Common consensus that seems to arise regarding seasons 4-8 is that the reason there were so many bad episodes in these seasons is due to a lack of good ideas for episodes. However I've been thinking, and I don't think this is necessarily the case. To demonstrate why, I'd like to talk about the episode One Coarse Meal, widely considered the worst episode of the show. We all know why the episode is so terrible, but is the cause of this really that the idea was bad? The abstract idea is Mr. Krabs learns about Plankton's fear, and uses it against him. I propose that there are ways in which they could have made this episode work. For instance, they should have put much less focus on the effect it was having on Plankton, and I think that they should have had Plankton discover Mr. Krabs' fear about halfway into the episode (and make it a real fear, not the fake one SpongeBob told him.) For the remainder of the episode, we could have had a battle of sorts between the two, where they both try to scare the other as much as possible (and have it written much more like a comedy, kinda like with the episode Pranks a Lot). It could have been genuinely entertaining and funny to watch the two try to one up each other by scaring them as much as possible with their respective fears. However instead, we got a depressing episode where Mr. Krabs psychologically torments Plankton, driving him to attempt to commit suicide. This is just one example, but I think the main problem wasn't the ideas, but rather the execution. What do you guys think?