Review: The Patrick Star Show “Terror at 20,000 Leagues”

OVERVIEW (SPOILERS)

Patrick’s show gets wrapped up in a horror anthology.

OUR TAKE

So it’s no secret now that Nickelodeon/Paramount/Viacom has been trying to expand the Spongebob Squarepants brand. First there was the new movie that ended up thrown on streaming when the pandemic hit, then there’s the Kamp Koral spin-off that was basically Spongebob Babies (even if it doesn’t make sense that Sandy is there), and now there’s this show about Patrick and his previously unknown family. I haven’t been really following the reception of this one, but the writing process seems to a lot less standard than that of Spongebob’s. The showrunner has mentioned wanting to mess around with established canon and wanting to do more surreal and bizarre stuff with this show. And while I haven’t watched the first few episodes prior to this one, I am definitely getting the sense that there is a more freedom to be strange and out there with the writing and storytelling, which is definitely apparent in the inaugural Halloween Special. We do have the framing device of Patrick trying to make his show with his sister that is the premise of the series, but it transitions well into a bunch of shorts that do Halloween stuff.

We got Frankensteins! We got witches! We got Alien parody! We got everything you could possibly want in a Halloween special! Assuming you just want those three things. But for the life of me, I don’t really know what else to say about this or the Patrick Star Show in general. I guess I’m a bit surprised to see that “you forgot the pickles” guy from that really old Spongebob episode shows up in this episode. Apparently Spongebob has been diving into nostalgia of their now 30-something year old lapsed viewers to bring them back and have them watch new episodes of the show, but then whoever’s still watching it now is probably the age of who was watching it when the show first started in 1999, so will they get these references? I mean, at least they aren’t going to care about Patrick suddenly having a whole family that we’ve never seen before. Or maybe they saw the episode about him not recognizing his own parents and are just as confused as anyone else! Anyway, this is a perfectly fine episode and if I had any further interest, I’d probably keep watching the Patrick Star Show. But I don’t! So, we’ll just leave it at that for now.