This episode perfectly captures the sensation of going to someone's house as a kid and discovering that their parents don't enforce any rules and you can do anything, as well as the ensuing mix of fear and awe, perfectly.

Minor correction: Toby Haynes isn't the showrunner, he's the director. The show doesn't really have a showrunner as such, it was directed by Toby Haynes, written by Peter Harness (who has more to do with the plot points) and produced by Nick Hirschkorn.

The slave ship scene is amazing - suddenly, we're seeing the horror of colonial Georgian England for what it really is, not just high society in London.

1. Alone Together
2. Rose's Scabbard
3. Sworn to the Sword
4. On the Run
5. We Need To Talk

I think that it certainly makes a point about consent, and the fundamental wrongness of what Peridot was doing does seem like it has a lot of parallels to rape, but I think the metaphor's broad enough that it isn't just about that.

Well, we've seen gems physically break up numerous times before - we almost saw it tonight. I think that's what it would look like, at least on a physical level.

I can't imagine how they're going to wrap up this plot in a way that doesn't give everyone on planet Earth nightmares through the collective unconscious.

What I think this show does really masterfully is couching its worldbuilding (which is great) inside character moments. In most shows, the point of this episode would be to reveal more about the nature of the Gems and more about what fusion is. In SU, the point of the episode is how this affects Garnet, and how that…

Both of them remind me a lot of the stuff in Akira - the suggestions of unnaturally distorted body parts and the sense of experiments gone horribly awry (the last one moreso in this than Cat Fingers).

I like the idea that Mayor Dewey is so politically paranoid that, regardless of if he's covering anything up, the mere mention of the words "cover up" in his presence make him call out his goons.

Yeah, I don't really see what's upsetting about that - she's not even disparaging being single, she's pointing out that Jasper's attitude (being angry about people in relationships, essentially) is often the attitude of single people who don't want to be single.