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.

The ending of House Guest is quite difficult to interpret: Steven tries to repair the Geode with his healing saliva, and despite his regained confidence he fails. However there is no need to fear, as Greg quickly saves the day with a complex human tool: high-quality duct tape!

It shouldn’t be hard to understand why this explanation is a little hard to take at face value: the Geode is an enormous structure of hard stone which is containing an incredibly powerful force, and while that force is enough to widen the crack in the stone as Greg and Steven watch the duct tape is apparently enough to not just stop the growth of the crack but also contain the storm (which had been leaking into the surrounding area.)

The duct tape sparkled on Steven’s night stand, but then so did Greg’s van after Pearl fixed it—and she was giving a list of very mundane repairs she had done to it. That makes it a bit tough to be sure that the sparkles represented some kind of magical property being transferred to the duct tape, from Steven’s spit or from the sheer power of Greg’s belief (and what little hair he has left).

This mystery might never be solved. If it is, maybe we’ll learn where Steven’s healing powers went… But that’s a mystery for another week.

This is a mystery that was finally officially answered quite some time ago (a year ago exactly, allowing for it being a leap year this year) when Jailbreak aired. We met Ruby and Sapphire, then they fused together to form Garnet again. Though it’s obviously not timely, we’ve chosen it as our first Answer because it was the perfect mystery: so many hints were dropped over the course of the season, allowing large amounts of fans to be sure of Garnet’s fusion status well before the answer was ever given.

So what were these hints? There was one really, really big one: like Opal, who was the first fusion we saw, Garnet had two gems with different cuts but the same color. On the temple door, however, there were two gems with the same cuts as Garnet’s gems but with different colors. You could clearly see the details when she opened the door in Together Breakfast, so this piece of the puzzle was actually put in the show before we could even guess there might be a puzzle to solve (which Giant Woman took care of by introducing us to fusion).

This was enough to start fan speculation about Garnet’s status as a fusion almost immediately after Giant Woman aired. Not only did she have the two gems with the same color, and not only did the temple door imply that they should be different colors, but just like Opal, Garnet is a very strong Gem. Whenever there was a monster to fight Garnet was always the one doing the heavy lifting (she was even the only effective fighter in Arcade Mania), and Opal did the same thing: absolutely dominated a fight where Amethyst and Pearl were helpless.

There were, of course, a bunch of other smaller hints. They’re a bit subtle as foreshadowing, but they did create an intriguing web of coincidences that seemed quite unlikely were Garnet not actually a fusion:

• The series pilot opens with Garnet standing in between fire and water.
• Garnet uses a keytar (a “fusion” of a guitar and a keyboard) in Steven and the Stevens.
• When Alexandrite breaks apart in Fusion Cuisine, Garnet initially breaks into two pieces.
• Hopper and Hoppy are color-coded with pink (a shade of red) and blue outfits, just like the gems Garnet activated on the temple door.
• In Alone Together Garnet says that (unlike Amethyst and Pearl) fusion isn’t hard for her.

Heck, Garnet even gets two shooting stars in the sky at her point in the theme song! It’s like they were winking at us every time the show started.

Of course even with all of this there were plenty of people who didn’t believe Garnet was a fusion. The examples of Amethyst, Pearl, Rose Quartz, Lapis Lazuli, and Peridot seemed to indicate that a Gem’s gem should be placed on the line of vertical symmetry. While we would, much later when The Answer aired, find out that different Gems of the same type can have their gems placed different places, at the time it was a missing piece of information.

Still, as far as fan theories go, Garnet fusion theory was rock solid (no pun intended). There was some strong evidence in its favor, lots of narrative choices that only made sense if she was a fusion, and only minor stumbling blocks in its way. They won’t all be so straight-forward, so we should look back and appreciate what we once had.