My oh my, what do we have here? Today’s first episode is “Choir Boys”, AKA one of the most notorious episodes in the entire show. What’s interesting about this episode’s notoriety is that I feel like it’s infamous from an insider standpoint. I don’t think more “casual” watchers of the show really know about this episode, because I hardly ever see it talked about ever. At least we start off with a beautiful background, can’t go wrong with a gorgeous shot!
My biggest problem with the episode is easily all of the annoying singing we’re subjected to, from both Squidward and SpongeBob (until the very end of the episode). Like why why why is this episode so full of annoying singing? I don’t want to hear that. I feel like annoying sounds are always so inescapable, unless I mute the volume lmao. It just makes the episode unpleasant to watch, or listen to I suppose, which is a huge turn-off.
Moving beyond my big issue with this episode, I guess I’ll just do my typical chronological run-through. I like Squidward’s little outfit in this episode, it’s cute and something different from what we see him typically wear, so that’s nice. Once Squidward leaves the house, we get a nice heaping helping of nothing funny happening, unfortunately. In fact, this entire scene is built around SpongeBob being forlorn and blank and even depressed, so you can imagine how dull the scene is. Not to mention it uses that SpongeBob design I already said I hated in my “Boating Buddies” review, so that’s another negative for sure. And then we get treated to a very irritating coughing sound…man this episode is really just racking up negative points, almost like it wants to be the lowest-ranked episode thus far! Well if that’s the case, I have bad news for this episode because so far it’s nowhere near as frustrating and infuriating as "The Thing", so it’s got a long way to go before it can be that bad. But it’s possible. Let's just see how the rest of this episode plays out.
I actually huff out a bit of a laugh with the pothole part, so hey that’s something for this episode. And honestly the whole bit with the jellyfish and Squidward was kinda funny, except for the annoying singing by SpongeBob. And then we get some unpleasant visuals with Squidward being covered in sting marks, so that’s fun. As you can see I’m not having a very good time. And this bad time is only continued once SpongeBob stops Squidward once more, this time acting like a policeman. Let’s see…more bad singing? Check. More boringness? Check. A general feeling of my time being wasted? Check. Sigh.
At least after that scene, we finally finally finally get to see some good singing from SpongeBob, which makes things actually somewhat interesting. Crazy how that happens. And the way he attracts jellyfish to him through his singing makes me think of “SpongeHenge”. Make of that what you will. We cut back to Squidward, and you guys will never believe what happens. More unpleasant singing and coughing noises!!! Isn’t that just so unexpected??? I’m really just reaching the end of my rope with this auditory torture because first off, this means that the same joke is being used for the entire episode, and second off, that joke isn’t even funny and is actively unpleasant. So yeah, that’s why this is the main issue of this episode, because all the funny cards are put into this joke’s basket, and it completely fails, and we have hardly any other good jokes to fall back on for humor. Thankfully, SpongeBob eventually comes in and saves our ears.
The other main problem with this episode is that it doesn’t feel complete at all, in fact it just feels so...empty. Almost like this episode is a short (which it absolutely should've been if this was gonna be the plot). And I’m sure this is definitely connected to all of the wasted time we get with the throat clearing and the bad singing and the very unnecessarily long scenes. Like even though we see SpongeBob say that he wants to show that he can be in the men’s choir, we never actually get the feeling that he cares even a little bit? And so seeing everyone cheer for him does not feel all that satisfying and more like a thing that is happening. The end of the episode was nice enough, it was very wholesome of SpongeBob to request a place for Squidward, and this is almost nearly humorously shown in the ending, with Squidward becoming a page-turner.
Ugh. That really just says it all about “Choir Boys”. Ugh. Just so annoying and so much wasted time. And I think the episode concept could’ve gone somewhere, but everything beyond the concept needs to be scrapped for that to work, because the material we’ve got is not it. I’m honestly struggling to figure out where to put this episode. Because I don’t like it, oh most definitely not, but I feel like it’s not a dislike in the same way that I dislike “The Thing”, you know? But I think it deserves to go in the same tier as that episode at most, because this episode really just shows what you should not be doing when crafting an episode. You should not fill it with a bunch of annoying noises that fill up all your time. And I would think that’s common sense lol.
I know people call this episode “Squidward Torture”, but as you can see that’s not what I found to be the problem here. Honestly even by “Squidward Torture” standards, this is pretty tame, and I don’t even believe in those standards, as I’ve explained before. I don’t feel good or bad for Squidward here, I don’t feel anything at all for him. Because this episode completely fails to engage me, other than making me irritated with the noises. And that is why this episode is going to unseat “The Thing” as my lowest ranked episode so far. That episode had a good first few minutes. This episode doesn’t have even that.
In fact, this episode has so few redeeming qualities mixed with so much unpleasantness that it has what I like to call the "ew factor". That means that this episode is going to be the first of its kind…the first “Abysmal”-tier episode. And here I thought we’d be able to make it to season 7 before this tier came into play. But I just can’t do it…this episode is really, really bad. I wanted it to be good, to bring some positivity to it because I know it’s so very hated, but I just couldn’t do it.
Episode Tier: Abysmal
Episode Score: 2.8/10