“Dear Neptune, what have I done?” “What do you mean? You drove him away.
It’s right there in black and white.”
Original Airdate: 11/11/05
Only three episodes into my watch-through and we’ve finally hit not just our
first double-length episode, but also our first major milestone of the season:
I’d say “Have You Seen This Snail?” is one of the more fondly-remembered
post-movie outings for the show, to the degree that I feel it’s been regarded
as a bit of a classic. It's a reflection of just how well the show’s
propensity for “specials” worked: I have vivid memories of how aggressively
they were advertised, and how much viewers were sold on the idea of bearing
witness to something, well, special. To my five year-old mind, it felt like
event television, and even when they were rerun, that exciting feeling of it
being like a shooting star which you’d be a fool to miss remained. But I now
look back on it as something that reeks of network mandating: “We gotta create
artificial hype around our cash cow to keep it feeling special!” While there
are some great episodes that exceed the usual 11-minute runtime (“Christmas
Who” being the biggest example), I don’t think it’s something the show was
ever able to
fully crack, not even in its best seasons. (“The Sponge
Who Could Fly” and “Ugh” might be the biggest dogs of the show’s early years,
in my opinion.) SpongeBob exists to be frenetic, fast-paced, and light; giving
it more time to stretch out absolves it of those strengths almost entirely.
Subsequently, this might be a hot take, but I don’t think “Have You Seen This
Snail?” is that great of an episode, however effortful it may be.
To some extent, I think the episode deserves praise, compared to other
episodes with sprawling episode lengths, for attempting to create a
compelling, emotional narrative instead of it feeling like an episode that ran
a little over, and that the writers then had to jam a bunch of fluff into for
the sake of rounding it out. (There’s not even any Patchy segments here, the
show’s classic fall-back for extending runtime.) There are certainly aspects
that feel drawn out, but I can at least respect their intentionality.
SpongeBob is rarely a show that aims for anything beyond a
surface-level comic romp, so the need to set itself up as they do is valid
enough, even if that does mean it takes seven minutes before it’s occurred to
SpongeBob that Gary has gone missing due to his inability to properly take
care of him.
Which, oh yeah! That also makes “Have You Seen This Snail?” one of our earlier
looks at SpongeBob being a bad pet-owner, an angle that I don’t think his
character has ever needed and which has often culminated in some of the most
distressing and tortuous episodes of the show to come! I won’t act like there
isn't a bizarre precedent for it—S3’s “The Great Snail Race” is a good target
for ire—though it’s a recurring theme which has never served the show well. At
least in this case, that’s intelligently weaponized and essential to a story
with a greater meaning to it, even if SpongeBob is frustratingly negligent,
fixating so intently on a new paddle-ball toy that he’s unable to interpret
Gary’s pleas for food.
With that being said, once the episode is able to push through its first act,
it settles into more of a groove, cutting between SpongeBob and his troubles
getting through the days without his beloved snail, and Gary’s adventures in
an unknown locale, where he’s taken in by an old woman who believes him to be
her long-lost pet. Both, tonally, are quite interesting. While the SpongeBob
half of the episode is the most antics-based, and keeps the show’s comic
rhythm up to snuff, it’s also the more emotionally blunt half, featuring lots
of crying and a particularly maudlin song, “Gary Come Home,” which feels, at
times, like it’s almost satirical with how much it wallows in its own misery.
Gary’s adventure, meanwhile, has some interesting horror aspects, especially
as it becomes clear that the old woman is, quite frankly, the complete
opposite of the way SpongeBob was earlier—so doting that she threatens to
suffocate him and send him down the path of her other deceased pet snails. I
struggle to figure out exactly how I feel about it, because there is something
heavy to its themes, intentional or not; the notion of an old, lonely woman
exercising Munchausen by proxy on her pet because it’s the only thing that she
has is a horribly depressing conceit, and while it’s smart of the show not to
devote itself to some sort of dark, psychological character study with her,
playing it for humor on the other hand leaves it feeling surprisingly jagged,
and arguably even a little careless. It also seems like it accidentally
vindicates SpongeBob of his comparatively apathetic treatment of Gary ("he's a
bad pet owner but he's not that bad!"), which… isn’t the right message
either. So is it meant to communicate anything? It’s hard to say, because it
instills you with an unsettling feeling that the show itself isn’t too intent
on dissecting.
It also feels somewhat emblematic of what this episode’s greatest issues are
for me, tonally: while it is sort of odd to see the show trying to tug on your
heartstrings, it ends up landing somewhere between a mix of earnest emotional
displays and some meta level of taking the piss out of them for bearing their
emotions. Do we laugh, or do we cry? The episode never fully commits to
either. To me, that feels suggestive of some level of insecurity, like the
writers weren’t fully confident that they could commit to the tones that the
story requires and instead had to reel themselves back in whenever “Have You
Seen My Snail?” threatened to become too much. And honestly, I get that. While
I think that a good show should be able to achieve a strong mix of tones, and
certainly a show that has run as long as SpongeBob has contains the
capacity for something more (see: the movie), it can be hard to know how to go
about them when they seem to clash so strongly with the identity that the show
is so tightly wound about: one of joy, frivolity, silliness, and the ultimate
triumph of the positive spirit. And it’s not like any of these really play a
strong role in the episode’s outcome, either, which leaves it feeling, at
best, too emotionally telegraphed to hit you in your most primal, innermost
feels.
None of that is to voice disinterest in SpongeBob trying to tell
heartfelt stories, because again, I encourage that sort of challenge! If
anything, there are a lot of episodes in the seasons to come that I feel I
might be among the select few to stump for, and I admire them because they
endeavor to try more complicated things. But for “Have You Seen My Snail?” to
have been more successful, it would have needed a greater sense of confidence
in itself, and in the end, its struggles to balance the sentimental and the
sardonic mean that it can never land on the right tone in any of its most
pivotal moments.
Favorite joke: Even if it has no bearing on the rest of the episode,
SpongeBob and Patrick barging in on Squidward’s shower, staring forth vacantly
as he screams for an abnormally long time, has rightfully become a beloved
moment. A close runner-up: the sky-writing gag (“Who’s this
Lisa person?”)
Stray Observations:
— I’m pretty bummed that I couldn’t take this episode as an opportunity to
rhapsodize about how much I adore Patchy the Pirate—who is often the best
part of these double-length episodes—but disappointingly, this episode
foregoes splicing in Patchy segments for a quick, crudely-animated intro. Ah
well. Soon enough, my friend! Technically he does appear in a ton of promo
material leading up to the special, including
this bit with Tony Hawk, and while there is charm to Tom Kenny being able to dial into his old
improv skills in them, they don’t have too much heft. It’s a shame, really,
that so much Patchy content was strictly promotional, which has ensured that
they’ve kind of fallen to the wayside and are a bit tricky to find.
— A very cute detail that I never noticed before: SpongeBob’s official
Mermaid Man and Barnacle Boy paddle set has a trademark for “Nickelodeon
Inc.”
— While it’s no Rock Bottom, I do enjoy whenever we take a look at one of
the moodier, non-Bikini Bottom locales in this show as we do when Gary
leaves Bikini Bottom, since it feels so rare to consider that there’s even
an outside world.
— Being that this is the first special of S4, it also has the season’s
first guest voice actor, with Amy Poehler portraying the old woman that
takes Gary in. I, for one, am quite a big fan of Amy, though she feels
sort of superfluous as a special guest, as the role isn’t really one that
she’s able to make particularly distinct to her comic voice. I guess one
of the kinder things that could be said about it is that she doesn’t feel
like she’s been randomly forced into the show’s formula just because the
crew wanted to hang out with her; a part of me wonders if she was just in
the building, between The Mighty B! being developed around the same
time and her connections to the sketch/improv comedy scene. (Never forget
that’s where Tom Kenny started out before he moved almost exclusively into
voicework.) Either way, I do like the way she enunciates “boogie-woogie,”
and that’s something!
— “Once again, you and I are kept apart, oh sweet scented pinecones…”
— Minor note, because I do love the “Now my heart is beating like the
saddest metronome” lyric, but wouldn’t it be better if the metronome was
animated in-time to the music? Iunno.
— Oh, and I’d be remiss not to mention Billy Cobb’s amazing interpolation of
“Gary Come Home” as a thrashing punk song, which might be the best thing to
come out of this episode.
Check it!
— Goes without saying, but our SpongeBob cry count is now at 4/5.
FINAL GRADE: C+.
Season Episode Ranking:
1. Krabs vs. Plankton (B)
2. The Lost Mattress (B-)
3. Fear of a Krabby Patty (B-)
4. Have You Seen This Snail? (C+)
5. Shell of a Man (C+)
Next week: Squidward tries to enjoy his life, and it doesn’t quite work out!
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