10 Prickly Pair
Air Date: 12/28/19
Official synopsis: leaving Little Homeschool, Steven has found a new hobby, plants.
This episode, which completes the first half of the series, shows the aftermath of Steven's decision to stop being involved with Little Homeschool. It has one of the simplest plots of all the episodes in Steven Universe Future and marks a subtle but important turning point in the series: Steven's emotional alienation from Garnet, Amethyst, and Pearl.
The episode begins in Steven's geodesic greenhouse, where the Gems are bringing him some gardening supplies. This episode is set some time in the weeks or months after Steven left Little Homeschool and it seems like the Gems have not interacted regularly with him in a while. They are impressed with the progress his garden has made, but he insists that he's just growing things the old-fashioned way and not using his magical saliva. The Gems compliment Steven on his garden work as a way to get some "me time," but that's not the way Steven sees it. He tells them that he's literally named his plants after his friends and seems to be trying to draw emotional support from them. Unlike people, plants are rooted in one place and can't leave--or so he thinks.
The Gems are rightly weirded out that Steven is treating his plants this way. This is probably the first episode in the series where the other characters have an inkling that Steven is Really Not OK. After Steven's meltdown in the previous episode, his friends seemed to brush it off, thinking that the matter was solved, but the Gems are now seeing that this may be a deeper problem. They gently try to ask Steven if he needs any help, but he insists that he's fine. Reluctantly taking his word for it, they leave, but not before Garnet tells Steven to keep an eye on his cactus.
Side note: the single most unsatisfying thing to me about this series is the way that Garnet's future vision works. There are several catastrophes through Steven Universe Future that I think she should have been able to see coming, like Bluebird's attack on Steven or the cascading consequences of Connie's rejection of Steven's proposal or the outcome of this episode. My most generous interpretation of this, which is never stated directly, is that Garnet can foresee what's happening outwardly, but, not being human, doesn't understand the implications of it for Steven.
After the Gems leave, Steven accidentally gets some saliva on a piece of cactus that he's trying to root. He leaves for a bit and when he comes back upstairs, the little cactus has become sentient, like Pumpkin or the watermelon folk from the original series. Steven is delighted at this development, because it now means that he has a plant buddy who can actually return his affection. He takes the cactus onto the beach that evening and talks to it about the inner struggles he's been having recently. The next morning, Steven discovers the cactus has a power that Pumpkin and the watermelon folk do not: it can talk. He's excited to show this to the Gems, but less excited when he realizes that the cactus--now named Cactus Steven--is repeating back to them what Steven had shared on the beach the previous evening. He quickly returns Cactus Steven to the greenhouse.
None of this keeps Steven from continuing to monologue, though. In Cactus Steven's presence, he talks about his frustrations with the Gems and why he doesn't feel like he can share his feelings with them before realizing that Cactus Steven will almost certainly repeat this back to the Gems if given the chance. Steven puts Cactus Steven under a box and leaves. Outside the greenhouse, Amethyst tries to approach Steven and ask if everything is OK. He insists that he's fine. She tells him that they're there for him if he needs any help.
That evening, Steven returns to the greenhouse and finds Cactus Steven pissed off and sprouting limbs. Steven doesn't want to let the Gems know what's happening, so he just leaves Cactus Steven alone in the greenhouse overnight. By the morning, Cactus Steven has grown into a life-sized Steven cactus who also contains all of Steven's angst. Steven gets angry, Cactus Steven mirrors Steven's anger back at him, and things keep escalating until they get into a fight. The Gems arrive and Steven tries to hide the fact that he's currently in a knock down drag out with a cactus, but he can't hide it for long. Inevitably, Cactus Steven begins repeating the things to the Gems that Steven doesn't want them to hear.
Since taking damage in the fight just makes him stronger, eventually Cactus Steven towers over everyone and has several heads, arms, and legs. The Gems don't make much progress against Cactus Steven's abilities, in part because they don't understand why he's saying these very specific insults about them.
Steven finally realizes that he's the sole cause of Cactus Steven's aggression, as Cactus Steven only mimics what he does. He pulls a classic Steven moment where he apologizes for treating Cactus Steven poorly and gives him a (very painful) hug. Cactus Steven then blooms all over with pink flowers and leaves. Steven wants Cactus Steven to stay, but Cactus Steven finally does something for himself: he says no, gives Steven one of his flowers, and bursts out of the front of Steven's house, never to be heard from again.
The Gems ask Steven if there's anything he needs to talk about, and the episode ends with Steven's reply: "I think I've said enough."
★
If Pumpkin and the Watermelon Stevens are projections of Steven's inner self at a simpler time in his life, Cactus Steven is the embodiment of Steven's current struggles. Although desperate for connection, Steven has started pushing away the people who are closest to him because he can't deal with the sadness of being abandoned by his other friends. As Shep rightly pointed out in Little Graduation, Steven needs his friends to help him understand who he is and what he's going through. The last thing he needs is "me time." What looks self-care from the outside is just isolation. However, as much as he needs help, he regards the three people who are in the best position to help him almost with contempt. He hates that Garnet and Amethyst give him advice, and he can't trust Pearl to listen without making it about her.
Cactus Steven is a pretty transparent metaphor for who Steven is right now: prickly, projecting his feelings onto other people, not having a sense of self separate from those around him.
One of the most important things about this series is that it shows how someone who is struggling can be failed by everyone around them, even when they are surrounded by loving friends and family. Here, when the Gems witness Steven literally trying to get his emotional needs met by plants, they understand that it's unhealthy behavior but don't know what to do, or even that something needs to be done. In Little Graduation, none of Steven's friends follow up with him after the dome drama, just dusting themselves off and going home like nothing happened--even after Steven's emotional pain manifested a potentially lethal situation.
I think it's difficult to see what a big turning point Little Graduation is until after watching Prickly Pair. In the former, Steven subconsciously makes a huge, pink, geodesic bid for connection that gets gently but definitively rejected. Steven's friends still love him, but we realize that they still see him as the little kid who follows people around and tries to get them to feel warm fuzzies. At the end of the night, they essentially pat him on the head and walk away to lead their own lives. (I'm not saying that they're wrong to do so, although I would hope that some of them would have stuck around if they truly understood the danger Steven is in.) As a result, in Prickly Pair, Steven has now internalized the idea that he shouldn't need to depend on anyone or have anyone depend on him. Of course it makes sense that, as Steven tries to gaslight himself into complete emotional independence, he would be delighted that he'd created a tiny sentient version of himself to talk to. It also makes sense why that tiny version of himself becomes a many-headed monster.
I also want to point out one small moment at the beginning of the episode: one of the plants that Steven names is Connie. Aside from a mention at the very beginning of the series, she has been absent and will not come back into Steven's world until two episodes from now. As the only human who can really understand what Steven's been through, he needs her the most. Soon, Steven will veer from complete separation from Connie to total dependence and that's where things will start to go off the rails.