We had questions yesterday, when we talked about what we learned from Horror Club. Sunday is a day of speculation: taking those questions and wondering aloud to ourselves about what it could all mean. Only time will tell what the real answers are, but we’re pretty sure that these questions will be addressed at least somewhat.
We have two big questions: why didn’t the gem in Horror Club reform when it was removed from the wall, and what was it doing in the lighthouse in the first place?
Why didn’t it reform?
It used to be quite simple: assuming that the gem had been there for a week or two, the expected response to being removed from its bubble or the object it was stuck in was an immediate formation of a physical form. This happened with the centipeetle in Monster Buddies, Lapis Lazili in Mirror Gem, and the gem shards in Secret Team. Each time it took just a second or two for the reformation to begin, indicating that the gem had been “fully charged” during its wait and merely suppressed from creating a body.
The lighthouse gem didn’t. It spent almost two minutes projecting an image and sound, but that’s not going to take very much energy when compared to forming a body. Either the gem lacked the ability to create a body, or it could have made one but chose not to.
If the gem lacked the ability to reform, the easy explanation is a lack of energy. As mentioned, its projecting of the memory of Ronaldo and Lars was a low-energy option. If it expended a lot of energy in its efforts to attack Lars and lure them to the basement, perhaps it was simply exhausted.
Lapis being meant to power the mirror but reforming immediately might be a mark against this explanation, but the mirror probably doesn’t require much power: all it needs to do is be able to see and hear, then play what it saw and heard back. Her gem provides far more power than the mirror needs, but she’s still needed as an intelligent – though magically shackled – mind to be able to interpret and follow orders. Throwing objects around and morphing the wall into a mouth would be a much larger power draw.
It’s also possible that the gem in the lighthouse is a different kind of gem. This isn’t likely: it displayed some kind of an ability to communicate, and if the gems of fully sapient Gems are used to power objects routinely enough for Pearl to hand them out like toys then it’s unlikely that there exists a kind of gem that only powers objects. We don’t know much about Gems, however, so the possibility remains open for now.
The more interesting object is that the gem could have formed a body but chose not to. Of course part of what makes it interesting is because there are so many possibilities, so it’s really hard to narrow them down. Chief among them, we think, is a desire not to confront the Crystal Gems. We’ve seen how they reacted to Lapis Lazuli and Peridot, so another Gem walking around would certainly cause confrontation. Perhaps this Gem in particular has a reason to think she would have her gem destroyed if the Crystal Gems had to fight her. She does, after all, have the gem that is on the money. She was probably a Gem of great significance earlier in history.
How did it get there?
This is the even bigger question. The rebellion has been over for thousands of years, but the lighthouse above the temple is probably only a couple of hundred years old. The wall the gem was in was wooden and had a pipe inside it, so the gem pretty much had to have been placed in there a very, very long time after the rebellion was over.
That leaves pretty much one easy guess for who put it there: Rose Quartz. We know she’s in the habit of keeping secrets from the other Crystal Gems—rather than leave them with the light cannon for emergencies, for instance, she entrusted it to Greg. Even Steven seems to instinctively keep secrets from them without even noticing that he’s doing it (him choosing to watch the video tape in Lion 3: Straight to Video at the Big Donut rather than in his room is the big example).
If the lighthouse gem (which we are very much resisting the urge to call Diamond, because Diamond is assumed to be of great significance indeed) was placed there by Rose Quartz, then its presence is probably linked to its lack of desire to reform. Could it have been one of the Gems Rose came closest to healing, so she placed it somewhere close at hand? Bound into an abandoned lighthouse, it would seem to have little opportunity to harm anyone. It also seemed docile enough to – mostly – keep itself out of trouble when others were around.
It also seemed quite lucid: the memory it replayed was more than just an explanation for why it was mad at Lars. Either it considered itself a friend of Ronaldo, just like the centipeetle considered itself of Steven, and considered Lars hurting Ronaldo to be just as bad as Lars hurting it, or it understood the importance of the event in some other way. No matter its reason for showing the memory, the lighthouse gem is clearly not some slavering monster.
2 comments
The lighthouse gem did seems to have sentient behavior just like the mirror Lapis was in. Perhaps it’s a object like the Desert Glass but it’s capable of listening. It does have quite the array of powers seeing it can both control inanimate objects and replay images from the past.. It is a big question about how or why it got there.
I can’t see why Rose would put it there though considering she could just bubble it. It’s a definite strange case on how it got there.
Author
It got there somehow though. Oh, what if it is Diamond? I want season two so much. I’m really hoping for there to be a lot more Gems running around in season two.