It isn’t just the references to Warp Tour, which are plentiful. It certainly has all the pros and cons of a table setter, ratcheting up tension and preparing the viewer for the season’s endgame without providing much internal resolution the inversion of the star wipe ending practically screams “But wait, there’s more!” Still, a good portion of its runtime is devoted to callbacks to preceding episodes in a way that doesn’t prepare us for the future, but acknowledges how we got to this point. Marble Madness isn’t so much a set-up episode as it is a pivot. We haven’t seen a “Steven isn’t taken seriously” plot since Future Vision, and while Marble Madness is a low-key variant (Steven never gets upset at his treatment, the Gems aren’t too condescending) it’s vital to keep this plot point alive as the finale approaches. Suddenly Steven has questions galore, and it’s the Gems whose knowledge is stunted by lack of curiosity.

Regardless, this occasionally frustrating trait gets a full reversal in Marble Madness that neatly sets up Season 1′s endgame. How many of you circa age thirteen (mental age a bit younger) were burning with questions about what your parents did before you were born? And if you’re in that group, how would that curiosity be affected by living in a world where literal magic exists to distract you? He’s not watching a cartoon and thirsty for worldbuilding, he’s living in that world and getting by just fine. And beyond Steven Universe existing in a medium that requires certain suspensions of disbelief for its pacing and tension to work, I can easily forgive Steven’s gaps in curiosity as the normal behavior of a kid his age. While the Crystal Gems might keep mum about the more painful details, and Pearl was physically unable to talk about major aspects of the past, they’d surely be able to answer basic lore questions, like what the massive fusion whose likeness encases the Temple was called (it’s Obsidian, by the way).īut if it was that easy, this would be a pretty boring show.

Bismuth would’ve arrived ages earlier if Steven had asked anyone about the weird bubbled gem in Lion’s mane, and we might know the contents of the unmentioned treasure box as well. “That’s okay! I don’t know anything all the time!”Ī common complaint about Steven is that, in his own words, he “never asks follow-up questions.” Indeed, many of the show’s “mysteries” are just things Steven hasn’t openly wondered about.

Marble madness steven universe