Squidward in Therapy

Who else feels attacked when they see this face?

I keep hearing that you only understand Squidward when you grow up: as a kid you identified with SpongeBob because you used to be like him (a happy innocent creative playful silly childlike haver of fun), and then you got old and crusty and turned into Squidward (a boring nasty cynical anguished self-defeating narcissistic grump). The general idea gets spelled out pretty well in this video essay, and you can see people repeating the thesis in just about every YouTube comment on every Squidward video.

But I saw the show as a kid, and I remember identifying with Squidward. When he was frustrated, I was frustrated; when he was embarrassed, I was embarrassed. I remember a hostile universe that was set up fully against Squidward. The poor guy was just stuck in despair at the bottom of the sea, playing his clarinet, badly, forever. That's how I saw it. How could you possibly identify with SpongeBob?

Let me be precise. I don't mean identifying with SpongeBob in general—of course you could relate to SpongeBob in those episodes when he deals with procrastination, or flunks his driver's exam, or forgets how to tie his shoes. I mean that I find it hard to see how you could relate to SpongeBob in his role in Squidward's life. In the classic episodes about the dynamic between SpongeBob and Squidward, SpongeBob comes off as an intrusive nuisance, a weird alien, a smiling monster—-not as somebody you could be.

The Squidward episodes I remembered most clearly were “Idiot Box” (the one where SpongeBob and Patrick play with their imagination and make impossibly real noises whenever Squidward isn't looking), “Just One Bite” (the one where Squidward tries a Krabby Patty for the first time), and “Artist Unknown” (the one where Squidward tries to teach SpongeBob the rules of art, but SpongeBob is naturally perfect at it). Looking back on these episodes, I remembered a very anti-rational, anti-snobbish, aggressively populist worldview—one that says, “Everyone who claims to be sophisticated is full of shit and denying their sense of fun. Look at SpongeBob. You would be talented like him if you just let go of your ego and stopped trying to live by all these pompous, made-up, adult rules. You should be a SpongeBob and not a Squidward.“

Well, that was the impression I had, looking back on the show. but I hadn't seen SpongeBob in a long time. So in early 2020 quarantine, I rewatched a whole lot of Squidward episodes from the first three seasons—all the ones I remembered, some I had forgotten, and some I had never heard of. I wanted to see if they really had the message I thought they had, or if I had just been projecting my insecurities on the show retroactively. Well—it turns out I had it completely backwards!

Each of these Squidward episodes is a caricature of Squidward's predicament. It's not that the show's message is “Fuck you, Squidward, for being a Squidward”—it's that when you're in Squidward's place, the universe seems to be saying that. The show isn't saying that talent and creativity belong to childlike innocent happy fun people—it's saying that from Squidward's position, happy talented people look like these smiling monsters. It's not saying people are permanently in one category or the other, SpongeBob or Squidward—it's describing the delusion that makes you essentialize people into SpongeBobs and Squidwards. I'm not saying the cartoon has to be a real description of anything; I'm saying it articulates the fantasies and delusions involved in a deeply unhealthy relationship with talent and ego.

Watching these episodes, I noticed a pretty common pattern:

1. Squidward tries to enjoy himself, but he gets interrupted by the intrusion of SpongeBob (and maybe Patrick).
2. SpongeBob shows off some kind of incomprehensible magic (an object or talent), which Squidward outwardly rejects.
3. SpongeBob takes Squidward’s rejection seriously, while Squidward becomes obsessed with the magic.
4. Squidward gives in to secret desire and tries to get the magic himself, often in private. SpongeBob catches Squidward in the act.
5. Squidward goes overboard somehow and gets punished by fate.

I see this as the basic pattern of these episodes: Bubblestand, The Paper, Artist Unknown, Just One Bite, Idiot Box, and Club SpongeBob.

Each one of them has an unattainable object—some kind of locus of the fun that Squidward doesn't want to have, then wants to have, then can't have, then gets punished for seeking. Sometimes it's a physical object (the paper, the Krabby Patty), and other times it just seems to be an incomprehensible talent (drawing a perfect circle, blowing elephant bubbles). “Club SpongeBob” actually has two copies of this pattern, with two such objects: first the unattainable thing is club membership, and then it's the magic conch, a pull-string toy that gives vague commands to be obeyed.

Why does this story keep happening? What does it say about Squidward, who is so committed to his persona that he can only transgress its mandates in private? What does it say about the world, that keeps clocking him on it and humiliating him for it?

I wrote a more detailed analysis of each episode and how it relates to Squidward:

• Commentary: Bubblestand
• Commentary: The Paper
• Commentary: Artist Unknown
• Commentary: Just One Bite
• Commentary: Idiot Box
• Commentary: Club SpongeBob

Of course, there must be more than just these. I'm sure you could find examples from season four and beyond, but by that time the creators had built the characters and situations, wound them up, and set them down; and away they went cluttering like hey-go-mad, treading the same steps over and over again, until they made a road of it, as plain and smooth as a garden-walk. It would be surprising if SpongeBob and Squidward didn't go on doing the same bit. So I'm not going to write about them unless they reveal a new dimension to the Squidward/SpongeBob dynamic.

On the other hand, there are some wonderful episodes that don't fit this formula at all. I certainly hope to analyze some of the episodes where Squidward gets exactly what he wants, and hates it. I also want to look at episodes like “Pizza Delivery” and “Fools in April,” which have their own memorable Squidward arcs. But these will have to wait for a later post.

1. SpongeBob loudly constructs a bubblestand outside Squidward's house while Squidward is trying to practice.
2. SpongeBob says, “We're not just blowing bubbles, we're making bubble ART! Watch carefully...” and then he shows a bubble-blowing technique that's complete nonsense, but it produces incredible bubble sculptures. When SpongeBob's butterfly bubble pops on Squidward's forehead, he says, “That's not art. That's just annoying! Blowing bubbles—that's just the lamest idea I've ever heard!”
3. SpongeBob and Patrick put their heads down, deep in shame, and walk back to SpongeBob's house. Squidward, alone, chuckles to himself, “Hmm hmm. Bubbles. Hm hm. Art.” And he keeps muttering, but starts glancing around him, and notices nobody's around him to see. He sniffs the wand and picks it up.
4. Just as he breathes in to blow a bubble—“That'll be twenty five cents, sir!” SpongeBob and Patrick are there, beaming at him! Squidward pays, and blows the most pitiful bubble you've ever seen, and it pops with a fart noise at his feet.
5. Squidward keeps paying quarters while SpongeBob and Patrick yell “Technique! Technique!” Finally, Squidward flies into a rage and does an sarcastic impression of the technique. He screams his lungs out into the bubble wand. The bubble, a product of his rage, lifts into the sky. As Squidward's house is going up, he plays the clarinet, beautifully, and SpongeBob and Patrick cheer for him. The bubble lifts Squidward's house up to the sky. It pops, and his house comes crashing down.

I skipped over the whole business where SpongeBob charges Patrick a quarter, and Patrick borrows a quarter from SpongeBob to pay SpongeBob a quarter. That bit is pretty funny on its own, and it shows the dynamic between SpongeBob and Patrick—they imitate serious business like kids do—but what I'm looking at here is everything in relation to Squidward. With respect to Squidward, the scene functions as something between steps 1 and 2: their antics are there to annoy him, and give him something to complain about. Creating value by circulating a single coin is a form of stupid magic (something out of nothing), so it's part of what's so irritating to Squidward about the bubblestand.

One thing they've done very subtly in this episode is the moment where Squidward goes from noticing he's alone, to picking up the bubble wand, to making an attempt at it. First he chuckles and mutters words you can make out (“Bubbles. Art”), then his laughter and muttering become indeterminate. They turn into a general sound without any particular content. Why does this make sense for the moment when he changes his mind? I mean, consider the alternatives: his eyes could bug out, or he could get a cartoon light bulb over his head, or could deliver an aside to the audience about the idea (“Now I'll do it in secret”)—but he doesn't. I think what's necessary for Squidward blow the bubble is that the decision doesn't register consciously. He needs to enter a state where he's at least a little bit out of his mind.

Another thing worth mentioning here is how Squidward acts when he's caught with the bubble wand. First his face caves in:

Then he has this deer-in-the-headlights look and says “Who would pay twenty five cents to blow bubbles?”

When SpongeBob offers lessons for beginners, Squidward starts coming back to his usual self—he says some words: what could be easier than to blow a bubble? And then he pays the 25 cents. What explains this? Why does he act haughty and then do what SpongeBob says? Why doesn't he walk away? I think it's because SpongeBob has offered Squidward a chance to measure his worth against a standard; and any alternative to paying the 25 cents would, in Squidward's estimation, be tantamount to failure. Unacceptable. So he pays. But also note that there's a layer of performance here: Squidward doesn't just pay and state the reasons he's paying; he also has to deride the whole game of bubble-blowing.

It's interesting that Squidward plays well when SpongeBob and Patrick are cheering him on. Squidward is celebrating himself, and finally hearing himself celebrated. The bubble makes a good symbol: for a moment, high on the narcissistic fuel he's addicted to, he actually likes himself, and all of a sudden, for once, he can play clarinet. But the moment is transient. The bubble pops, and his ego crashes back to rock bottom. And then he sucks at clarinet again.

1. Squidward walks out with a lawn chair (“Time to relax!”) and throws a bubblegum wrapper onto the walk in front of SpongeBob's house. SpongeBob picks it up and asks Squidward if he wants it back.
2. Here the incomprehensible magic thing is what SpongeBob can do with the paper. Squidward calls the paper “only garbage,” to which SpongeBob says, “Garbage? Why, Squidward! In the right hands, this paper is a goldmine of entertainment! A spectacular afternoon of underwater fun! A treasure trove of—” Squidward confirms, over and over, that SpongeBob can keep the paper, ultimately making an Odysseus pact about it: “No matter how much I beg, and plead, and cry, DON'T give that paper back to me, EVER!”
3. Squidward tries to entertain himself, but keeps getting distracted by SpongeBob's laughter. SpongeBob plays tricks with the paper, which go from impressions to impossible, magical feats. Squidward watches from behind some coral as SpongeBob plays tricks with the paper, admitting it does seem like fun. Then Squidward tries to have fun himself, but SpongeBob proves that he can do better with the paper than Squidward can do with anything else, even playing music better than Squidward can on his clarinet.
4. Squidward demands the paper back. SpongeBob reminds him of the deal. He even has flip book footage! Squidward offers to trade. He gives away all his stuff, including the shirt off his back!
5. When Squidward tries the paper, he can't do ANYTHING with it! What a chump! As a last straw, Patrick comes by, snatches the paper, and wraps up his wad of gum there. We hear the cold wind blowing, and Squidward asks “Anybody have any sunscreen?”

Notice what Squidward does when he tries to entertain himself with Boring Science Digest. He laughs! “Haha. Erosion. Haha. Mitosis.” These are obviously not jokes, and he's obviously not enjoying the magazine. It's as if Squidward is performing adulthood: not simply being an adult and enjoying his own interests, but acting for an unseen audience, demonstrating outwardly the interest in whatever he thinks adults are supposed to be interested in. This is why I can't agree with the claim that Squidward is who we all become as grown-ups: rather, Squidward is a child's idea of a grown-up.

Nor can I agree that SpongeBob is who we were as kids. Passive aggression is something that develops later. When Squidward plays notes, SpongeBob applauds him, saying, “Hooray! Hooray! That was great, Squidward! All those wrong notes you played made it sound more original!” These are exactly the right words to hurt Squidward. If anybody said this, would you think it was out of innocence or out of malice? Malice, obviously! But I should qualify this point here. Of course children sometimes DO say deeply hurtful things to adults, not meaning to. Have you ever tried to draw something for a kid and made them cry because it looked wrong? Devastating. In this case, there's a disconnect between what the kid thinks they're doing, and what the adult thinks they're doing: it looks to the adult as if the kid were being a little passive-aggressive shit on purpose. I think this is what the scene captures, and it makes SpongeBob not “what we were as children” but a grown-up's idea of a child.

SpongeBob and Squidward are thus reciprocal: SpongeBob is what an annoying kid looks like to an adult, and Squidward is what a grumpy adult looks like to a kid.

Compared with “Bubblestand,” this episode has an especially long step three (Squidward becoming obsessed with secret desire for SpongeBob's object). Squidward goes and watches discreetly behind some coral—and even catches himself saying the paper looks like fun. “What am I saying?” he says, shocked at himself.

When he goes inside, the paper follows him—either physically, as in the bath... ...or psychologically, as when Squidward accidentally paints himself with the paper on his nose.

Then the bit changes. Squidward stops avoiding SpongeBob, but starts actively showing off what he can do with his own stuff—his ball-and-paddle toy, his new shell car, his ventriloquist dummy, and finally his clarinet. When he tells jokes with the dummy, it takes a crack at him (“Hey! Little Squidward! What's gray and ugly and has six arms?” “I don't know, but have you looked in the mirror lately?”), and Squidward reacts as if it really hurt his feelings. Is it possible for Squidward to have spoken through the dummy without realizing what he was saying? Apparently. Anyway, SpongeBob tells a joke and a crowd of anonymous fish appear JUST to laugh and vanish. The last straw is when SpongeBob plays better clarinet with the paper than Squidward can: clarinet is the one last thing Squidward can do that makes him feel special, and SpongeBob takes away even that power.

We saw two moments when Squidward reveals his true thoughts through art that he makes accidentally—painting the bowl of fruit, and telling jokes with a dummy. This seems to be a thesis of the show, that real meaning comes out unconsciously, and real art comes out accidentally. I'll have a lot more to say about Squidward's self-portraits in a later post.

Squidward ends up with nothing, and SpongeBob with everything. When Squidward plays with the paper, it doesn't work. The lesson is clearly that it isn't the paper that's good at things: it's SpongeBob who's good and Squidward who's bad, forever.

I suppose you could read this as an allegory about the folly of possessions, but it would have to be a very hateful one: “Why can't you just MAKE things fun? What's WRONG with you?”

1. The episode begins with Squidward at the Adult Learning Center, sighing with satisfaction behind a teacher's desk, wearing an artist hat. “Ah, how I have dreamed of this day: Mr. Tentacles, professor of art. What a marvelous opportunity for the people of Bikini Bottom. Bring me your huddled masses of bored housewives, and I will shape them in MY image.” It's nine AM, and he opens the doors to let the students in, but—horror of horrors!—his only student is SpongeBob.
2. Squidward starts teaching the class, but is thrown for a loop when SpongeBob draws a perfect circle. His method is ridiculous: draw a head construction in reverse. Squidward gets mad and balls up the paper: “Forget the circles.” SpongeBob also folds up paper—into a kinetic origami piece of SpongeBob and Squidward playing leapfrog. Squidward tears up the paper and SpongeBob makes a picture out of the scraps.
3. We enter into the third sequence when Squidward starts teaching sculpture: Squidward's marble falls to pieces, but SpongeBob makes Michelangelo's David with one tap. “It's beautiful!” Squidward says, his persona slipping a little. Grasping for something to criticize about the sculpture, he pulls out a book called The Rules of Art, and sticks a Squidward nose on David's head. SpongeBob earnestly cries about how bad he is, although Squidward knows SpongeBob is a genius. It's interesting here that SpongeBob saying what Squidward clearly wanted to hear doesn't make Squidward happy: he just looks conflicted and guilty.
4. The art collector shows up, and Squidward takes credit for SpongeBob's piece. The statue gets broken, and Squidward promises the collector something that will knock his socks off. He finds SpongeBob in the dump. Squidward coaxes him back, but SpongeBob has lost his gift—BECAUSE he's adopted the rules of art!
5. Squidward flies into a rage and destroys everything in his studio. He leaves before he could discover that he accidentally made an even better David—but the janitor gets the credit.

Have you noticed that body parts come off a lot in this episode? SpongeBob's hands come off and hide in a can. Squidward's artificial nose goes on and off the statue, and his real nose even drips off his face and plops onto the floor, when SpongeBob recreates The Rules of Art. I'm not going anywhere with this, but it reminds me of Jiří Trnka's The Hand, where a large disembodied hand invades a potter's little house and compels him to make replicas of itself. Squidward does want to shape the huddled masses in his image, and his oeuvre is pretty much entirely squids, so maybe there's fruit for comparison there.

The main theme of the episode is—well, you hear different answers from different people. It could be about how narcissism makes you a rotten artist, or it could offer a parable about the damage the education system does to people's natural creativity. There's even—I can't believe this is real—a video essay called “This SpongeBob Episode Will Awaken Your Creativity.”

Here's a quote from it:

There's a SpongeBob episode that demonstrates exactly why the talents of the majority of people are not realized. What usually happens is: early in life we express our creativity through music, sports, or some other kind of artistic skill, and instantly fall in love with whatever that activity is. Then, one day, our hopes and dreams are shattered, and society, which can include our parents, teachers, coaches, or, quote, “friends,” refuse to support our artistic vision, and that hurts! It can also be traumatizing, believe it or not. So then what happens is, we fall into depression, basically give up on further developing that skill, but the irony is, we were actually the geniuses the whole time. There was something there that others didn't get. But this episode shows that there are people who will get it, who will understand why we intentionally design our art the way we do.

Is that how your childhood was? Taking up something, loving it at first sight, but getting it beaten out of you by the people in your life? Sorry about that, but I still mainly disagree with the thesis here. I think the episode is not a picture of childhood as kids experience it; it's an adult's fantasy about talent and innocence. Remember that nearly all fiction about childhood is written by adults looking back on it—-and we're very good at revising our memories to agree with our current prejudices.

Anyone who teaches little kids will see what's missing from the picture of childhood here. It's true that kids do play and invent constantly, but they're also pretty bad at everything, and scared to try anything unfamiliar. I once taught a girl who screamed and cried when she tried to cut out a paper horse, and snipped off its tail—-it took days of work to build up her confidence after that, and convince her that she wasn't just permanently bad at scissors forever. It's not “children have a natural confidence and creativity until you take it away from them”: it's “children think they're helpless until you show them they can do things for themselves.”

Childhood is brutal. Adults think that adulthood introduces terror, envy, hostility, and dishonesty into the untroubled Eden of happy childhood. But all that is there from the beginning. What adulthood introduces is the retroactive impression of a lost Eden. Innocent happy childhood never existed, the way Atlantis never existed: its invention was the invention of its having been lost.

With this in mind, we have a way to make an important distinction among stories about childhood. When childhood is all happy innocence, spoiled by adulthood, that tells us the story is probably from an adult's point of view. When childhood is all frustration, anxiety, and incomprehensible terror, that's the kid's point of view.

Now what's really interesting about SpongeBob SquarePants the show is that it tells both kinds of stories about the same character. As the people at Wisecrack point out in this video essay, SpongeBob himself is a deliberate blur between childhood and adulthood—we get episodes where he's hilariously incompetent (as when he takes driving lessons from Mrs. Puff), and episodes where he's hilariously competent—-as here. Artist Unknown shows SpongeBob through Squidward's eyes. In the logic of the episode, SpongeBob is an adult's dream of childhood: the stupid, happy, natural, creative genius, and Squidward is the sad hack whose permanent flaw is his self-awareness.

Wherever art comes from, SpongeBob seems to be born with easy access to it, but Squidward teaches it out of him. Squidward can only tap into that source of creativity when he destroys his supplies, squeezing the paint out and smashing the marble slabs—in the same way that Squidward could only blow a great bubble when he screamed into the bubble wand.

Some people believe art is really like this: a desperate scream of the unconscious, which we can only tap into when we're drunk, or sleep-deprived, or traumatized, or furious, or regressing to the primal state of childhood. I don't. Maybe my unconscious IS screaming out to me, but I think this is a pretty unhealthy way to think about art. There's nothing wrong with trying to learn technique, there's nothing glorious about damaging your mind and body, or regressing to childhood: growing up is not going to kill your creativity. A lot of people who work on improving their art do say they go through a period of unlearning, where their new art seems worse than their old art. And they worry, the way Squidward worries about SpongeBob, that by following technique they killed off the source of their art. But then they keep practicing, they keep learning, and they get better again.

I'm going to say a lot more about this episode in a future post about Squidward's art.

Club SpongeBob has most of the elements of the other episodes in this collection. There's the abhorrent, irrational “fun” thing that Squidward is denied access to (the magic conch), and it breaks his pride until he gives in, only to keep denying him. But something is different here: this episode seems to contain two copies of the structure—one nested in the other.

1. Squidward goes out on his bike, but he's interrupted by SpongeBob and Patrick laughing from up in a treehouse. We have the following mini-episode:
   1. Squidward gets bothered by SpongeBob and Patrick talking funny: “Wey wook, it's Widward.”
   2. “What's that supposed to be, some kinda stupid secret code?” says Squidward. “We can't tell you, cause you're not a member of the club.” Squidward rejects the idea of club membership: “What does it take to be a member—besides being a moron?”
   3. SpongeBob remarks that Squidward couldn't get in even if he tried, because he wouldn't fit in. This makes Squidward want to get in even more.
   4. He enters, despite the warnings of SpongeBob and Patrick, and it turns out they meant it literally—there was no room for him up there.
   5. Now that Squidward is in the club, they sing a welcome song for him, which of course makes him want to leave. Squidward tries to climb out. Doing so, he accidentally slingshots the treehouse into the woods.
2. They're lost in the woods, but SpongeBob shows his magic conch shell. “You've got to be kidding! That is just a stupid toy!” SpongeBob answers, “Squidward, we must never question the wisdom of the Magic Conch. The club always takes its advice before we do anything.” The Conch tells them to do nothing. Squidward goes away.
3. Squidward sets off, but he gets lost and panics. When he sees light off in the woods, he follows it, celebrating himself, but he winds up back where SpongeBob and Patrick are. He sets up his own camp and tries to do things himself, frying up a bug. SpongeBob and Patrick just sit there, and a beautiful picnic falls out of the sky for SpongeBob and Patrick.
4. Squidward asks for food, and SpongeBob and Patrick agree that he can have some. “What shall I eat first? The spaghetti, the turkey, the soup, the canned meat?” But when they tell him he should ask the Magic Conch, he questions its authority. “Maybe he's not a brother,” whispers Patrick. Squidward pretends to believe in the Magic Conch and asks it what he should have. “Neither,” says the Magic Conch.
5. Squidward begins to believe in the magic conch, desperately asking over and over if he can have something to eat. It keeps denying him. A park ranger discovers them—-and the ranger turns out to believe in the magic conch! The conch tells them to do nothing. SpongeBob, Patrick, and the ranger yell “All hail the Magic Conch!” Squidward, utterly defeated, sits down between them and repeats after them: “All hail the Magic Conch.”

This does have two copies of the story pattern, and accordingly there are two objects of inaccessible “fun.” At first the object is club membership. But when Squidward enters into the clubhouse, the object becomes the magic conch. Why are there two objects of desire, each with its own plot structure?

Well, I noticed this episode is also the most directly religious I've analyzed so far, and that might be a clue. I think the two objects—the clubhouse and the magic conch—map onto two parts that make up religion—the sanctuary and the divine presence. The episode takes those elements in order: first an entrance to the holy place where secrets are kept, then an encounter with a maddening, senseless voice of authority. Seen this way, it describes the path of an outsider toward the presence of God.

I'm thinking about Durkheim's definition of the sacred: “set apart and forbidden.” Sacredness does seem to depend on exclusion—there must be a boundary between the unclean outside and the clean inside; and there must a difference between the unworthy and the worthy. Squidward is obviously unworthy of the sacred, but he claws himself into its presence anyway. Come to think of it, “Just One Bite” also had a sanctuary for the patties which were set off and forbidden. In both cases, Squidward can enter, but once he does it's clear he's not supposed to be there.

The divine presence is appropriate for Squidward too: from his perspective, the universe seems to be ruled by somebody out there who hates him.

Here's the path I'm talking about. First Squidward has no interest in religion, and what motivates him is simply the fact of his exclusion. Then once he's in, he witnesses the object of worship and rejects it. But then he's brought to worship it because it rejects him, personally. No matter what position he takes—outsider, insider, disbeliever, heretic, believer, supplicant—the answer is always that he can't be saved.

This looks like predestination, the notion that our tickets to heaven or hell are printed before we're born. I think it also looks like Catholic damnation: that the condition of the soul is fixed for eternity at the moment of death. It's as if Squidward is already dead!

This would make a neat fan theory: everybody's dead, Bikini Bottom is the afterlife, Squidward is in hell, SpongeBob is in heaven, and all forms of afterlife coexist in one place.

It may sound like I'm reading too much into a goofy cartoon, but I think it's always appropriate to ask why some images feel right for a character. The clouds, wings, and halo feel right for SpongeBob, and the burning chamber and outer darkness feel right for Squidward. This carries over into fan content as well. (See Squidward's Afterlife, which not only shows Squidward in hell but SpongeBob worshiping Baphomet! This one is about suicide, so don't watch it at a bad time.) It's appropriate to ask why this feels right for the characters, and what view of religion is implicitly suggested by all this imagery of the afterlife.

As I see it, SpongeBob draws an analogy between damnation and “being a Squidward,” but the association could go in either direction:

1. Squidward's predicament, one of permanent exclusion, pride, and self-defeat, is an allegory for damnation.
2. Imagery of damnation helps to explain Squidward's predicament.

Not that I don't care about the fate of my soul, but I'm more interested in the second direction: I want to investigate Squidward's predicament. Nobody wants to be a Squidward, but what is it like to be one? How do real people fall in that pit, and how do they climb out of it?

I'm sure I didn't cover all episodes with this pattern. If there are more from later seasons (after I stopped watching), please do let me know.

1. Squidward comes out of his house to see SpongeBob and Patrick hopping around waiting for the mail truck. They get a TV in the mail, but throw out the TV and keep the box. This annoys Squidward enough that he confronts them about it.
2. SpongeBob says they don't need a television, “Not as long as we have our...” (he make a rainbow in the air with his hands) “Imagination!” Squidward dismisses the thought and takes their TV.
3. SpongeBob and Patrick drive Squidward nuts by making impossibly real noises from within the box. When Squidward opens the box, SpongeBob and Patrick are just sitting there, playing pretend. When Squidward tries to enjoy TV, everything on there is about boxes.
4. Squidward thinks they must be fooling him with a tape recorder. He joins SpongeBob and Patrick to find out how they're doing it, but they just sit and make noises. He thinks they must be fooling him with a tape recorder, so he sneaks in at night.
5. Finally Squidward's imagination seems to be working! He pretends to drive a racecar, and he hears racecar noises. Of course, this is a dump truck hauling him away.

Squidward isn't fun; he's not allowed to see how SpongeBob's fun works; when he tries to have his own fun, it all points back to SpongeBob's fun; and when he tries it with SpongeBob and Patrick, it just doesn't work. This is largely the same story with the same themes we've seen already.

But there's one important distinction from the others: this one is metafictional. The title is Idiot Box, which is a dismissive name for television. It could have been called “Boob Tube.” People call it that because they're worried that children's imagination is wasting away because they're spending all day in front of a machine that pipes in visual fantasies for them—they can't construct their own imaginary worlds. Maybe this is a well-founded worry. Maybe TV was melting my brain back in 2002, when this aired. But isn't it bizarre to get that moral from a cartoon, on Nickelodeon, on the boob tube itself?

Television shows Squidward the boxes to remind him of the real fun he's missing out on. The boxes on TV would then have the same relationship to Squidward as Idiot Box on Nickelodeon has to the viewer.

I wonder what it's for. Do kids pick up on the metafiction? Do they feel accused of being like Squidward, watching the idiot box on TV, being reminded of what real fun is like? This is an empirical question. Somebody please show this episode to a kid and talk about it. Wouldn't it be interesting if the show asked kids to identify themselves with Squidward, while adults identified kids with SpongeBob?

One last note: Squidward does have an imagination. We see it in this shot! Squidward not only has an imagination, it's powerful enough to control him, to mess up his life. But in contrast with SpongeBob, Squidward has no power over it. When it comes to imagination rainbows, he's impotent.

1. Squidward watches a customer eat a disgusting deep-fried ultra-supreme Krabby Patty and squirt mayo into his mouth. Squidward says he hates Krabby Patties, and SpongeBob takes his comment as a joke.
2. When SpongeBob finds out Squidward never had a Krabby Patty, he gets on his case about trying one, harassing Squidward, who keeps saying no. Finally Squidward caves in and tries it. He makes a show of tasting it: he pretends to love it for a split second, then calls it disgusting and stomps it into the ground.
3. SpongeBob leaves in tears. Squidward digs up the burger, eats it, licks the ground, and weeps for his wasted years. He realizes he needs to get his hands on a Krabby Patty, but without SpongeBob seeing: “After that performance, he would never let me live it down.” Squidward pretends that somebody else has ordered a Krabby Patty. While SpongeBob is flipping Krabby Patties on the grill and the sight and smell is making Squidward's pupils dance in his eyeballs, SpongeBob apologizes—just when it hurts. SpongeBob comes out calls out for whoever ordered the patty—and eats it himself, with Squidward watching!
4. A dream of marrying a giant Krabby Patty drives Squidward over the edge. He sneaks out late at night and enters the Patty Vault. SpongeBob arrives on cue to ruin the moment for Squidward. While Squidward sweats and mutters, SpongeBob puts the pieces together: “You like Krabby Patties, don't you, Squidward?”
5. Squidward slams the door and confesses. He swims through the Patty Vault eating every patty in sight. SpongeBob yells out warnings, and Squidward keeps on eating. Squidward finally stops, looks down, sees his thighs, and blows up. He ends up as a disembodied head, while a chuckling doctor holding his tentacles in a bucket says, “I remember MY first Krabby Patty.”

I could see this as a few different allegories at once: one about addiction, one about religion, and one about being closeted.

Addiction is obvious. The only thing to see here is that, true to Squidward's character, he barely has any willpower except what he needs to protect his image. He can't resist the Krabby Patty when he's alone, but he gives it everything he's got to resist the Krabby Patty when somebody might see him enjoying it.

I said religion, and I guess I meant Christianity. This episode shows us damnation: the damnation of Lucifer, who denies God for no reason but his own pride; or of Don Giovanni, who gets dragged to Hell by the statue simply because he can't be compelled by force to repent. The Krabby Patty, which SpongeBob calls an “absolute good,” has the character of a sacrament. SpongeBob appears in a heavenly cloudscape when he says the burger is “good for your soul.” Squidward says, “Oh please. I have no soul,” and we see him in a chamber of hell. It's as if Squidward is being pressured to repent from the outside, which only makes him want to refuse more. Don Giovanni goes on being damned because the statue goes on twisting his arm. Squidward goes on refusing the Krabby Patty, although he loves it, because of all the people who want him to love it. But Squidward is too weak-willed not to repent, and it goes this way: first a private acceptance, then a confession to SpongeBob at the threshold of the sanctuary, (the Patty Vault), and finally a joyful entrance. But the twist is that he gets damned for repenting anyway!

“You like men, don't you, Squidward?” That's what I imagine whenever I see this still of SpongeBob's smug squinty grin. What Squidward goes through in this episode is a lot like what I went through as a closeted queer kid. Of course queer kids have it worse in towns where they get beaten up, but there's a subtle terror even in happy tolerant Democrat gay-straight-alliance sorts of neighborhoods. In those places, part of the terror of being closeted is knowing how much they want you to come out. You think, “I'm surrounded by friendly, accepting, woke people—people who would have accepted me earlier—but because I waited too long to admit this is how I am, I can never do it.” You know you're queer, everybody around you seems to suspect it, but you just can't give them the satisfaction of saying “I always knew it.”

This episode shows exactly how parents, friends, teachers, and counselors should never treat anybody. Squidward is putting on airs about hating Krabby Patties, and then lying about it. The exact wrong thing to do is press the matter. Squidward can change his mind, but that requires dignity and privacy. The world lets him have neither. If SpongeBob just weren't there the next day, then Squidward could have one Krabby Patty in peace; instead, Squidward has to resort to the Patty Vault, where he winds up overeating and blowing up. And when he gets there, SpongeBob is there to clock him. SpongeBob is equivalent to the high school friend who sticks around to remind your new friends of your cringy persona in middle school.

And the crowd is even worse! Probably the cruelest element in the show is the mob of anonymous fish who always show up in the frame when it hurts somebody. This time the smiling crowd appears from behind doors and out of barrels to recite: “The only people who don't like a Krabby Patty have never tasted one!”
Got that, Squidward? You're weird and different and you suck because your taste isn't normal. Fuck you.