Review: Steven Universe”Mindful Education”

Read this and learn something.

Spoilers Below

When Connie shows up for some Stevonnie training, she is definitely distracted. She doesn’t even notice that Steven is bald! (Well, OK, he’s wearing a bald cap.) Steven asks her what is going on and Connie confesses that she accidentally hurt a boy at school. He bumped into her and she automatically threw him over her shoulder. Connie feels so bad about the encounter that she can’t get it out of her head. Unfortunately, this affects their Stevonnie training. Connie can’t stop thinking about the boy and it de-fuses Stevonnie.

Garnet, who was sitting in on the fusion training, knows what to do. She sings a song to Stevonnie about calming your thoughts so a fusion can work. When the individuals get overwhelmed with their own thoughts, the fusion fails. Connie gets the idea. However, now it’s Steven’s problem. He keeps thinking about all of the gems he’s hurt. Bismuth, Jasper, Eyeball Ruby, and even Rose Quartz. These thoughts overwhelm him to the point that Stevonnie falls off the floating ruins. As Stevonnie, they could just float to safety. But Steven’s thoughts cause them to de-fuse, leaving both of them in danger. Connie eventually gets through to Steven that it is OK to have these thoughts and you have to accept them in order to get past them. Steven listens to his friend and they are able to re-fuse to float back down to Earth.

My favorite part of this episode was when Garnet was showing Stevonnie that, as themselves, Sapphire and Ruby are two completely different personalities. But they are able to get over themselves to become, and stay, Garnet. Fusions aren’t about the individual. There wasn’t a lot of action going on here. Since both Connie and Steven (half of him, anyway) are human, I think it was necessary to show how their fusion would react to the bad human feelings. We already kinda know how happy feelings affect powers. We don’t usually get to see the bad ones though. It was a nice change.