Our journey through uncertain times for SpongeBob finds us at a fairly inauspicious start. But hey, you gotta start somewhere!
My memories of Season 4 are an amalgamation of two different things: my childhood memories of watching the show, and the memories of doing a full watch-through of the show that began in 2020 with one of my long-time friends, with whom I watch an episode a week. (It’s very much ongoing—we’re currently in Season 11.) Largely indebted to the latter, my feelings about Season 4 tend to run fairly cold. To me, it feels like a season of uncertainty. While the impact of Stephen Hillenburg on a day-to-day basis across the first three seasons is largely left to be implied, it feels like there’s something of a vacuum in his absence, despite the fact that there’s plenty of carry-over from Season 3. All the major figures in the show’s production returned besides Hillenburg himself and creative director/supervising producer Derek Drymon. Their position as tastemakers, tasked with approving writers’ outlines and ideas, was passed to Paul Tibbitt, one of Hillenburg’s favorite members of the crew, who was a writer, director, and storyboard artist from the show’s inception.
