What we learned from Rising Tides, Crashing Skies

It was the fun episode, the silly little documentary Ronaldo slapped together (as well as his main portfolio piece for the position of inter-species negotiator). A couple of brief pieces of dialogue, delivered by Pearl, were still enough to give us some interesting facts:

• Monsters are drawn to the Crystal Gems
• The temple, though extra-dimensional, still exists in proximity to Beach City

So let’s start our analysis of #StevenBomb2.0 with the simplest entry we’ll have: considering two facts that have just been added to what we know about the Crystal Gems.

Magic beings are indeed drawn to us

This is an old idea. Even back in the pilot episode the idea that magical beings could detect and follow magical stuff was introduced. The very first episode, Gem Glow, had the Crystal Gems assuming that the centipeetle mother was trying to get into the temple. In Beach Party the puffer fish was definitely being attracted to either the Crystal Gems or the temple.

The nature of this attraction could be the subject for speculation but there’s not much to go on. Now that it’s been clearly established that this is happening, though, we can start to watch out for hints about why the corrupted Gems seek out the Crystal Gems and their temple.

We’ll have to move all the bubbles

This bit of information, that moving out of Beach City would also mean relocating the things inside the temple rather than simply moving the door, was very new. The temple is very much a mystery, with not much information at all being revealed about it. (It was a big enough deal to see the large expanses of solid rock in Reformed.)

When The Test aired we wondered whether the space inside the temple was finite or not and it seems that the answer is probably yes: if the areas inside the temple are all inter-connected and the temple intersects with the area around Beach City then there is probably a limit to the amount of space inside (though you could create universe geometries where the space inside is still infinite).

There is obviously at least some allowance for variance on the entrance: the same door can lead to various rooms, far distant from each other, inside the temple even though it occupies a single point in Beach City.

Probably the most telling thing, however, is what Pearl didn’t say. Her objection wasn’t that they couldn’t protect the bubbles without a temple, merely that they would have to move them. Assuming that Pearl wasn’t simply stating the first part of the problem (with an unstated “and we have nowhere to move them to”), that leaves us with two big possibilities that both mean the Crystal Gems are just fine with regard to potential bases: either there are other protected sites already around that they know of and could move into, or the Crystal Gems retain the ability to make a new extradimensional residence should the need arise.