JCM's Bottom 10

[JCM]

Because I hate myself.

#10 - To Love a Patty

In a show about a talking sea sponge, you're bound to get a lot of weird moments, and those moments are great in moderation, but To Love a Patty is a weird moment stretched out to an unbearable 11 minutes. It's not just the storyline that turns me off, it's the way that the storyline plays out. SpongeBob falls in love with the Krabby Patty just out of the blue. There's no buildup, no real reason that SpongeBob suddenly falls for one of the thousands of burgers he's cooked in his time at the Krusty Krab. He does point out a few things that sets it apart from the others, but it seems more like the writers trying to cover their butts than an actual explanation for such an inconceivable story development.

Another thing that I hate about this episode is how out-of-character SpongeBob is. SpongeBob, who cherishes work, just leaves in the middle of a shift so that he can make googly eyes with his "Patty". He neglects his house, neglects his friends, and in one scene murders a whole group of scallops, all in the name of love. By the time Mr. Krabs finds out that SpongeBob is playing hooky, the patty has gone bad, and SpongeBob's relationship has literally become unhealthy. How does Mr. Krabs respond? By hosting a dinner with him and the putrid meat. (Granted, there was money involved, but still.) After that, the episode goes from creepy to disgusting when SpongeBob eats the rotten patty, the final sad, unfunny moment in a string of sad, unfunny moments that makes this episode one my least favorite of the series.

#9 - Best Day Ever

I probably shouldn't have expected a lot from an episode based on a song, but this episode had an entire 24-hour marathon dedicated to it, so when I originally watched it, I figured that the people behind it would have put some effort into it. I was wrong. This was just another boring, lazy excuse for an episode that I hated for many of the reasons I hated To Love a Patty. SpongeBob attaches special meaning to something (instead of a Krabby Patty, it's a day), with no rhyme or reason, and he spends the entire episodes going after that special something, ending up devastated when it doesn't work out as he had hoped. This episode has some little touches to make it uniquely awful, though. There's the scene with SpongeBob and the usher that seems to have been randomly thrown in at the last minute, and the scene at the concert where SpongeBob yells at everybody for ruining his perfect day, which again, he had just made up on the spot. But despite his arrogance and lack of reason, he still gets his happy ending, because the episode hasn't promoted the song "Best Day Ever" enough yet. However, that's just me being bitter. I'm sure that some people would have found the ending touching, and it isn't as bad as it could have been, which is why this episode isn't higher on my Bottom 10. Don't consider that a recommendation, though.

That's it for today! Come back next Saturday, when I'll post numbers 8 and 7.

[Webizoid]

I knew I wasn't the only one who agreed SpongeBob wasn't righteously indignant at the end of Best Day Ever. And I can't look at that rotten patty for more than two seconds at a time. I can't wait to see what else your countdown has in store!

[Metal Snake]

Wow, both of these were amongst my all-time least favorite episodes a long time ago. Nostalgia.

[JCM]

I forgot to do it yesterday, so I'll do it today instead.

 

#8 - Waiting

 

 

This episode was one of the first produced under the three-shorts format used in Season 5. This was undoubtedly the worst of them, because it didn't make up for its shorter running time by using more fast-paced humor; in fact, it tended to drag on more than the regular-sized episodes of the season, probably because it was based on a SpongeBob children's book (one I actually have in my possession) that took me less than two minutes to read. This episode is basically the book, stretched out and with more of SpongeBob crying and acting like a jerk to his friends. Suffice it to say, I'm happy it didn't go over seven minutes.

#7 - The Splinter

 

 

Ah, The Splinter. Source of a million "ewws" and "ugh". It's not just the grosser scenes of the episode that turn me off, though, but how ridiculously its story plays out. When it starts off, SpongeBob gets a splinter after falling into a pool of mayonnaise with swords sticking out of it, trying to get his spatula. Yeah. After that, Squidward messes around with SpongeBob by telling him that he'll get sent home for his "injury", causing SpongeBob to go berserk. That makes sense, at least. After that, SpongeBob calls Patrick about the "injury", Patrick comes over to the Krusty Krab, makes everything worse, and leaves. This is what I hate most about this episode, and many other episodes like it. Patrick isn't utilized as a character. He's just a plot device, and it sucks because there's a lot more you can do with him. It doesn't help that Patrick basically treats SpongeBob like dirt during their appointment. I will say, however, that the shot of Patrick gargling SpongeBob's foot got a chuckle out of me.

 

Anyway, SpongeBob goes back to the Krusty Krab, shows everyone his now-horrendously-deformed finger, Mr. Krabs fixes it, and everybody lives happily ever after. Hooray. There's not really much else that I have to say about this episode that hasn't be said about it already. There's not a lot of humor, the execution is as bad as the concept, and pus drains out of SpongeBob's finger for 15 seconds.

 

Come back next weekend for...yeah.

[JCM]

#6 - Dear Vikings

 

 

This is probably the only episode that gets more fan hate than The Splinter, and while I believe that there are worse episodes, this is certainly deserving of the negative reviews it gets. The problem with this episode is that it doesn't really have a coherent plotline. Mr. Krabs starts selling viking size cups (which are really the same size, but you get to wear a cardboard hat when you buy it; typical Mr. Krabs) and SpongeBob wants to know what vikings are, so he asks Squidward, who proceeds to tell him a bunch of random lies (typical Squidward). SpongeBob wants to know more, though, so he writes the vikings a letter, which is akin to writing a letter to Santa Claus, but through a series of contrived coincidences, the letter manages to get to the vikings, who, despite the Krusty Krab not being mentioned once in the letter, know exactly where to go to find SpongeBob, then they proceed to destroy the Krusty Krab and kidnap SpongeBob and Squidward without any kind of motive whatsoever. SpongeBob, in some strange bout of Stockholm syndrome, treats it like another opportunity to learn from the vikings, and it's not until they kill one of their members and almost kills Squidward that he realizes that the vikings have a couple of screws loose. Then he saves the ship from sinking due to an iceberg, and the episode ends despite the fact that he and Squidward are still essentially hostages to a group of crazy, bearded men.

 

This episode had a couple of amusing moments, like the "Olaf" gag, but all in all, it was a "viking-sized" disaster. Why it got an Emmy nomination and an entire DVD dedicated to it is beyond me.

 

#5 - A Day Without Tears

 

 

This episode is similar to the Season 4 episode "Funny Pants", which took SpongeBob's annoying laugh and made it even more annoying for the purposes of the episode. However, seeing SpongeBob laugh is certainly more tolerable than seeing him cry, and unfortunately, this episode is all about him crying, which made it a shoo-in for my top 5. SpongeBob has always had a childlike personality, but I hate it when episodes like this crank his childlike personality up to eleven so that he's indistinguishable from the Rugrats. (Not that I'm dissing Rugrats; that's a great show). Anyway, since Squidward apparently learned from what happened in Funny Pants, he doesn't try to get SpongeBob to reduce his tear emissions by telling him a story, but instead tells him that if he goes the entire day without crying, Squidward will go to a slumber party with him. The stakes have never been higher, so Squidward spends the episode trying to get SpongeBob to cry. Spoiler alert: SpongeBob wins, and viewer finds himself crying after 11 wasted minutes.

 

Come back next time when I review two more episodes! Wasn't expecting that, were you?

[Wumbo]

I honestly didn't mind A Day Without Tears. They took a premise I thought I would loathe and actually made a kind of funny episode out of it.

[JCM]

#4 - All That Glitters

 

 

This is the oldest episode on my list, and one I hate just as much now as I did when I first watched it 8 years ago. It had an interesting concept, which is more than I can say about a lot of the episodes on this list, but the execution was horrible enough to make it worst episode of Season 4 and one of the worst episodes of the entire series.

 

It starts out with SpongeBob being tasked to create a "monster krabby patty", which btw, sounds like a heart attack waiting to happen. He tries to flip the giant slab of meat with his tiny spatula, and surprise surprise, it breaks. Cue 30 seconds of SpongeBob crying. After that, he's told to get a new spatula, but because of the sentimental value that the spatula holds, he refuses. But then, he sees a cool, high-tech spatula in a store window, and he gives the store owner everything he owns, including the literal clothes off his back, to replace his un-replacable spatula with it. He walks back to the Krusty Krab nude, eager to test the baby out, but the spatula's artificial brain, apparently the brain of a one-percenter, decides that it's too classy to flip burgers and leaves. So, SpongeBob goes to the only hospital in the world that accepts kitchen tools as patients and reunites with his old spatula, but that spatula now has an artificial brain, too, a brain that really hates SpongeBob for abandoning it. So, SpongeBob cries for another 30 seconds, and another SpongeBob comes out of nowhere to tell the audience the moral of the story. Of course, the spatula forgives SpongeBob, and everything ends well, except for the fact that SpongeBob no longer has a house, or clothes, or a dime to his name. Yeah.

 

This episode seemed obsessed with torturing SpongeBob in every way possible, and if made for something really painful to watch and impossible to laugh at. I get that this episode was trying to teach some kind of lesson, but it doesn't even succeed at that. SpongeBob was never designed to be an educational series, and while we can learn things along the way, it should always put entertainment first, or risk sacrificing everything that made us fall in love with it in the first place.

 

#3 - Boating Buddies

 

 

I don't hate Squidward abuse as much as a lot of other fans do. In fact, some of my favorite episodes (The Camping Episode, Club SpongeBob) had tons of it. I can tolerate Squidward abuse when it's funny and at least partly justified. In this episode, however, it's neither, and there's a reason it's one of the first episodes people who hate Squidward abuse point to. It takes the abuse to its logical extremes, not even trying to extract any humor from it. We're just supposed to laugh because Squidward is miserable, and that's a display of lazy writing if ever I'd seen one. It doesn't help that it's a boating school episode, which, as I mentioned in my review of No Free Rides, is one of my least favorite types of episodes. The typical SpongeBob-Mrs. Puff dynamic of boating school eps is thrown out the window, though, so SpongeBob can focus more on annoying his neighbor, to everyone's chagrin.

 

Since there's only two episodes left, I'll post number 2 next week and the biggest, baddest of them all the week after that. Don't miss it!

[PatBack]

I can predict it's going to be Pet or Pests. That episode gets way too much hate, imo.

[JCM]

#2 - A Pal For Gary

 

 

In order to explain why I consider this one of the show's worst episodes, I'll compare to Have You Seen This Snail?, one of the show's best episodes. Both episodes focused on Gary the Snail, an under-appreciated character, but while HYSTS showed SpongeBob neglecting Gary, going on to regret it, and learning that he should respect his pet more, APFG plays SpongeBob's neglect for laughs, having him learn nothing and forcing Gary to clean up after him without expecting anything different in the future. One episode was hopeful, and the other was cynical, and this, better than anything, represents the change that the show itself had made.

 

This episode has more in common with the Season 6 episode Pets or Pests than HYSTS. While Pets or Pests wasn't a fun episode to watch, either, the conflict between Gary and the pet in that episode was mutual, and SpongeBob was at least aware of that conflict, instead of being completely blind to it as he was in this episode. I can usually handle SpongeBob being naive - that's been a part of his character since day one - but when his naiveté interferes with his ability to be a good pet owner or be a good friend, he should become aware of it and try to fix it, instead of cases like this episode where the plotline rides on his gullibility until its at its greatest extent, and then rides on it some more. Instead of giving SpongeBob the chance to redeem himself and giving Gary the break he deserves, the episode chooses instead to go the easy route, to have Gary fix everything, and as a result, SpongeBob ends in the exact same place he started, while Gary is in a worse position than he was at the beginning of the ep. I think that the show should focus more on comedy than trying to give each character karmic justice, but when there isn't a whole lot of either, it's not really good to an episode's prospects.

 

Basically, this episode treats a character who already doesn't get a lot of respect with even less respect, pushing the episode into uncomfortable territory and making it even more unwatchable than it already is. That's a quality it shares with Boating Buddies and Numuro Uno, my least favorite episode of all time. Do you know what it is? Find out if you're right when I post it next week!

[Wumbo]

I have a guess. 

[JCM]

#1 - One Coarse Meal

 

 

This episode is my least favorite episode of the series because of how exceptionally crappy it is to its characters, and to the character of Plankton in particular. Plankton has never been a saint, but he has evolved over the years to become less threatening and more feasible as a main character, Krabs, meanwhile, has evolved in the opposite direction, becoming an even bigger jerk season after season, and this episode is the culmination of their respective evolutions. Mr. Krabs is never quite as evil as he was here, while Plankton is never as sympathetic. There's a possibility that they could reach those extremes again, but I doubt it. This episode could have given us better insight into the relationship between Mr. Krabs and Plankton, akin to Friend or Foe or Best Frenemies, but it opts instead to tread the same ground the show has trod a zillion times before: Mr. Krabs and Plankton hate each other. The End.

 

And if all this episode did was reaffirm something we already knew, I wouldn't have looked at it twice. No, it blew that thing we knew to ridiculous proportions. When Mr. Krabs does something awful, he's usually motivated to do it by money, and he usually gets some kind of reckoning for it at the end, like in The Cent of Money or Krabby Land. Here, Mr. Krabs does what he does for fun. He doesn't care when Plankton is no longer a threat to his restaurant. He doesn't care when he's driven Plankton to attempt suicide. I'm not one to rage about continuity, but this is person he grew up with. It just seems weird that he would be so indifferent to Plankton's misery. Anyway, Mr. Krabs not only has no remorse about what he's doing; he also doesn't get any real punishment. I mentioned in my Pal For Gary review how I like to see some kind of karmic justice when a character does wrong. While SpongeBob wasn't aware of his misdeeds in PFG and Boating Buddies, Mr. Krabs knew exactly what he was doing, and that makes him all the more deserving of a kick to the seat of the pants for it. The ending of One Coarse Meal made it seem like this would be the case, but it just became another excuse for SpongeBob to add insult to Plankton's injury instead. I don't know if this was an attempt by the writers to be clever or whatever, but they only succeeded in making one of the least satisfying endings of the show's history.

 

At that point in the series' run, I didn't expect it to be funny or creative or even well-written, but I did expect it to have respect for the characters, and that's something this episode just didn't have. That's something few of the episodes in my Bottom 10 had. I've learned to tolerate so much from this show over the years, but the characters are the thing that got me into SpongeBob in the first place, and they are, in my mind, its biggest strength. When the writers take away from the characters by making them act in ways they shouldn't, or in the case of my bottom three, treating them in an unusually cruel manner, you take away from the episode itself in a way that can't be easily repaired. One Coarse Meal combined bad writing, bad humor, and bad character development in such a way that I knew it would be number one on this list from the very beginning. If you don't agree with me, if you think One Coarse Meal is a work of art and I'm an idiot, you're entitled to your opinion, though I would prefer that you didn't insult my intelligence.

 

That's it for my Bottom 10! Come back next time when I do my middle 8 (just kidding; I'm done with these reviews ), and as always, stay gold!

[CyanideFishbone]

As TheMysteriousMrEnter said for OCM, "If you write a episode like this, it does not just mean you are a bad writer. It means you are a bad person."