S04E03: Have You Seen This Snail?

“Dear Neptune, what have I done?” “What do you mean? You drove him away. It’s right there in black and white.”

Original Airdate: November 11, 2005

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.

S04E02: The Lost Mattress / Krabs vs. Plankton

“ALL MY MONEY WAS IN THAT MATTRESS!” “WHAT?? HAVEN’T YOU HEARD OF A BANK??” “NOOOO!!”

Original Airdate: May 13, 2005

While I understand why “Fear of a Krabby Patty” and “Shell of a Man” were chosen to lead off this season, a part of me wonders if that pairing would be better served if “The Lost Mattress” served as a chaser: it’s not an amazing episode, but it’s got a nice, easygoing feel while spotlighting more of the cast we’ve come to love. It’s been a bizarrely Krabs-centric start to the season—which even continues to the fourth episode that we’ll get onto momentarily—but in the case of “The Lost Mattress,” he’s merely a catalyst for a little slapstick nonsense with SpongeBob, Patrick (welcome to S4, buddy!), and Squidward. Is there a sense that the character dynamics here are a little warmed-over? For sure. We’ve seen this rapport between the trio dozens of times, and there’s dozens more instances of it to come. But the cozy familiarity, with some nice snap to the writing, makes this feel like the first episode of the season so far that’s been able to sustain itself, and go about at a fun pace without any awkward or halting moments.

S04E01: “Fear of a Krabby Patty / Shell of a Man”

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.

Your Weekly Sponge: An Introduction

Look, an image from "Procrastination"—an episode I will not be talking about!

Hi! My name is Dax. I’ve written on the internet about various shows for almost a decade now, but there’s something that I’ve always wanted to cross off my ever-expanding list of things to write about: SpongeBob SquarePants! Yes, he of the pineapple under the sea, of an absorbent and yellow and porous quality! And you might be thinking… really? Hasn’t everyone talked about this show enough? Haven’t we all jointly agreed that the show is a cultural juggernaut which, in its heyday, yielded some of the highest-quality children’s animated programming of all time? We have, and I acknowledge that! But get this: I’m not here to talk about that era of the show.