What could Hit the Diamond mean?

Take us out to the ballgame, take us out to the questions! (Alright, that’s not how the song goes, but work with us.) Do you ever leave a baseball game wishing you had the answers to some very important questions? Well we had some questions after we saw Hit the Diamond, so come ponder with us.

Why retrieve Jasper?

Peridot wasn’t having delusions of grandeur when she assumed that the Rubies and the roaming eye were there for her: after all she did call Yellow Diamond a clod. To her face. That really made Yellow Diamond mad, so when some homeworld Gems show up it’s reasonable to assume that they’re there for her. If there was going to be any plot twist about the roaming eye’s mission, we would have figured that it was there for Lapis, not for Jasper.

Sure, Jasper is apparently a successful homeworld warrior (she’s allowed to wear a cape, traditionally a status symbol in films and cartoons), so it makes sense that they’d want to get her back. Having heard from Peridot that the mission had failed and Jasper was nowhere to be found, it would make sense that they’d want to retrieve a valuable asset.

It’s also possible, however, that the homeworld wants Jasper back to punish her. The mission failed, after all, and according to the Rubies she was the leader of the mission—responsibility for it would fall on her shoulders. It seems like a waste to send soldiers to get a Gem off of a planet that’s about to be destroyed anyway just to punish her, but they might just want to arrange a more vindictive punishment, such as being used to power an object like Lapis had been.

Except regardless of their motives the homeworld sent some of the most incompetent soldiers imaginable. It’s been pointed out that their actions could possibly be interpreted as playing dumb, but that theory is a little bit too Ronaldo even for us. If Jasper is important to the homeworld at all, to save or to punish, sending the Rubies doesn’t make a lot of sense. It almost seems like checking off a box on a bureaucratic checklist: yes, a team was sent to retrieve the leader of the failed mission, but unfortunately it seems they failed. Whoever ordered the mission may have had no choice but to do something, but didn’t want the mission to succeed. Or, perhaps quality control at the kindergartens has really slipped in the past few hundred years, and the Ruby squad was really the best they could do.

What’s up with Eye Ruby?

Whatever reason you think she had for acting that way, the Ruby with her gem in her eye definitely acted oddly. At the very end she stared at the team for quite a while before finally thanking them (apparently with great effort) and leaving. A lot has been read into that exit, with some speculating that she knew Jasper wasn’t on Neptune but for whatever reason did not want to find Jasper.

While this would mesh nicely with the bureaucratic checklist hypothesis, there’s just nothing else in the episode to back it up. She seems to be acting normally as part of the group, not betraying any hints of awareness at any point.

Strange as it may be, the best hypothesis seems to be that she was simply being polite. She’s obviously a Gem of few words, but ending her presence with her graciously giving her thanks at the end of the episode shows that it’s not because she’s mean or anything like that. Hit the Diamond just wasn’t a good episode for full-Ronaldo theories.