But she's still the same stoic Garnet we know and love:

Yeah. There's a lot of room for them to do different things with Ronaldo, but they seem to stick to the same routine for him and it's just a *little* too broad.

Peedee's a nice character, but he doesn't have the comedic potential of Lars, Sadie, and the Cool Kids.

This episode kinda reminded me premise-wise of those catch-up episodes you occasionally see in anime to round out the budget, and you can maybe read that into its appearance after "Sworn to the Sword". It does look a little shabby compared to your usual SU episode, although a lot of that's just the framing device. I…

Connie seems like a fairly extroverted person who just hasn't found the right environment yet. Or, I guess in this case, has just found the right environment.

I feel weird for being the guy who uses SU as a replacement MLP rather than a replacement AT.

I liked "Steven the Sword Fighter" better than this one, actually. But I have weird subject adverse reactions to this type of episode that don't really affect most people.

Filler? If this is a filler episode, most cartoons are made up of nothing *but* filler episodes.

Yeah, but I thought that one went without saying.

Not sure what to think of the insignia of the gem empire essentially being NFPA 704.

I think it is, although not a direct one. Most of the references I caught were stuff more relating to Rose, though. The animation when Steven and Connie pull the sword out of Lion's head, the way the roses just pop out of the bushes after the fountain starts flowing…

This is probably the most thoroughly-stacked episode of Steven Universe ever, even just from a technical perspective. We get a new opening animation, new sets, two whole songs, and a whole load of fight scenes to boot. They must have been saving up a lot of sugar (no pun intended) for this one.

Is it just me or is this the first time we've seen the temple hand outside of the title card? They casually decided to drop in so much new content in this episode, it's ridiculous.

I actually watched Eva and Utena over the break, mostly because people kept mentioning "references" in the comment section here. I even finished the last couple of Utena episodes earlier today, which made a great segue into this episode.

In fairness, those Holo-Pearls are not exactly safe practice.

Yep. The new title sequence has so much added bling that it's even a little distracting.

I'm going to need to watch this one again because the first time I was just giddily laughing for eleven minutes.

1. Wake Up / Escape from the Citadel (although in a lot of ways I prefer to see it as the end of the plot-driven S4-5 stuff rather than the beginning of the more introspective S6)
2. Evergreen
3. Astral Plane
4. Ocarina
5. Orgalorg

Yeah, my theory was before this big leadup to the Finnale thing. We'll probably have to wait a fair bit.

You do kinda have to apply Roadrunner logic to the Ice King, a bit.