OH FRICK I’M REVIEWING THE POLITICAL EPISODE, HELP ME PLZ.
Appointment TV[]
Kind of surprising how there hasn’t been a bad episode since My Leg!, but here we are with another bad one that just bored me through and through.
This episode’s plot is basically if you smashed Best Day Ever and Overbooked together, removed any sense of humor at all, and stuck with Best Day Ever’s pacing rather than Overbooked’s pacing. Yeah, I think you can tell with that description this is the true definition of a lame rip-off. But let’s talk about this episode in more detail, shall we? Well, I can at least say this episode’s first 45 seconds or so are pretty good, mainly because I enjoy how enthusiastic SpongeBob is to get to watch the lost episode of Mermaid Man and Barnacle Boy, and unlike say, Best Day Ever, which has SpongeBob wanting to literally do things he does daily (minus Squidward’s thing), this actually has him getting excited for something that’s actually worth getting excited over, so that’s a plus. As well as that, his enthusiasm is definitely shown really well, and it’s kind of relatable too because anyone would get excited if a lost episode of a TV show were to finally air. That being said, it goes downhill from here. Let me just say that this is one of the most repetitive episodes I’ve ever seen in awhile. With Overbooked, yeah it was kind of repetitive, but it didn’t really feel like that to me because so much was going on that I was just rolling in with the plot. Here, every scene takes a gargantuan amount of time in the episode and most of them can just be stand-alone scenes in an episode, so there’s not really much excitement to be found with this.
For example, there’s the first scene, which is that Mrs. Puff needs to get her tire fixed. This scene takes up over a minute of the episode’s runtime, and is insanely BORING because nothing here comes off as creative or funny. Then there’s the scene with Patrick, which is just as dragged out but also is even less funny and less creative because it’s just Patrick checking rocks for a minute. Then there’s Sandy, who apparently wants him to hold his finger in her treedome, and then after this sequence each chore he’s tasked to do has a shorter runtime. Personally, I don’t get why SpongeBob feels the need to do all these chores for these other people. Seriously, why is he putting a lightbulb in Plankton’s Chum Bucket? And why the hell does he need SPONGEBOB’S help to do that? But then apparently he’s forced to massage some elderly people’s feet or whatever, handle the traffic, AND clean the Flying Dutchman’s ship. Hey, at least the other ones made sense or were kind of explained, here it just feels like they’re trying to make a gag out of the whole situation, but it fails horribly from a story perspective and I didn’t really laugh at it because it’s really just everyone abusing SpongeBob for their own needs. But oh boy, it gets worse. He comes home after doing all that unnecessary work, and then for some reason, his VCR goes haywire for some freaking reason and then everything else he had setup also becomes ruined, because there is LITERALLY NO REASON FOR THIS other than to just move the plot and have SpongeBob become a complete crybaby and have everyone feel sorry for their actions.
Honestly, SpongeBob’s crying is way too exaggerated here. With something like Pizza Delivery, yes, he overly cried, but here his crying just feels really stupid and unrealistic while that episode still made his crying sound pretty legit. I’ll admit, him turning into an utter wreck does kind of make sense and I like the visual afterwards where he’s literally turned into a complete mess, and the next scene isn’t too bad either. It’s kind of repetitive and the actual play is horrendously unfunny thanks to the terrible jokes the characters make as well as the mediocre song, but at the same time, I do like that all his friends came together to make SpongeBob happy, even if he couldn’t actually watch the lost episode, even if that was only caused because the plot demanded that all of SpongeBob’s stuff got ruined. This scene gets ruined a bit more when Old Man Jenkins randomly comes just to make this really bad joke that ruins the moment right before with SpongeBob feeling emotional about the whole play, which was just a terrible move because this episode really didn’t need him to be here, but they just crammed in here because they needed to get one more laugh out of the audience, but this attempt failed to make me laugh, rather cringe at how desperate this episode is to be good. Because, yeah, this episode does feel like a very desperate attempt to get my attention. This episode’s boring enough without being a rip-off, and yeah, I would’ve given this a solid bad had this not be a rip-off, because a lot of moments feel very forced, the emotion is handled in a mediocre manner, and the episode is just ungodly repetitive and stupid from start to finish. But considering there are better episodes out there that do a similar concept like this but better, such as Overbooked and heck, even Best Day Ever to an extent even if that episode is only slightly better than this but still bad, and that right there is enough to bring this down by another rating.
Episode Rating: Crap (3.5/10)
Karen’s Virus[]
Wow, an episode where SpongeBob literally goes INSIDE Karen trying to get a virus out of her. Now that’s what I call cool!
I really like the pacing of this episode, which is good because there’s kind of been problems with pacing all across this season. But anyways, I really like how they get started with the conflict right away but they actually carefully explain how Karen got the virus, by having this robot come by the Chum Bucket, but be sick because she has some sort of infection that’s contagious. So now let’s talk about the actual concept of this episode with further thoughts, because I honestly love this idea. It’s not too far-fetched for the show to do this kind of idea because Karen is one of the main characters and her getting a virus is a very simplistic concept, but it’s something that can really going in all kinds of directions, and where better to start off than the actual VISUALS of the inside of Karen? Simply put it, everything about this is incredible. The CGI used to make this wonderland is truly amazing to look at, and everything is so incredibly detailed and colorful, and the many areas SpongeBob, and soon later a companion, go through look like the animators went through tons of time and resources to really perfect the animation here, and the fact that most of the episode takes place here is very good, but it’s not like Library Cards where the characters are just set foot in one specific location, rather there’s many different areas WITHIN this location that the characters go through. There’s also the design of the virus itself, which looks pretty damn great with it also being designed in CG, and it truly looking creepy. One thing I’m also really glad the episode did is not make SpongeBob or most of the other characters CG, but rather 2D. If they were to make them CG as well, they most likely would look really ugly and out-of-place, so I’m glad they stayed 2D, and their designs blend in with the environment pretty well anyways even if they’re animated differently.
As for the plot itself, it’s pretty damn fun. SpongeBob exploring these different areas is very fun to watch and I also like when this character named Ideal Plankton and these other visions of characters from the actual world of SpongeBob come into play inside Karen. I like how these characters are actually what Karen visions the real characters as, which makes their designs even more funny because I simply laugh at the fact that she imagines Plankton as this buff guy even though he’s very miniscule, or how she imagines SpongeBob as really idiotic, Squidward being this blob, and Mr. Krabs being this money magician or something. Speaking of humor, this episode isn’t too abundant in it, aside from a subplot I’ll talk about later, but the main plot does have its fair share of humor, such as the ideal versions of characters I just talked about, SpongeBob shouting NOOO when Ideal Plankton falls down a trench, only for him to reply why he said no when he just told him to save Karen, which is a classic misunderstanding joke that works amazingly, and yeah this does come in an emotional sequence, but technically this isn’t really executed as a very emotional sequence, unlike Appointment TV, so the joke doesn’t come off as very out-of-place. There’s some other small visual gags here and there that I enjoyed, but for the most part it’s the plot that’s really worth checking out here, so let’s continue doing that. I like the sequence where Ideal Plankton and SpongeBob are fighting the other ideal versions of the characters, how they have these amusing abilities and the entire sequence is just tons of fun.
This episode also does a really good job at suspense, mainly because of the subplot where Karen ends up going out-of-control and starts causing havoc, so you want SpongeBob to get rid of this virus before Karen ends up dying down. That being said, this subplot isn’t really perfect, because the jokes they make here are definitely some of the worst ones in the episode, such as Karen kissing the cash register for some reason, or her dancing with a bunch of hillbillies where there’s a lot of stupid jokes that play out. I would’ve liked it if this subplot more so just showed Karen going crazy so it would take up less time in the episode and we could’ve gotten more time focused on the sequences inside of Karen. Back to the good, I really love the memory bank scene and it’s easily my favorite scene in the episode. I really love how they make tons of references to past episodes using the whole idea of a memory bank, but they simply show these references in the background to not distract you from the actual plot in hand, so it does give this episode some rewatchability where you’d have to go back to this episode to see just how many episodes they referenced and which one they did in fact reference. That being said, I HATE the ending. Honestly, for an episode as clever as this, I’m surprised the twist at the end is actually here. Basically, the virus is hungry, so SpongeBob puts him on a Krabby Patty so he can eat that instead of eating Karen. I’ve seen this twist so many times before and honestly, they could’ve done a much better job at this twist. Because if the virus was just hungry, why would he eat KAREN’S parts in order to feed? Maybe because he originates from Karen, but they don’t really explain that either, so this twist just comes off as lame and forgettable.
Aside from that, this is a pretty damn great episode and a major highlight of this season, with fantastic animation, a fun story with interesting new characters, and some clever moments as well as good suspense. This is one adventure that’s (almost) unforgettable.
Episode Rating: Supreme (8.5/10)