#eric thurm

“I thought that it would resonate like a secret message, not something that so many people had been waiting to hear,” she says of the show’s popularity. “When people come to me and feel that too, I get it, I feel the same way. It’s this feeling of, ‘You found me, and I found you. We found each other.’ There was just no way to put a signal out to say, ‘Here I am.’ And now we’ve found each other.”

Basically, Peridot is a big prude who is too bound up in her own head to explore and be comfortable with her body the way it is (yes, this is vaguely gross, but it’s also like, half the point of the show), and eventually grow into understanding what it would be like to have a free, loving relationship with herself or another person. Like, say, Amethyst. ... Peridot plays the angsty teen to potential love interest Amethyst here, which is interesting since usually the team’s angsty teen is... Amethyst. Amethyst instead gets to be a different kind of teen, alternating between “overtly chill” and “upset at Peridot,” which manifests in a delightful noogie. Amethyst, who has always been the youngest Gem, now has the opportunity to be cooler-than-thou, the way a college sophomore can pretend to be extremely worldly to the incoming freshman because he smoked a joint once at a Chance The Rapper show. Except that her speech about Peridot being who she is, rather than who she could be, stinks of maturity and the lessons she’s learned over the course of the show, especially relating to her own relative deformity.

[Peridot] tries on the stilts Steven got her for her one-month canniversary as an adjunct member of the team, preening about her new height and ability to reach shelves for Amethyst. (Yeah, Amethyst could shape-shift and reach up and get stuff herself, but nearly everything Peridot says about or to Amethyst in this episode is a little flirty.)

Critics' Quarrel: Debating the End of "The Affair"