What could Maximum Capacity mean?

A character episode. That’s what Maximum Capacity is. And we still find things to speculate about. Someone help us: we think we have a problem.

I’m starting to think our family has a problem

We’re not the only ones with a problem: hoarding behavior appears to run in Greg’s family. His hoarding behavior may very well have been triggered by the loss of the love of his life: Rose Quartz. It’s tough to be certain, though. As a traveling musician he wouldn’t have had nearly enough things to fill up a storage shed before settling down in Beach City, so it’s hard to tell if the stress of losing Rose was the cause of his hoarding or merely coincident with it.

Steven made a very good analogy when shouting at Amethyst after seeing her shapeshifted into the form of his mother, likening her clinging to what Rose meant to her to his father’s habit of never throwing anything away. She does seem to exhibit hoarding behavior as well as Greg, though it’s difficult to tell if it’s pathological or merely a quirk.

While she tries to apologize for her mistreatment of Greg, she does it in part by keeping all of the stuff he had been hoarding and was finally planning to get rid of. This seems to indicate that while Amethyst has recognized she’s having problems and is not working through them well, she still can’t put her clinging to the past aside just yet.

Why the secrets?

Hopefully we’ll very soon have an episode that sheds a little more light on Rose Quartz (spoiler alert: Rose’s Scabbard is next in line after Marble Madness), but even this far into the first season she is still quite the enigma, and we’re not expecting to have all of our questions answered by the time it ends. Crucial to the cohesion of the Crystal Gems and beloved by each of them, she embarked on the project of passing her gem on to a human child apparently without telling any of the others why.

Lion appears to be a very intentional contingency plan that the Crystal Gems know nothing about. He’s taken Steven to a base for training that the other Crystal Gems apparently don’t even know about and his mane contains at least one thing the Crystal Gems would be very interested to know of (the bubbled Bismuth). Most curiously, Steven (who is, we must remember, half made up of Rose’s personality) instinctively tells the Crystal Gems nothing about any of this.

Rose Quartz is so secretive that even after knowing what Steven’s learned about her that the Crystal Gems don’t, we can’t make any good guesses about why she would keep them in the dark. It would be very interesting if just as much as there are things the Crystal Gems don’t want Steven to know, there are things Rose Quartz doesn’t want the others to know. But what could those be? Unknown unknowns at this point, unfortunately.