned, as for most of the episode she just thinks they’re patients, but she’s worried as all hell about her kid’s safety at every turn. And we learn that this desire for safety is also the root of her controlling nature: in their final conversation, she makes the valid point that she needs to know when Connie’s in over her head so she can jump in. Yes, Connie is a very capable kid, but she’s still twelve.

Hindsight also redeems Dr. Maheswaran quite a bit, as we see Connie go on further adventures with her parents’ blessing. Would I like to see the conversation between the Maheswarans and Pearl about Connie’s training regimen? Yes, of course, I’ll take a full episode of just that, please and thank you. But it’s awesome to see Connie start to thrive as a Crystal Gem Trainee after talking things out here, and to see that subtext eventually spoken aloud as she compares her mother’s growing acceptance to how White Diamond should improve things in Change Your Mind. This doesn’t mean Doc M is Vidalia-level chill now—there’s a reason she’s associated with Yellow Diamond in Jungle Moon—but it’s an excellent start.

The glasses scene also brings us a solid update of how long the show has been going on in-universe. In a medium where it’s fine for Bart Simpson to be in fourth grade for thirty Halloweens, it’s such a relief to hear Connie confirm that An Indirect Kiss happened nearly a year ago. And we’ll get another taste of it in the next episode, which features another Beach-a-Palooza ostensibly about a year after Steven and the Stevens.

Jamie’s off-screen journey to Kansas was our first taste of time concretely passing, but now we have specific references to just how much time has passed. I love when Steven Universe gets specific about certain things that shows are often vague about. Like how in Ocean Gem, Greg doesn’t just get hurt, he breaks his leg. And he didn’t just meet the Gems when he was a young adult, but when he was 22. Or how Steven’s game systems aren’t generic consoles but perfect replicas of a Nintendo 64 and GameCube. These extra details make the world feel real, which, again, makes the weirdness of the hospital more of a bummer.

Connie and Steven are still a blast to watch together, and it’s terrific to see their training pay off in the final monster fight. The choreography is simple in a way that feels true to what they actually might have practiced, rather than a fancy ultra-situational action show maneuver. Jumping on Steven’s shield for a height boost? I buy that they’ve practiced something that practical. Their fights get better and better as the show goes on, and as great as it is to see Stevonnie in combat, I actually tend to prefer the two of them separated for the more visualized cooperation.



Outside of battle, the “-eth” scene is a wonderful encapsulation of their friendship at this stage: Steven’s a goofy kid, and even though Connie points out that his grammar is incorrect, she’s down to be goofy too. And it’s great to see Steven get upset about his mom’s sword being taken without blaming Connie for it at all. We already have a solid conflict going on between Connie and her mother, so it makes sense for the crew to not overcomplicate things by just making Connie and Steven one unit, but it’s still a testament to their solid bond.

Steven’s relationship with his own mother is quiet this season, thanks to the Week of Sardonyx and the Cluster Arc, but episodes like this are a nice way to show how he feels about her without bashing us over the head with it. We could’ve had an episode where Connie complains about her mother and Steven gets self-conscious about it, but instead, all we get from him is his worry about the sword and a small hug. It’s not manipulative or tearjerking or much of a surprise, but it’s just plain sweet, and with Sadie’s Song readying itself to demolish Steven’s usual characterization for eleven minutes, it’s nice to have a reminder that he’s capable of being sweet.

Future Vision!



I mentioned the connections to White and Yellow, but while White may be more similar to Dr. Maheswaran’s perfectionist control freak, I’m all in on the Yellow Diamond comparison from Jungle Moon. She’s also a perfectionist control freak, but it’s clearer that her icy exterior hides the emotional motives for her actions. And Doc’s phone call after confiscating the sword gets a nice extra bit of oomph after hearing Stevonnie’s bitterness about being ignored.



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

This is a breath of fresh air compared to Fusion Cuisine, and works especially great alongside Jungle Moon, but I can’t really get over how disappointed I am with the horror, considering how great the Cluster Gems are and how little we see of them. This could’ve been in my top fifteen with a little tweaking.

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4. Horror Club

3. Fusion Cuisine

2. House Guest

1. Island Adventure