Pinned thread Season 12 Discussion

SlipperytheTotodile

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UPDATED TIER LIST!
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  • As we all figured Krusty Koncessionaires is obviously on the top tier here due to it being my favorite episode of the entire show!
  • Yes i watched Kwarantined Krab clips on youtube and its got some funny moments
  • Pat Hearts Squid makes a solid case of an underrated but good episode...
  • Why is Who R Zoo? underhated? I like this one a lot
  • This season had an addiction for alright episode there are 4 it seems like...
  • SpongeBob's Big Birthday Blowout in my opinion wasnt as good as Truth or Square because it does have funny jokes and some decent moments but the SpongeBob torture was noticeable...
  • SpongeBob's Bad Habit is funny but boring and contains filler
  • Escape for Beneath Glove World has a good plot and all but has weak gags
  • One Trick Sponge was actually kinda interesting but its meh due to the plot clearly listing everyone except SpongeBob and Patrick are gonna be jerks
  • Dream Hoppers is bad how? Well it rip off 2 good season 1 episodes! Sleepy Time and Reef Blower. Sleepy Time due the plot and Reef Blower due to mostly silence
  • Pineapple RV was formally meh for me but now i realized my true colors of that episode...
  • My Two Krabses is just terrible it was my least favorite before i rewatched The Nitwitting and SpongeBob in RandomLand
  • The Worst episode of this season are a mixture of The Nitwitting and SpongeBob in RandomLand both are bad due to overused randomness
Top 3:
1: Krusty Koncessionaires
2: Lighthouse Louie
3: Karen's Baby
Honorable Mentions: Patrick's Tantrum and Knock Knock, Who's There?

Bottom 3:
1: SpongeBob in RandomLand
2: The Nitwitting
3: My Two Krabses
Dishonorable Mentions: Biddy Sitting and Jolly Lodgers

Best: Krusty Koncessionaires (duh)
Worst: SpongeBob in RandomLand
 

Bigsmoker

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Ok I finished watching the season and it's probably my least favorite season of Spongebob.
There are a few nice episodes but most of the season is meh or pretty bad.
I have posted many times why I don't like modern Spongebob seasons on this forum and season 12 is the same but a bit worse for me since season 10 has a really good episode(Life Insurance) and season 11 is very creative, so I give them a bit bonus even though I don't like these seasons.
However, season 12 is the same without any bonus. It is not creative like season 11 and doesn't has a really good episode like season 10 has, so it's a bit worse for me. I would not exaggerate and say this season is trash and give it a 1/10, but it's really meh and I would give this season a 4.5-5/10.

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Pugs4Thugs

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Another month, another review.

FarmerBob: 7.5/10
Gary & Spot: 9/10
The Nitwitting: 4.5/10
The Ballad of Filthy Muck: 9.2/10
The Krusty Slammer: 8.3/10
Pineapple RV: 9.3/10
Gary's Got Legs: 8.7/10
King Plankton: 7.2/10
Plankton's Old Chum: 9.1/10
Stormy Weather: 5/10
Swamp Mates: 9.3/10
One Trick Sponge: 7.9/10
The Krusty Bucket: 9/10
Squid’s On A Bus: 8.8/10
Sandy’s Nutty Nieces: 8.9/10
Insecurity Guards: 8.9/10
Broken Alarm: 6.4/10
Karen’s Baby: 7.8/10
Shell Games: 6.9/10
Senior Discount: 6.9/10
Mind The Gap: 9.3/10
Dirty Bubble Returns: 7.5/10
Jolly Lodgers: 9.2/10
Biddy Sitting: 5.3/10
SpongeBob's Big Birthday Blowout: 9.2/10
SpongeBob In RandomLand: 8.7/10
SpongeBob's Bad Habit: 7.9/10
Handemonium: 8.8/10
Breakin': 7.9/10
Boss For A Day: 7.7/10
The Goofy Newbie: 8.3/10
The Ghost Of Plankton: 9.3/10
My Two Krabses: 7.6/10
Knock Knock, Who's There?: 8.3/10
Pat Hearts Squid: 9/10
Lighthouse Louie: 8.9/10
Hiccup Plague: 8.8/10
A Cabin In The Kelp: 9.2/10
The Hankering: 9.3/10
Who R Zoo?: 6/10
Kwarantined Krab: 9.3/10
Plankton's Intern: 9.4/10
Patrick's Tantrum: 6.7/10
Bubble Bass's Tab: 7.8/10
Kooky Cooks: 9.3/10
Escape From Beneath Glove World: 6.5/10
Krusty Koncessionaires: 9.3/10
Dream Hoppers: 8.2/10

Top 5:
5. Mind the Gap
4. The Ghost of Plankton
3. Krusty Koncessionaires
2. Swamp Mates
1. Plankton's Intern
Bottom 5:
5. Broken Alarm
4. Who R Zoo?
3. Biddy Sitting
2. Stormy Weather
1. The Nitwitting
Scoring:
Amazing: 17
Great: 12
Good: 10
Okay: 6
Mediocre: 2
Tolerable: 1
Bad: 0
Abysmal: 0
Additional Comments:
Dang, this month went by fast! Can’t believe I’m already at the point where I’m summing up my feelings on season 12. There’s a lot of things I can discuss here, because I think this season’s got some real differences to the couple that came before it. That’s why I’m officially naming seasons 9B-11 as an era (I’m thinking of calling it the Revitalized Era. Still workshopping), and season 12 as the beginning of another. So I think the obvious choice for this discussion post is to discuss what makes season 12 a departure from seasons 9B-11.

Well, the first and most obvious thing is that I did not like season 12 as much as seasons 9B-11. If season 11 is my favorite of the post-sequel seasons, than season 12 is my least favorite. I’d say I regard it similarly to maybe season 8? There’s elements of season 6 in here though, but not many, as we all know that that’s my least favorite season of this show. I can say for sure what this season is not though—a transition season. Nah, this season’s actually quite consistent. So if there was a transition, it was made between the production of season 11 and 12. Which is a little unusual for this show, but hey, that just shows that new things can still happen 12 seasons in. And I suppose I should also make it clear that this season isn’t bad. I mean the average episode rating was an 8.1/10—same as season 10.

Alright, so why didn’t I like season 12 as much? Well, there’s a few reasons, and they all are also reasons why season 12 stands apart.. The big thing here is that this season has a lot more duds than the last few ones, and I believe there are two main contributing factors to this (along with a number of smaller ones, but let’s focus on the big ones first).
  • Number one is that this season had a big, big problem with not knowing where to stop. And this plays out in a few different arenas. This easiest one to explain is the one I’ll start with, and that’s that this season had too many episodes with too much annoying stuff in it (for example, “The Nitwitting”). It’s like they didn’t know when too much annoyance was enough. And that’s something that was quite characteristic of season 6. The next way that this played out was for some inexplicable reason, we spent wayyyy too much time with characters we had never previously seen, or had reason to be invested in. I see this as the result of the experimental energy we’ve been building up over the last 3 seasons, most notably in season 11, but the problem here is that, again, it goes too far. I don’t mind new characters, but episodes like “Stormy Weather” and “Who R Zoo?” have this problem of introducing characters we don’t care about, and spending much of the runtime with them. This is a clear extension of the problem with the season 11 episode “Don’t Feed the Clowns”, so in hindsight, that episode was an indication of what was to come.
  • Number two is that for whatever reason, I found myself unable to connect with many of the episodes in this season. For some, that could be due to writing issues (”Shell Games”, “Senior Discount”, “Patrick’s Tantrum”). For others, it’s due to what I mentioned previously about following characters we have no investment in. And for still others, it’s for reasons I have no idea about. Many of the Good and Okay tier episodes fall into this. And I say it in my reviews, I truly don’t know what it is. It’s possible that it’s due to the fact that this month was exceptionally stressful for me, because it’s true, that was the case, but I’m not quite convinced. I’ve had stressful months before and still been able to connect.
  • One last thing I noticed in this season that definitely contributed to my not liking it as much, but isn’t as big of a thing as the other two reasons, is that this season backslid hard when it came to characters utilized for episodes. This did improve by the end of the season, but that doesn’t explain why for so much of the season, I was hard-pressed to find an episode about Gary, Pearl, Mrs. Puff, Karen, or Sandy. So I didn’t really like that. Sandy and Gary especially had a huge disappearing act in this one. Very odd. But the season did continue doing things like having new pairs of characters interact, so I can’t harp too much on this.
Alright, all that sounds bad, but let me be the first to say that this season also had a lot of good. While the best episodes in this season for the most part didn’t reach the general heights of previous seasons, the ones that were really good were quite good. And, something I noticed as early on as “The Ballad of Filthy Muck” was that this season did a good job including both over-the-top episodes, and understated ones. This is why I liked the “Krusty Koncessionaires”-”Dream Hoppers” pairing so much. Which speaking of, this season also introduced this format of putting two episodes together where the second episode directly references the first. This shows that even if I would not call season 12 as experimental as any of the seasons in the previous era, there is clearly still some experimentation going on here. It remains to be seen if this picks back up in season 13, and so I’m looking forward to finding that out.

One last thing I did want to say before I gave this season its title is that I believe that, in general, my reviews have been harsher this season. While I don’t like season 12 as much as season 11 or season 10, I do think that if I was in the same mindset as I was when I reviewed those seasons, a few of these episode ratings might be higher. Getting specific, I was a lot more strict about what qualified as Amazing tier this time around, I think, and I’m not sure if that’s because the quality of this season’s episodes were lower, or if this was a result of my mindset this month. In all honestly, it’s probably a mix of both.

Alright, so, what am I going to call season 12? This season is for sure overhated, I mean there’s literally a topic on here talking about if it’s the worst post-sequel season. But given that I share that view, the criticism is warranted. And, of course, I don’t actually think this is a bad season at all. I think it’s best to give this season a name that reflects the ways I think it went a little too far out of the bounds of what this show is supposed to be, which ended up backfiring (it did that with the things I mentioned earlier, it did that with character fundamentals, it did that with this show’s escapism tendencies, etc.). Ricochet? But that’s so similar to season 9’s title, kind of. Rabid? Well that’s just crass. Hmm…Frenzied. Yes, I like that. Not too much negative connotation. So yes, season 12 is the Frenzied Season. I think there’s a lot to like here, and there’s so much energy in this season. But that energy is quite a bit unrefined and uncontrolled, leading to episodes that just go down a completely unnecessary route, and do a little too much. I suppose this could also refer to the exaggerated expressions that people complain about, but as I’ve made clear time and time again, I really don’t care about the expressions. I like how expressive the animation is. It fits what the show is now. But I suppose you could call the animation frenzied sometimes, so this fits twice over.

I don’t usually write ending notes on season overviews, but I have to make an exception. Today, Halloween, marks 365 days of me posting these reviews. Yes, I haven’t posted every single day, but I’ve done so for like 90% of them, and this general project has been me reviewing a SpongeBob episode every day. So sit down semantics people (which is basically just me because no one cares like that). Tomorrow will be the official one-year anniversary, I suppose, but today is 365 days. Can’t believe that we’re here. I won’t write more than this, because I will be saying very similar things at the end of next month, when this project comes to a close (for now…).
 
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