137a. One Coarse Meal

Truly the most vile, dire episode of SpongeBob, or even most if not all Nicktoons (neck-in-neck with "Love Loaf", if you could call that a cartoon) that deserves all the hatred it gets. The difference between this and A Pal for Gary is that the horrific peril is portrayed entirely realistically, and never truly stops. Plankton, though in this season he has committed crimes, doesn't quite deserve being tortured in his own home over the course of weeks to a suicidal depression. Krabs seemed to have full, murderious intent, and a sickening bloodthirsty towards him, as seen when he erases a picture of Plankton as he thinks about what he's doing. No mercy, no humor, and virtually no comeuppance make this Krabs one of the most evil characters in the series's history.

Worse, SpongeBob betrays Plankton and Karen is no help. The episode also just isn't funny at all.

1/10
 
This episode is terrible. This episode made a lot of people wonder who the heck is the general bad guy. Plankton, or Krabs. Apparently, Krabs is the main antagonist in the episode, because, all Plankton does is try to steal the formula, but despite Plankton being scared off by Pearl, Mr. Krabs decides to be a cold, heartless ******* by scaring Plankton for sixteen days!!! He makes him have nightmares, extreme paranoia, and worse enough, Plankton lays in the middle of the road and says he hopes for a bus to come after saying he can't take it anymore. Seriously, in no way is this funny. Then Mr. Krabs gets informed of it by Spongebob and laughs it off, not even caring. And at the end of the episode, it seems good at first when Plankton takes revenge on Krabs by his fear of clowns, but Spongebob scares him off with a hologram of whales. Wow... I don't hate Spongebob in this episode, but he is a traitor in this episode. And Mr. Krabs is freaking evil in this episode!

3/10
 
So is Plankton considered the villain and not Mr.Krabs because I think Mr.Krabs is the villain in that episode...they ruined his character...all that he wants is Plankton's suicide?? That's depressing even for him! This episode is terrible , giving it a 0/10

So is Plankton considered the villain and not Mr.Krabs because I think Mr.Krabs is the villain in that episode...they ruined his character...all that he wants is Plankton's suicide?? That's depressing even for him! This episode is terrible , giving it a 0/10
 
This episode is sickeningly overhated. Yes it's bad but it's not as awful as everyone says it is. Of course the suicide attempt is bad but it is very short and it doesn't contribute that much to the episode itself. The thing that bothers me it's that this episode has no substance at all and is just honestly really boring and creepy. It had a really good premise because yes it makes sense for Plankton to be afraid of Pearl because they usually are afraid of whales, it just wasn't executed brilliantly and if it was; cut out the suicide reference and made the episode a little less creepy and I would consider this good even though there were positives they were heavily outweighed by the negatives.

3/10
 
This episode really gave me a "WTF?" face when I first watched it. To defend the episode for a little bit I don't think it's quite the "Worst episode ever!" for a couple of reasons. For one it is aware that Mr. Krabs took things to far, the action scene in the beginning is one of the best Plankton moments in his otherwise dull appearances in season 7, and I thought SpongeBob scarring Plankton with the projector was more him trying to reset things rather than him trying to torment Plankton. I mean Plankton already knows it's Krabs and he wouldn't want Plankton to mess with Mr. Krabs a ton too so he stopped it before Plankton would go too far. (Though the line "You've redeemed yourself boy!" still leaves this vague and questionable) So while there's worse episodes out there (Boating Buddies, Truth or Square, Stuck in the Wringer, and Smoothe Jazz at Bikini Bottom) I still think this is a pretty terrible episode.

The comedy seems to be completely absent. I didn't laugh once and it's hard to even find where they were trying to make jokes. Even the episodes I said I thought were worse at least tried to be comedic. This episode on the other hand is just depressing to watch. The plot is horribly constructed and vague to the point it's hard to know what they were intending. Pearl's involvement is absolutely ridiculous as well. Apparently she's eaten Plankton (Pet or Pests flashback commencing) which is just... odd to say the least. A good chunk of this episode is just creepy seeing Plankton get more sad and isolated. This is also possibly the worst character derailment in the series, Mr. Krabs is really despicable here, even at his worst old Mr. Krabs was never this evil and honestly he's fairly irredeemable in this episode. What I'm trying to say is even when you remove that weird out-of place suicide scene the episode is still boring, full of filler, lifeless, humorless, poorly characterized, and dark in a bad way. If you want to do an episode with darker themes at least have the decency to make it funny! Over all this episode is overhated but it's still really bad, actually the FOP episode "It's a Wishful Life" is worse than this and I find it baffling that more people think this is worse than that, I mean at least this episode doesn't go into detail about how the world would be better if Plankton killed himself.

1/10
 
So I finally saw this infamous episode today. My mom was flipping channels and put on Spongebob because she "missed it." Low and behold...this was it.

So I didn't love this episode, but not always for the reasons you might think. Yes, the "suicide jokes" got to be a bit much, but honestly if they had stopped at the first one I thought it would have been fairly not bad dark humor. I guess like with some Squid abuse, the writers just got carried away. But mostly I didn't love the episode just because it had no point. Mr. Krabs didn't have a motive; he wasn't even trying to stop Plankton from pulling anything. He was just being a jerk for no reason at all. Thus, the rest of the episode fell pretty flat. There was no humor, although I guess some of the gags near the end were trying to elicit laughs. Sadly, they failed. But the suicide jokes that everyone talks about didn't even have that big of a role. I did think it was interesting to see how Plankton's cousins ended up, though. They were some of the least people I'd expect to reappear in an episode.

And let me just say, when even Spongebob knows what's going on and tries to talk Mr. Krabs out of it, something's probably wrong. Don't get me wrong; it's good not to see him be super-naive in every single episode, but come on.

Final score: 3/10, mostly for lack of enjoyment than anything else.

EDIT: As someone who wasn't totally bothered by the suicide jokes, I wonder if this episode is one example of how society gets more offended by things today, or at least takes them more seriously. I found this topic from 2010 and the opinions are very different: http://www.sbmania.net/forums/topic/27042-one-coarse-meal-episode-disscussion/
 
RogerSmith2004 said:
This episode is HORRIBLE. I mean, Krabs is the biggest jerk he's ever been, and he still wins. Spongebob betrays Plankton in the end, and Plankton attempts suicide. I mean, what happened. I mean it's one thing for the show to be disgusting (although I never really liked that), but to be depressing and scary is a whole 'nother level. I mean, this isn't the kind of show for that.

0|10 Overall
Click to expand...
Welp, I better get them to play a SAW game where they have to learn to rekindle their relationship, which died at the dawn of a sandwich.
 
EXTREMELY over hated episode. I will agree the suicide joke is a bit too far, but besides that I don't see anything else in this episode that's too bad. I think the part with the projected whales was funny, as well as all of his relatives inside the whale's stomach.

Seriously, this episode is not as bad as everyone says. It's just a boring episode to me. Not much really happens...


5/10
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top