It takes a special kind of brilliance—a gem-like brilliance, one might venture—to state your show’s whole thesis humorously in its second episode. It takes something even greater to have it pack an emotional gut-punch in the finale of its main arc five seasons later.
“If every pork chop were perfect, we wouldn’t have hot dogs,” Steven Universe’s eponymous hero says to White Diamond, the pathologically pristine, ostensibly flawless despot of his mother’s people, in the waning moments of its simultaneously breakneck and wistful 44-minute Season 5 finale, “Change Your Mind.” Or, to quote Leonard Cohen, “There’s a crack in everything. That’s how the light gets in.”
The Hot Dog Thesis is simple and stunning, and it’s the epitome of Steven Universe’s entire moral reasoning. It’s the proof that, in spite of the trappings of anime and video game homage, post-apocalyptic space romp, family dramedy, and bildungsroman, the show is, above all, a synthetic work of humanist philosophy.
Beauty is impossible without imperfections. That is the way of art, and of life. In an imperfect world, it is flaws in which we find both beauty and strength. Accept what and who you are, and what and who those around you are. Love your neighbor as yourself. And when your neighbors fail, allow the possibility that they, as we, can grow and change.
Was this the show’s finale? Who knows! (At the very least, there’s a movie on its way.) But in last night’s imperfect—and, therefore, perfect—paean to growth and unity, creator Rebecca Sugar and company brought one of the greatest televised stories of the 2010s to the only conclusion that could feel right. Sometimes you can have pork chops and hot dogs at the same damn time.
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