What could Love Letters mean?

With all episodes from Love Letters onward being produced in season two and meant to air as part of it, it looks like it’s a great time to take stock of what the rest of the season has to offer. Of the fifty-one episodes the that are meant as part of it, we’ve only seen three. One seventeeth of the way through, how are things shaping up?

A brief recap

• Full Disclosure dealt with the immediate aftermath of Jailbreak, primarily focusing on the call that Steven made to Connie in The Return and working through Steven’s feelings about what had happened.
• Joy Ride carried on a bit with Steven’s feelings (and brought TV back!), but for our purposes the most exciting thing is that it introduced the hunt for Peridot in the second episode of the season.
• Love Letters didn’t do much with the plot, but it did establish that the Crystal Gems are actively searching for Malachite.

Malachite on deck

So, using the same logic we applied after Joy Ride aired, we can predict that the issue with Malachite will indeed be dealt with earlier in the season, perhaps for the mid-season finale. We predicted this already, but seeing the hunt for Malachite established early is some good evidence that they are, as expected, probably planning to go somewhere with it sooner rather than later. It would be odd but possible to see this happen before the mid-season finale, but that would only raise our expectations for the mid-season finale further.

Bigger things?

So we’ve had two episodes that introduced two plotlines, indicating that perhaps both will need to be resolved sooner. When we made our season two predictions we figured that if Peridot were going to remain an enemy she’d stay active until nearly the end of the season, which may not happen.

With such an early start to both her and Malachite’s plot threads though, we’re left with an interesting question: if Malachite gets dealt with, and Peridot joins the team, what will the season finale be? Will Yellow Diamond take note of Jasper’s absence, put two and two together, and come to Earth to face the resurgent Crystal Gems? Will the homeworld’s earlier weakness be revealed to be from fighting an external enemy when that enemy shows up on Earth? Something completely off of the wall?