Amethyst takes it upon herself to cheer Peridot up, the better to restore Steven’s control over his own bathroom.

Amethyst: Come on, Peridot, I can’t stand seeing you like this!

Peridot: Like what?

Amethyst: Dude, let’s just get out of the house. We could check out my old Kindergarten. I met all those other amethysts out in space, and they all came out of the same rock as me! I’ve been meaning to get a look at the old neighborhood now that I met the neighbors.

Steven: That sounds fun. What do you say, Peridot?

Amethyst: You can make us feel dumb by telling us all the stuff we don’t know!

Peridot: I miss that…

Amethyst: Great! It’s settled. Let’s get out of the bathroom!

This episode is an obvious callback to “On the Run”, which serves to highlight Amethyst’s growth as a character as well as the idea of home.  Amethyst has really started coming into her own over the past season or so, largely because she’s just so much more confident.  Steven helped her to stop comparing herself to others, and now she’s helping him out by being bold and proactive when he was way too concerned about upsetting Peridot – when all you’re doing all day for days on end is moping and generally feeling sorry for yourself, you really need some upsetting.

Steven: Come on, Peridot, take a look at the beautiful countryside!

Peridot: No. Your efforts to entrance me with Earth’s beauty are pointless. My sector of countryside was perfect. Now it’s somewhere in space. Just let me know when we get there.

Once Amethyst has successfully engaged Peridot in expounding upon her area of expertise (correcting her on the placement of Gems), she gets rather contemplative in her melancholy.

Peridot: This used to make sense to me. I thought life was generated in a Kindergarten. Formless, aimless energy channeled into new, useful Gems. But life doesn’t start in a Kindergarten – it ends here. I’ve gotten used to plants everywhere, bugs and breeze and sunshine…all of that has been sucked out of this place. It’s with the amethysts that were produced here, and now this place is nothing but a miserable husk.

But then they discover what appears to be a flower, and that gives them an idea.

Steven: Wow! That’s Earth for you. Always bouncing back.

Peridot: I don’t know. I’d have to run some tests to see if this is not an anomaly.

Steven: You wanna try planting stuff here? You know how to farm!

Amethyst: Yeah, that could be fun!

Peridot: It could be an interesting experiment…

Steven: Yeah! Let’s re-garden the Kindergarten!

So they have a little planting montage and add some color to the Kindergarten.  I’m not sure if sunflowers were the best choice, though – maybe something more accustomed to the shade would grow better.  But I suppose the point is to bring some sun into that dreary place.

Peridot has finally moved out of the bathroom (at least enough for Steven to make use of it again), and they’re all eager to return the next morning and continue their gardening.

Peridot: Hey…thanks for doing this for me.

Amethyst: What? Come on!

Steven: It was fun!

Peridot: I’m just glad I was able to fix something.

Peridot: Well, I don’t know why I’m surprised. I should’ve known not to have hope.

Steven: But, maybe if we try again-

Peridot: It’s not going to work! It’s never going to work, okay?

Amethyst: Hey! Don’t be a jerk! We were just trying to cheer you up!

Peridot: And good job with that! I feel just great now that I know that nothing’s ever going to get better! Everything is just ruined forever! We can’t get any of it back, not my home, not Lapis, and not this crummy planet either! We might as well throw it all in the garbage and toss ourselves in after, because it’s all just hopeless trash!

Then they remind her of the growth they found the other day, which she steps on…

…revealing that it was a Gem monster all along.

Peridot: Oh, of course!

She’s subsequently grabbed by the monster, but Amethyst and Steven deal with it in short order (largely offscreen) as Smoky Quartz, and as tough as Peridot is, she’s none the worse for having been swallowed.

Amethyst: Man, you were right. The Kindergarten really is dead forever.

Peridot: I was a fool to think we could reinstitute life there.

Steven: Tell me about it.

Peridot: Alright, I will. I was basically using this as a distraction from losing Lapis, losing the barn, and just a general sense of complete hopelessness I tend to deal with on a day-to-day basis. But it really only confirmed for me that once you mess something up, it’s ruined for good, and nothing will ever be able to grow again.

But of course that’s not really the point.  Sometimes you’ll make mistakes with functionally irreversible consequences, but there is always an opportunity for growth in failure, if not quite the way you’d hope.

Steven: Wow. What about all this?

Amethyst: Now that’s some plants!

Peridot: Huh. Guess the countryside out here is pretty beautiful. But who cares? I wanted to have this for the Kindergarten!

Steven: Even if there’s nothing we can do for that one patch of land, there’s still a whole Earth blooming all around us.

Amethyst: Yeah! Why don’t we try gardening in literally any other place? It’ll be easier than trying to plant in the Kindergarten.

Sometimes when you fail, all you really have to do is turn around and try again elsewhere, somewhere your efforts can actually be rewarded.  There’s no point in dwelling on what you can’t do or where you can’t be, so work on something you can improve.  Just because you can’t have exactly what you wanted doesn’t mean you can’t have anything good.

Until next time…