02 Guidance
Original air date: 12/8/19
Official synopsis: Amethyst has been helping Little Homeschool Gems find jobs on the boardwalk, but Steven isn’t sure about her approach.
This is top candidate for funniest episode in Steven Universe Future. The jokes and visual gags are some of my favorites in the whole Steven Universe arc. The episode ends up being a light-hearted treatment of some themes that will return in a more serious way later.
Amethyst surprises Steven by taking him to Fish Stew Pizza, where Bixbite works putting her extraordinary cutting skills to use. (Having appeared as a crab monster in the original series, she retains one crab claw that helps her precision cut pizza ingredients.) It turns out that Amethyst brought Steven here not simply to share a pizza, but to tell him about her new mentorship program where she talks to the Gems at Little Homeschool about what they want to do on Earth and pairs them up with jobs suited to their skills.
At Beach City Funland, Gems in this program now work for Mr. Smiley: various Quartzes operate the rides and carnival games, Nephrite does sky writing in Uncle Andy’s plane, Rubies are bodyguards for Mayor Nanefua, and two new characters, Snowflake Obsidian and Little Larimar, make snocones.
Steven is immediately suspicious. It seems like everyone in Amethyst’s program is doing a version of the job they had under the Diamond Authority. It’s not really clear what Steven’s problem with this is, except that he seems to feel like the Gems haven’t been liberated enough. By this logic, it’s not enough for a Ruby to be a bodyguard for someone on Earth; she has to do something completely different than what she was made for.
So that’s what Steven sets out to do. He puts the Quartzes in the pizza shop, Snowflake Obsidian in the plane, Rubies selling flowers, Bixbite (with her razor sharp crab claw!) giving balloons to kids, Nephrite selling snocones, and Little Larimar controlling the roller coaster. It’s Amethyst’s turn to be suspicious, but she doesn’t say much as she follows Steven around, watching him undo all of her work. Steven goes back to Fish Stew Pizza completely satisfied with himself, excited to see everyone change and grow due to his intervention.
Of course, things start to go sideways pretty fast. The Quartzes start assaulting people with pizzas, as do the Rubies with flowers, stealing money from their pockets as payment. Snowflake Obsidian’s plane ride goes haywire, Bixbite accidentally snips off the strings of all her balloons, and Little Larimar’s roller coaster gets stuck in a dangerously high speed loop.
Now that chaos is happening on the boardwalk, Steven goes looking for Amethyst. He finds her sitting calmly in the arcade, sipping snocone syrup from a paper cup like whisky, waiting for him to arrive. Unlike Steven, she saw this coming from a mile away, but also saw the futility of trying to talk him out of his idea. Amethyst had put in a lot of work prior to the start of the episode talking to each of the Gems, trying to figure out what was best for them. Only now does Steven realize that he completely ignored the work she put in, opting instead to just take over her program without putting much thought into it at all. He apologizes and asks her, “Can you help me unhelp all the people I helped?” (One of my favorite lines in the episode.)
Realizing that they need to act urgently to save both the plane from crashing and the roller coaster from going off the tracks, Steven and Amethyst fuse into Smoky Quartz. They manage to bring the plane to safety (ripping the tail off in the process) but the situation with the roller coaster is now out of control—having broken in several places, it looks like the train is now going to run off the tracks. In desperately running to get to it in time, a new Diamond power of Steven’s activates: hyper speed. Suddenly, everything around Smoky Quartz seems to be in slow motion while they run at a normal pace. They manages to pull everyone out of the train in time before it sails over the edge of the tracks and crashes into the ocean. “Sometimes you save the people and the roller coaster crashes into the ocean.” *roller coaster explodes in the distance* “And that’s OK.”
Afterwards, when sitting on the beach reflecting on the day, Amethyst tells Steven why she set up her mentorship program the way she did. “Everyone here has kind of a weird history and I thought they should get to choose how they feel about that.” Steven had wanted to make choices for others about what their future should look like, but Amethyst wants to let them decide it for themselves. When Amethyst asks Steven about his future, he’s reluctant to talk about it. He thinks that he was previously good at helping people, but maybe he’s losing his touch.
Just then, the train from the roller coaster floats by them and we see that Onion had been sitting in the very back the whole time. He seems completely unharmed and unperturbed. Steven jumps to his feet and yells, “Oh no, we forgot to save Onion!!” And then after a beat, “Eh, he’s OK.” (And it’s true, Onion is Eternally OK. I’m pretty sure he’s functionally, if not completely, immortal.)
★
This theme of Steven not being good at helping anymore is going to come up again and again in the episodes to follow. Over the course of Future, it will become apparent that helping people isn’t simply something Steven does because it’s the right thing to do; it’s become his identity. And I don’t think that’s really Steven’s fault. During the original series, Steven jumped in to help others because he loved making people happy. Somewhere along the way, this became an expectation that others put on him and he put on himself. What we see in Future is that he will get pushed to the brink because he ignores his own needs so long that his desperate attempts to help people begin causing harm.
I’m intrigued by Smoky Quartz’s reaction to what happens with the roller coaster, and then Steven’s reaction to Onion later. I can’t tell how much of the Smoky Quartz reaction is coming from Amethyst, who is much more at ease with imperfection that Steven. But at the end, Steven instinctively panics that they didn’t save Onion, even though Onion is fine. Is this Steven growing and becoming more comfortable with imperfection, too? Or is he becoming so burned out on helping others that he starts to care less about the consequences of his actions? Given the events of future episodes, I’d say the latter.
Diamond powers seem to come from the will of the Diamond her/himself. Pink Diamond was destructive until she wanted to stop hurting others and start healing them. Her powers followed suit. Near the end of Future, we’ll see the other three Diamonds switch their powers in a similar fashion. In this way, Steven’s development of hyper speed is a manifestation of his desire to help everyone as quickly as possible, to be in multiple places at once. (We’ll see that come up again soon in A Very Special Episode.) The problem with Steven is that his Diamond powers allow him to bring many of his desires into the world, even when they’re unhealthy or unrealistic.
As I said, this episode is light-hearted and I want to take it in the spirit that it’s given. But wow does Steven leave a path of destruction behind him: the roller coaster, Andy’s plane, traumatized people who were attacked with pizza and flowers and had their money stolen or almost died in a plane or roller coaster crash, and let’s not even think about how much money Fish Stew Pizza lost in wasted ingredients. This episode’s treatment of this all is quite cartoony, but soon we’ll see the series more seriously spell out the implications of Steven’s actions.