I gave all these episodes a second shot today, and I still feel that almost everyone of them besides "
Your Mother and Mine" were incredibly lame.
Your typical townie/filler fluff.
Like who cares about Sadie's conflict with her mother? That character hasn't made a major appearance in over 60+ episodes, and instead of SHOWING us how overbearing she can be (
like you should in a visual medium...) they opt to have Sadie vaguely tell us about it which makes it very hard to form any sort of meaningful connection to this incongruity between the two of them. So "The Big Show" just ends up becoming this episode with negligible stakes and Steven randomly filming people talking about trivial stuff while, in the back of their minds,
the audience knows that much more interesting, exciting, and dangerous things are happening off screen.
Pool Hopping was also incredibly dull, and another instance of wasted potential in this series.
So you're telling me that episode starts off with Garnet randomly working at the Big Donut? Oooo, interesting start!
Also Garnet confesses to Steven that she's been feeling very inadequate as a leader because his string of bold decisions are evading her future vision? Oh man, I love it!
The only problem is...everything between those happenings is just plain boring. The two characters deliver some pizza in a super short visually uninteresting montage, and then go to Vidalia's garage to make a tired titanic joke...yawn. Why does the crewniverse often create these interesting premises and then choose to do the most boring things with them? Like...is their budget $5 or something? Do creative things, it's a cartoon with aliens and magic, you can do almost anything!
Outside of two admittedly funny/cute gags (
Pearl's heckling at the improv show, Garnet overworking Greg on the tennis court), Letters to Lars was an absolute snoozefest. It was mainly centered around Mayor Dewey who I can't even pretend to care about, and I feel like they completely botched the interactions between the gems and townies. Pearl could've been replaced with a little old loopy woman with a funny voice who never had a cell phone before and the joke would still work...Peedee Fryman could've had the same argument about improv with Jamie that Peri had and nothing would be different.
What a bummer.
This show is starting to feel like someone haphazardly duct-taped Clarence and Hey Arnold to the original Star Wars trilogy, it feels so messy.
Maaaan, that half-hour special in May better be fuckin' amazing...
Edit: Also Kate Micucci is awesome but the crewniverse had her in waaaay over her head in that "G-g-g-ghost!" song, it was kind of cringey. :/
