Buddy’s Book is a subtle one, setting up lots of details for later. But like every Connie episode the dialogue is just amazing. The kinds of things she gets wrong due to her rigorous and enthusiastic tunnel-vision. Also note the diamond theme here.

That’s a whisper of a detail. The music in this show is just so important for communication, and the choice to work in the Diamond music, quietly, while Steven and Connie mill around the library… it’s so fascinating, in terms of the signals it trickles in about what’s happening

Makes it sound a little Twin Peaks, if you’re not quite keyed into the cues.

Suppose it helps that this is one of the few times the show reflects something I recognize from my own childhood. When I wasn’t being dumped in a shopping mall alone all night, I used to wander the stacks of various libraries while my father researched forgotten publications.

Those goddamned stepstools. You can’t even push them effectively. And they smell and feel so odd.

The Crystal Temple was ruined even a couple hundred years back. Though, notably, the dunes didn’t yet stretch up to her entrance.

Hadn’t noticed the later call-back. When Steven first presents Connie with Buddy’s book, she gets all dramatic as she does. Then in “Steven’s Dream,” when he asks her to bring him the book — well, of course. It’s this attention to detail, you know.

The show is roughly 45% foreshadowing, 45% callback, and 10% tears.

Either Dewey’s name changed over time or Buddy isn’t so good at spelling.

Likewise their shared image of Buddy as Jamie in full “drama zone” harks back to “Love Letters” — even as the story here builds on the play in “Historical Friction.” Neither of those is particularly eventful, so it’s tempting to dismiss “Buddy’s Book” by association. But, no.

This is actually a super important episode not just for establishing the season arc that people insist doesn’t exist and setting up or contextualizing random bits of mythology, but for looping those earlier episodes back in and showing how they’re actually relevant.

And… I mean. Unreliable history, right? Everything about this episode deals with the ways in which we get the past wrong, and change stories for our convenience, down to picturing Buddy as Jamie and the CGs first by their modern incarnations then as shown in a painting earlier

Through the whole story, Buddy keeps recording details of Gem history all wrong. Some he gets right; not many. The very last beat in the story addresses how Steven and Connie pictured Buddy very differently from the reality, and how they kind of prefer their version of the truth.

Which as an opening volley to the show’s third act is pretty fucking important.

Half the episodes in this show seem to basically contain all the elements for every future episode. Like, pick any random episode and there’s a good chance you can work out an argument for why It All Starts Here. That’s more true than usual for “Buddy’s Book,” though. Endgame.

It’s not a particularly eventful episode, and maybe that’s the thing that trips people up this season. So much of the season is people sitting and talking and learning and thinking things through, and figuring out how they feel. It’s… drama, you know. As opposed to melodrama.

Guess I’m also always a sucker for ancient texts and maps and artifacts and whatnot. So wrapping the fragments of Gem history that we know in a human context, more clearly illustrating how they’ve affected and influenced the development of the world, is super interesting to me.

This is fun, speaking of new details. The beefsteak strawberry. I could do with a few of those.

“Fare-thee-well!” from a penny farthing. Have I mentioned the internalized wordplay on this show?

Wish I had a library near here. Wish I lived in a place that was livable.

For a show without scripts, this show really loves its words.

Bits of this remind me of Edward Gorey.

Or, you know, this.