The second act is the weakest, as it is in most stories. (See The Two Towers, etc.) There is a certain amount of flailing in season three in particular, what with the abrupt resolution to the Cluster thread, a long span of… nothing in particular, then the abrupt resolution to the Jasper situation, just in time to shove us over Plot Event Two and into the third act, where things start to get interesting again.
It becomes extremely clear as the show goes on that as much as they’ve carefully structured the whens and hows of the overall story, and as particular as they are about continuity, they really don’t give much of a shit about plot. All their attention is on theme, as presented through character, as developed through scenario. By the third act, engaging with the show becomes a matter of actively reading it as literary metaphor rather than as explicit events.
All of which is fine by me, because I can’t give a quarter of a shit about plot as a story device. It’s just an excuse to get things from point A to point B, where we start to explore the meanings and parallels and consequences of the things we established earlier—which is exactly the spirit the show seems to take as it develops.
Like. Season three is a fucking mess, and I’d have done a lot differently there. But season 1 is good, especially in the second half when it really starts establishing the fuck out of the scenario and the themes; season two tears into developing all of that before season three drops the ball; and then seasons 4-5 zag right back into plumbing the psychology and significance of what came before, with Future the culmination of that thread.
If you watch it straight through, it’s a lot more obvious what a huge shrug season three is. Estelle is nowhere to be found. Connie is in three episodes all season. Peridot and Lapis are basically put on the shelf. The middle is just townie episode after townie episode. Anything that seems important, and that seems like it would have gotten a ton of weight a season earlier or later, is just cut short with a shrug. Then season four quickly scrambles to make up for that dip, and really pulls the show into the meat of what it has to talk about.