Daily Archives: Monday, February 4th, 2019

Oh good Lord again. This Garbanzo business, what does one imagine it could possibly serve to foreshadow? “It’s a miracle! Pinto has healing pow-uh, -ers? W-, why’d you nudge me and wink, like this was all…”

So what on Earth is the point of Onion Gang? Well. Keeping in mind the general themes of this season, I think we get at it here:

Steven: Woo, no more weirdo friends. Let’s see. (leans over balcony) I bet my best friend Connie’s free. (dials her number) Hey, Connie! It’s me, Steven. I was wondering if you-Um, no there’s no mission. I wanted to hang out. You’ve-got to do back to school shopping. Oh, okay. Say hi to the pencils for me! (hangs up) Well, I bet Peedee wants to hang. (Steven pauses, when a text from Peedee reads, “Can’t hang out. End of summer work rush.” No big deal. I’m sure someone else is free. (Scrolls down his contact list, which is half empty) Umm… Oh. Looks like the lonely boy with no friends his age was actually.. Steven.

(In the morning, Steven is lying on the couch by the windowsill, when Onion knocks on the screen door)

Steven: No, Onion! Just leave me alone! (turns away) You don’t have to play with me anymore.

(Onion walks away for a second, then returns, jumping through the screen of the door, bursting it open, and comes over to Steven)

Steven: What are you doing?! (Onion pulls him down by the foot and begins to drag him) No, Onion! Onion listen! I figured it out! The only reason you hang out with me is cause you feel bad for me, isn’t it? (Onion, shocked, shakes his head) You don’t have to lie to me to protect my feelings! Those kids, out there in the woods. You understand each other and you don’t even talk! They’re your real friends. So just go. I don’t need you to pity me. It’s the one thing I can do by myself.

Notice that last line in particular.

This is how the (relatively few) townie episodes all play out, over the course of season four. They serve to deal less with the townies themselves than with Steven’s ongoing emotional issues through the lens of dealing with others, making them relevant to the season’s ongoing story and themes.

What’s significant is Steven’s relationships with the characters. The common point of all these interactions is Steven, with each specific character serving to elicit a slightly different response due to the different nature of their relationship. Collectively it’s all of these threads, from all of these relationships, that bind Steven to his humanity and illustrate the emotional stakes, for him, of the decisions that he makes. It’s not important that we spend a long time with Jamie in particular for Jamie to serve as one of many faces binding Steven to this life.

Which goes back to what I was saying about the townie episodes in season four existing less to build up the world, as they tend to in earlier seasons, than to serve as mirrors and outlets for Steven’s changing emotional state.

They’re there to show us what’s going on with Steven.

We will return to this.

“Last One Out of Beach City” is a standout episode, and a moment of intense growth for Pearl, but from Steven’s perspective it’s also disconcerting. Pearl, for all her drama, has always been the stable domestic presence. Closest thing to a mom Steven has ever had.

And here, he can’t even have a quiet night in to play a puzzle. It’s like a weird dream, how Pearl decides to act here. And Steven gets dragged along the whole time, not entirely willingly, getting more unsettled as the night goes on.

It’s not exactly a bad experience, and it’s good for Pearl and exciting and all, so he’s enthusiastic as well, but it’s a weird night that can only contribute to the growing unease. As signaled by the new ending music that appears in “Mindful Education.”

A troubling thing in hindsight is how much Steven keeps buried and unexamined. It builds up.

The whole Holo-Pearl as Depression thing in “Steven the Sword Fighter” is about as direct as the show gets in terms of discussing unreliable parenting, though it arcs around to touch the topic whenever she has one of her breaks.

In lines like the “almost let me die” thing, there’s a repressed mania going on there while he struggles to remain optimistic and supportive, the way he figures he’s expected to be. But the fact he’s even saying it, and the tone of his voice, and the look on his face… yikes.

So many of the show’s best comedic lines become much less funny when you start to think about them closely.

“Ha ha ha… wait… uh, Jesus Christ. Um.”

But then, I guess that’s how comedy is supposed to work.

There tend to be several levels of weight and implication to most of the humor in this show. But then you take a step away from the immediate scenario and its rhythms and you realize, you know, that’s actually pretty disturbing, there.

Unfiltered Truth Drop is kind of the default joke model on this show.

Going back to the early seasons with better knowledge of the characters’ psychologies and dynamics and backgrounds and personal traumas, and lots of the humor lands very differently. It’s all on-point but it’s biting and uncomfortable where it used to just seem like banter.

In the extended intro, I always thought Steven’s line in the bridge section was a bit… off, and potentially troublesome. With the arc of the series clear now,, looks like that was the intention, though? Actually, they’re all kind of… not healthy.

There are a few issues. Steven’s a sweet kid, and he takes everyone else’s stuff on board and doesn’t know how to process his own feelings about it. But he’s been handed over to a bunch of psychologically fucked space aliens with no social skills, who can’t see what’s happening.

One of the only times the show gets overt about what’s going on with him, prior to his slow-motion meltdown over series four, is in “Joy Ride,” where the Cool Kids treat him like someone his own age for once, and he feels little enough responsibility to slightly open up to them.

Even then he’s not sure what he’s saying, but what little he does admit to, and in the offhanded way he does it… pretty much appalls them.

Anyway, about the music—when “Mindful Education” aired, the new ending did not go unnoticed. The contemporary comment here says it all.

That unease continues through all of seasons four and five, as Steven’s problems grow. It’s only in the last few episodes, once he reaches Homeworld, that the music lays down its cards and reveals what it’s actually doing.

Anyway. Though far from an original observation, Pearl as Recovering Disaster Gay is one of the best things in the show so far. Somehow I never noticed that was the Big Donut they stopped at. I thought it was just some random gas station along the way.

But. Yeah, of course it’s a fucking doughnut shop. Because…

It’s impossible to overstate my appreciation for the background artists.

And yeah, Rebecca Sugar confirmed that Pearl’s new regeneration is in response to her experiences in this episode. This is where her self-concept has been sitting ever since, more or less.

With all this in mind, “Future Boy Zoltron” makes a hell of a lot more sense. It’s far from one of the show’s greatest episodes, but it’s genial enough until Mr. Frowny turns up, after which it gets… weird, and uncomfortable.

In particular, as a follow-up to “Mindful Education,” the trouble with Mr. Frowny here, it… like. This is not going to be an easy season, okay. By way of Garnet’s future-vision, the foreshadowing is made literal in the same way as “Steven and the Stevens” resetting the pilot.

Incidentally, Mr. Frowny’s original character design was… rather different. Also, lots of people read in the last part, though even with that knowledge and looking for it, the subtext is super unclear. But, guess it’s fully intentional!

I know I had more to say on this topic. I can’t seem to figure out where I put my notes, though. Hm. Will update if I come across them again.