Amethyst started the series as the least effective warrior of the Crystal Gems: far weaker than Garnet, she seemed to have a knack for using her whip to place herself or the team in danger, and little else. After Reformed she started fighting quite a bit smarter, but what is her potential for raw power?

We know that a quartz should be very strong—Jasper was at least as strong as Garnet. Amethyst is, however, an “overcooked runt”, having stayed in the ground for too long. This means it would make sense for Amethyst to be permanently weak. Reformed even seemed to show that Amethyst’s gem simply couldn’t handle generating a physical form more appropriate to a quartz, malfunctioning under the stress.

If it makes sense though, why do we wonder? Peridot gave us a lot to think about in Too Far, saying that Amethyst can do everything a normal quartz can do after seeing a display of her prowess with her whip. Depending on how it’s interpreted, one line might even have said that Amethyst could even look like a normal Amethyst if she knew what they looked like (of course it could also mean she’d know what she was missing if she had seen a normal Amethyst).

There’s also an interesting pattern in fusions: Sugilite, formed when Garnet fuses with Amethyst, is much bigger and stronger than Sardonyx, formed when Garnet fuses with Pearl. Plus, even though size isn’t everything (see Rainbow Quartz) it seems to normally be a good indicator of power, and Opal is far bigger than Garnet while Amethyst and Pearl seem roughly equivalent in mass with Ruby and Sapphire.

So it appears that when thrown into a fusion, Amethyst brings a lot more power than Pearl does despite not out-massing her by much (she may be much stockier, but she’s far shorter).

That means that despite there being a good reason for Amethyst to be as weak as she currently is, we should watch out: the show might be hinting that it’s possible for our Amethyst to become as strong as she was meant to be.

While it was eventually a win for following the clues, the path to figuring out the purpose of Pearls wasn’t without its red herrings.

The first idea was that Pearls were technicians and were eventually replaced by Peridots. Considering how good Pearl is with technology, especially how she was able to make the Universe Mach 3 so quickly in Space Race, but also how she was the go-to gearhead in Political Power, this wasn’t even an unreasonable assumption to make.

However, Keeping it Together gave a big bit of information: Pearl likes doing chores. By itself that wouldn’t mean much, since she’s established to be fastidious bordering on neat freak, but it seemed to make sense:

• Pearl was always the one doing the cleaning (such as in Steven the Sword Fighter and Coach Steven).
• While her technological capabilities were impressive, she had very significant failures. The Universe Mach 3 was damaged while exiting the atmosphere, and her prototype robonoid disruptor didn’t work. (She’d later get a big win technologically in Friend Ship though, and was always good at fixing Greg’s van.)

After that, when Friend Ship aired, it seemed to seal the deal: “I’m just a Pearl.” Pearl needed someone to tell her what to do, she was useless on her own. When taken with the line “you weren’t built for fighting” from “Do It For Her”, Pearls being considered lowly by other Gems was pretty clear. As we would later find out, when the theory was confirmed in Back to the Barn, technicians aren’t super high-ranking on the Gem homeworld either, but at least they can hold their heads high around the servants.

So that was an interesting case, with a new episode coming in and supplanting old assumptions with a compelling new piece of evidence about Pearl that fit into a pattern that had been established well before in the show. It would see a bit more strengthening before finally being confirmed, but the mystery was correctly “solved” based on strong hints rather than an explicit statement.