The fate of the Galaxy Warp and the flask robonoids’ work ethic

Friend Ship didn’t beat around the bush at all: we saw the Galaxy Warp, and everything was decidedly un-annihilated. Oh, sure, none of the warp pads worked and the homeworld warp was rubble, but that’s exactly how the Crystal Gems left things at the end of Warp Tour. We didn’t get the destruction that we hoped for after Winter Forecast aired, so now we’re going to hope that the shooting star gets used on something more fun.

Then of course there’s the communication hub warp pad, destroyed in Coach Steven and still very much not repaired in Cry For Help. Are the flask robonoids slacking off, or are they just not up to the task?

You shoot it

Although Steven clearly saw a potential future where the Crystal Gems attempted to destroy the Galaxy Warp with the shooting star in Winter Forecast, the Galaxy Warp survived despite Steven not being around to interrupt the launching of the attack. Of course it’s possible that it’s uselessly exploding in warp space now, but because the route between the Crystal Temple and the Galaxy Warp is safe to warp through it’s pretty unlikely. The safe thing to assume is that the Crystal Gems never attempted to fire the shooting star.

In our initial wondering about Steven’s future visions in Winter Forecast we got hung up on whose knowledge Steven might have been using, but further dialogue has given us a new way to interpret Garnet’s likening future vision to a map. The ability may, in fact, be quite “magical”, working off of knowledge that neither Garnet nor Steven have (at least consciously). We may never know for sure why Garnet wasn’t able to predict the arrival of Peridot on Earth in Warp Tour, but we also know that in Cry For Help she correctly failed to see any futures where they apprehended Peridot at the communications hub. Sapphire failing to look near enough in the future to see Steven upset is also an interesting hint about how it gets used.

We just don’t understand future vision. The survival of the Galaxy Warp was disappointing, but it’s probably for the better: if it had been destroyed then we probably never would have gotten to see the damage. Now we can look forward to seeing what the shooting star can do!

Deployed and accounted for

Peridot had sure made it sound like the communications hub warp pad should have been fixed. She had deployed dozens of flask robonoids on Earth, and we had seen them repair warp pads and use the warp to travel to the Galaxy Warp. She said that she had accounted for all of her robonoids, so while she’s obviously not indicating that they’re all present (we don’t see all seventy-nine on screen at once—about two dozen might have been elsewhere) it was still a good guess that the robonoids would have sought out and fixed each warp pad.

This leaves some possibilities: perhaps a flask robonoid reached the communications hub but couldn’t repair the pad. Peridot would probably have launched a robonoid at each pad, using old records about Earth’s warp network, expecting them to make sure it was intact then meet up at the Galaxy Warp. In this scenario there are, as we guessed earlier, probably no more than seventy-nine warp pads on Earth (and we can assume that about twenty-nine of them are too heavily damaged for the robonoids to fix).

Another scenario has Peridot firing robonoids randomly and just got very lucky to land one right by the temple’s warp pad. This would be if Peridot didn’t have any records to work with, and wouldn’t tell us much of anything about how many warp pads are on Earth. Considering how many of them found their way to the Galaxy Warp via warp pads, this doesn’t seem too likely.

Either way, the communications hub remains unconnected from the warp. Lion can’t be too happy about that. Thankfully for him, they probably don’t have much reason to go back there now that it’s been thoroughly smashed.