Yawn
(This review
contains spoilers!)
Remember Tiger Millionaire? Literally the ninth episode of the entire show,
one that was only okay at best and only served as a way to get some early solo
character development for Amethyst? Well, what if I told you we would get a
sequel to that episode...3 seasons and 113 episodes later?
Hoo boy, this episode wasn’t fun to
get through.
Ever since the StevenBomb ended, Steven Universe has fallen into a
serious slump, and Tiger Philanthropist is
no exception. It didn’t lie to us like Rocknoldo
did, nor did it waste the potential of rarely seen characters like The New Crystal Gems. The biggest
problem with Tiger Philanthropist is
that it’s an episode based on a storyline unseen since the literal first ten
episodes, and it came several years too late.
What’s the story? Amethyst decides
she’s done with wrestling, and Steven quickly loses interest because she’s not
there with him, but keeps doing it because Lars is a big fan of his wrestling
persona.
That’s it. This is the same cartoon
that brought us Mr. Greg, by the way.
It’s become remarkably easy to forget that considering the last few episodes.
I’m not saying every episode needs to
be on the same level as Mr. Greg, but
they have to at least try. At no point in Tiger
Philanthropist was I interested in what I was seeing, and only finished it
because I had to write this review. The ending is exactly what you expect:
Amethyst comes back for one last match, and the two of them lose, leaving the
wrestling scene behind. Honestly, with how this storyline’s been gone since
Season 1 and only returned when Amethyst shapeshifted into Purple Puma for a
visual gag, I figured they’d done that long ago.
Which brings me to my main point: this
episode would’ve been fine if it had been sandwiched somewhere in Season 1 or
even at some point in Season 2. I guess it’s here because it kind of plays into
the results of Amethyst’s Season 3 arc and meeting her family in That Will Be All, but this episode feels
out of place even in the filler-driven Season 4 we seem to be trapped in. With
the wrestling subplot being missing in action since the ninth episode, bringing
it back out of nowhere for the one hundredth and twenty-second episode is just
confusing. It’s incredibly hard to believe Steven when he laments that wrestling
is “their thing” when they haven’t done it since an episode that aired in 2013.
And the last thing this episode screws
up: Steven is written incredibly poorly. He legitimately feels like the Steven
from pre-Mirror Gem Season 1! He
whines and complains, exhibiting very little of the awesome character
development we’ve seen him go through over the course of the show. It feels
like he regressed back for this episode and this episode alone.
Tiger
Philanthropist is an enormous waste of time. Like I said before, this
episode would’ve been fine if it’d been placed at some point early on in the
show’s lifespan, before the introduction of elements like the Diamonds and
Bismuth and Rose’s moral choices. This feels like an episode that was meant to
be placed in Season 2, but was shelved and brought back out of development hell
just so it could tie into Earthlings
and the other recent Amethyst episodes. I’d only recommend watching this
episode if you’re a hardcore Steven
Universe fan who watches everything the show puts out, and even then it’s
only worth seeing if you have nothing better to do.
FINAL SCORE
1/10
Garbage
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