How fun, a notorious episode riding the coattails of another notorious episode! And let me just say something right now, in the past, I always disliked this episode more than “Squid Baby”. Time to see if this still holds up!
Well, the beginning of this episode is for sure an improvement over the previous, again starting with Squidward relaxing after a funny joke involving a customer. Things start declining, though, once Squidward sees SpongeBob’s diary, and the plot becomes very predictable. And this is not a plot I like, not at all. And do you know why? I’m sure you can guess. If you thought anything along the lines of secondhand embarrassment, congratulations, you are correct! I
hate secondhand embarrassment. I have made this abundantly clear throughout these reviews. So when this episode makes it the entire plot, you best believe I’m immediately unhappy.
“Little Yellow Book” doesn’t even try to make the embarrassment entertaining, in my opinion. The scenes of Squidward making SpongeBob do the things he’s written about in his book are at best boring as L, and at worst so uncomfortable and unpleasant to watch. Especially because Squidward’s not doing this alone, he has an audience, and they’re all laughing at the little yellow guy. I’m just trying to figure out what’s supposed to be entertaining about this. Because not only is this plot not good, but it’s even worse that it’s happening to SpongeBob! He is the
main character, no one wants to see him lose like this. The sooner we learn this, the sooner we can stop having plots like this. And honestly, we
had moved on from plots like this…last time anything like this happened was in season 7!
Squidward, for perhaps the first time ever, is absolutely insufferable here. What he does in this episode crosses the line in every way for me. The reason why SpongeBob ruining Squidward’s day/life is funny is because it’s misfortune and never on purpose. Squidward here is actively malicious and it’s extremely unpleasant. And don’t think I forgot about the Bikini Bottomites here, this is their worst showing this side of “Someone’s in the Kitchen With Sandy”, full stop. Especially when it comes to their utter hypocrisy. They’re laughing at SpongeBob for like 3 minutes, and then when it somehow becomes
more clear to them that Squidward is reading SpongeBob’s diary (because how did they not realize this??), they turn on him?? No, act the way you act with your full chest. Squidward may have been the impetus and worst offender, but they all deserved severe consequences just like him. Oh and don’t think I forgot about Patrick. Trash. The
only person who didn’t annoy me is Mr. Krabs, as he’s the only one to clearly not listen to Squidward’s reading of the diary, so he’s the only one who can actually chew Squidward out like he does in the episode.
The
one thing I like about this episode is that we get to see SpongeBob’s perspective on a lot of things through his diary. I love this guy’s endless optimism and joy (which is clearly exhausted to some degree in this episode, yet another reason I don’t like it at all). And yes, this episode spawned the
mocking SpongeBob meme, we move on. And seeing Squidward reap the consequences of his actions was fun, at least until the hypocrisy of the Bikini Bottomites was directly addressed, and until the end of the episode when he decides to read SpongeBob’s real diary because he’s an a-hole.
This episode is immensely annoying and frustrating, with only the smallest smidgen of satisfaction. It's like "Dumped" but a lot worse. My main concern is whether I think this episode is Bad-tier or Abysmal-tier. I think I might have to go with the latter, because of the utterly nonsensical writing, and the aforementioned frustration. So, congrats on being one of five, "Little Yellow Book". Congratulations.
Episode Tier: Abysmal
Episode Score: 2.7/10