With waiting for the remaining new episodes for this month and the whole summer for more episodes, I've been trying to go back and pin down specific episodes that I consider really great.
These episodes happened nearly a year ago but I've already seen a good collection of new people come to the series since then so I'm going to put spoiler tags on the more spoilery shit while describing the rest in a way that doesn't point out too much.
The first few episodes I'm currently going back and watching is the entire third stevenbomb set (Sardonyx). I honestly love 4/5ths of these episodes. Cry for Help is literally just a great episode. It builds an internal conflict that is very serious for the crystal gems. It showed this really gloomy feeling that hangs over Pearl and Amethyst that affects Garnet
(Sapphire/Ruby specifically)
.
The following three episodes after (Keystone Motel, Onion Friend, and Historical Friction) focuses on each of the Crystal Gems, each episode doing what SU does best and embedding all this background shit everywhere.
Greg knows about Sapphire and Ruby? Amethyst was around Greg a lot to know about his old Manager and Vidalia (connecting back to Maximum Capacity and We Need to Talk)? The crystal Gems were very much connected to the founding of Beach City?
These episodes also show how each person in the conflict from Cry for Help is struggling with their issues on the matter. Pearl knowing that she did something horrible and desperately trying to find some way to make amends with Garnet, Amethyst being on the sideline of this entire matter, seeing that this problem has had a really destructive impact on their team as a whole, and Garnet struggling with trying to forgive Pearl despite her feelings toward what she did. I also enjoy how the later two episodes mad a good effort in bringing side characters in.
With all of that being said for the first four episodes, its a fucking shame to say that the fifth (Friend Ship) is easily the weakest of the bunch. Fair enough, What the episode about is a solid representation of how this kind of conflict resolves itself. Its not really....nice. It is a good episode but I guess when comparing it to the previous 4, its just not up there.
Unrelated but i love that its perfectly normal for Steven to be involved in everything since that's just the kind of person he is.