Chocolate With Nuts is the better episode by a long-shot. The thing I most value on an episode is it's humor, and Chocolate With Nuts, while lacking in other areas, is easily the funniest episode of the show. It may have a very bare-boned story, but it allows more time to launch it's gags at a really fast, yet well-timed pace and never slows down even once, whenever there's a joke they can make they make one, and I found every last one to hit bullseyes, from the one's that stick in our heads like the "CHOCOLATE" fish, the con man, and "Let's Get Naked!", to slightly more subtle (although still high-energy) ones to pad out the time like misunderstanding what an entrepreneur is or "exaggerating" the truth :P. It also had an amazing variety of them, it had a good combination of both running gags, quick oversights, visual, character interaction and even some hints of gross-out like "Not the way I use 'em." It really needs to be watched to believe.
Band Geeks on the other hand... I think people may enjoy for reasons that don't really exist. There may be praise for "how much Squidward went through and accomplished, finally beating the odds against Squilliam" but what did Squidward even do? At this point he's been nothing but rude and careless to people, aside from maybe hints of kindness towards SpongeBob, which they even acknoledged in SpongeBob's crappy motivational speech, and frankly I think that's what made the humor work so well, as it gave him just the right amount of karma. Here... it's kinda like that, but are we supposed to laugh at Squidward's misery like the jokes say, or root for him like th estory does, because it doesn't really do either. Squilliam's a poorly designed character that's only starts and ends the plot quickly with his bragging to make Squidward look better, and it doesn't really end up giving a motivation or a strive for the audience. And as for it's humor... I loved it when Patrick misinterpreted "KICKING" to be rebuttaled by a trombone, and when Plankton said "Do instruments of torture count?, " but besides that it either took too long to get started, like the mayonaisse joke, seemed kinda forced into it and admittedly stupid, like when the drumstick were stupidly blown, or seems surprisingly dark for the show for no apparent reason. I like dark humor if that was the episode's intent and they went all-out, or if it's a quick suicide gag to exaggerate the situation, but it seems there's too much of them here to really tolerate at apoint, the one with flag-twirling was played out unfittingly seriously. Also, I don't care if you lack continuity between episodes, but within it, at least try to be consistent with who plays what instrument, the harmonica gag felt just as lazy as the key under the mat.
And there's the ending, which, uh, I don't get. It's runs for too long and's too empowering to really be a joke, and it don't think it really fits in the context of the story. It leaves too many of the episode's plotholes open, like what was Squilliam's plan to begin with, what did the gang do to prepare in the last night, and why didn't they just make an original song for pete's sake, it feels lazy to just steal something from the 80's and do nothing else with it. It just seems like they slapped it in to allow Sqidward to be happy and even that doesn't work because he doesn't even show a courageous act once, he's just a crappy and whiny teacher to the point where he killed multiple people. If that's a person who "deserves" his reward, I don't know who doesn't.
If you were in my school you would hate Vine as much as I do.
