Review: The Patrick Star Show “Just in Time for Christmas”

Overview (Spoilers Below):

Patrick travels through time to find last-minute Christmas gifts for his family.

Our Take:

Nickelodeon is once again celebrating Christmas early by delivering a slew of holiday-themed episodes of our favorite shows. Before we celebrate the occasion with the lovable sponge next week, we have to pay the particular sea star another visit, whether we want to or not. This is the first Christmas-related episode of the SpongeBob SquarePants spin-off, which has been doing reasonably well since its debut in July. At least, from my perspective.

Regarding its holiday-themed stories, The Patrick Star Show managed to deliver a watchable spooky special in the form of “Terror at 20,000 Leagues”. Now, it’s attempting to provide a joyous and comical Christmas episode that’s as bearable as the show’s Halloween special. How, you may ask? Why, by sending Patrick back in time, of course.

This is less of a Christmas special and more of a time-traveling adventure that happens to take place around Christmas. We see Patrick traveling to different periods throughout the episode to get his family new Christmas gifts instead of garbage. Despite some minor obstacles like a monster chicken and a bearded Mrs. Puff, he succeeded in typical Patrick Star fashion.

With the episode being ten minutes long instead of 30 minutes, its story couldn’t provide any actual conflict in retrieving the new gifts. Nonetheless, its goofy charm and visual gags managed to make it another suitable holiday visit at the Star residence. My favorite joke of the episode has to be Patrick getting kissed. Patrick gets many kisses from different characters during his quest, including the monster chicken and Bunny from Patrick’s imagination cloud. The funny part about it was that he had no idea why until the end where Squidina pointed out that he was wearing a mistletoe hat. It’s the type of joke that we would typically see from Patrick regarding his gullible nature. I wouldn’t be surprised if they made a Valentine’s Day episode based on that gag.

Overall, “Just in Time for Christmas” is what you would expect from a holiday-themed episode of The Patrick Star Show. It’s straightforward, random, and consistently gleeful. However, it doesn’t do much to spread holiday cheer regarding its story. But since the mistletoe joke got me laughing, I was willing to let that slide. It would be interesting to see if they’ll make more holiday episodes for Patrick and his family to endure in the future, like Easter.