A Day Without Tears

A Day Without Tears
This episode feels like it should've belonged to Peppa Pig, where George Pig had his own spotlight for one episode.
Season	7
Episode No.	136a
Main Reason for being ScumBob	SpongeBob spent most of the episode crying, yeah, what would you expect? Very boring. The beginning. Overuse of filler scenes. Rips off Funny Pants. Squidward is at his worst. Misleading title.

A Day Without Tears is a mid infamous episode of SpongeBob SquarePants. In this episode, Squidward bets that SpongeBob has to go through the entire day without crying, and if he fails he'll have to do all of Squidward's chores for a year.

Why It'll Make You Want to Cry

1. First off, the idea of an episode where someone's crying for the most part is an awful idea on paper.
   • It's also the main problem with this episode, SpongeBob cries a lot here, we know he has a crying problem, but this is just the worst offender of them all as he cried over the smallest of things, like:
     • Getting his toe stubbed (Depending on your view)
     • Ripping his favorite shirt
     • A radio playing a sad song
     • Accidentally dropping his Krabby Patty whilst jumping in surprise
     • Being yelled at Squidward
     • Broke his jellyfishing net
     • Listening to a made-up sad story
     • Or worse, no reason at all.
2. The title is also extremely misleading, as it's a day with a ton of tears.
3. This is, you guessed it, another SpongeBob torture episode.
4. Squidward is an unlikable jerk in this episode. This is evident when:
   • He yelled at SpongeBob for no reason other than to make him stop his pettiness over a Krabby Patty that he poured his heart into making, now with his progress ruined after it fell onto the floor.
   • And he's trying to make SpongeBob cry so he can win the bet. Which is cheating.
5. The entire plot of the episode itself is generic, not for the "BET" type of plot that is used in the actual episode, but because this episode certainly rehashes Funny Pants from the fourth season, and that episode itself is no better. The only differences is this episode is based on the more obnoxious half of the episode, and replaces laughing with crying.
6. The entire "crying montage" showing the flashbacks to all the "hundreds of tears SpongeBob has cried over the years" are all unbelievable nonsense and utter lies, since none of those "flashbacks" come from past SpongeBob episodes from Seasons 1-6, which just shows how the writers couldn't be bothered with continuity between episodes in Seasons 6-7 for the sake of plot contrivance, which is ridiculous and utterly unacceptable since an earlier episode "Mrs. Puff, You're Fired" from Season 4 did use flashback scenes from the episode "No Weenies Allowed" from Season 3. Wait one minute, does this scene ring you a bell?
   • Not only that, the animation in these "flashbacks" is very lazy, as it's the same animation of SpongeBob crying being reused over and over again over different backgrounds.
   • To add salt to the wound, this "flashback" sequence isn't even funny in the slightest either, instead it's just incredibly depressing.
7. On the topic of continuity errors, for some strange reason Squidward yelling at SpongeBob seems to make him cry, despite that in other episodes SpongeBob doesn't seem to cry when he gets yelled at by Squidward. This same mistake is also previously repeated in the Season 5 episode "Whatever Happened to SpongeBob?".
8. The scene where SpongeBob calls Patrick on the phone to tell him about his bet with Squidward served no purpose but to be filler.
   • Also, this scene takes no sense since there are a ton of episodes that SpongeBob has gone through without crying, and this scene looks like he thinks that crying is only emotion he wants to feel, plus, he didn't even laugh in this episode.
9. It’s the first episode to play “Coconut Cream Pie” and "Aloha Bikini Bottom", which using both tracks in that same episode is a bad time for this episode to play these tracks considering this is an episode that is nothing more than a "Funny Pants" rehash, except with crying instead and the second half being turned into an entire episode.
10. The humor is such a mixed bag in this episode. Aside from the depressing running joke of SpongeBob's crying, the joke with Patrick and SpongeBob's TV (that he destroyed) is pretty clever and makes for unintentional comedy at best, what we get for the rest of the episode are stale with depressing and heartbreaking crying jokes from SpongeBob, as well as some stupid jokes like the one-joke where a news reporter reports on the news that a manatee does not get what he wanted for his birthday, which with a joke like that, does this even feel necessary to the episode?
11. SpongeBob's voice-acting by Tom Kenny is really depressing, mainly due to the SpongeBob character's crying depressingly throughout most of the entire episode; not helping is the fact that most of SpongeBob's crying sounds heartbreaking.
12. To make things even worse, it's paired up with the ULTRA-infamous Summer Job.
13. The plot also ripped off "The City of Frownsville" from The Powerpuff Girls (1998 version), and that episode was extremely worse than this one because instead of showing one character crying for the most part, everyone is crying instead.
14. In total, this is just a rip-off of "Funny Pants", but worse, well, at least it's not worse than "The City of Frownsville" from The Powerpuff Girls (1998 version), or this.

Redeeming Qualities That Don’t Make Us Cry

1. SpongeBob crying over a stubbed toe is reasonable since it could be pretty painful.
2. Patrick is right when he told SpongeBob that it is possible to go for the rest of the day without crying.
   • Also, Patrick is the only likable character here.
3. The joke with Patrick and SpongeBob's TV (that he destroyed) is arguably the funniest scene from this episode.
4. The ending isn't that bad. Squidward loses the bet and as punishment, he cries due to now having to do what SpongeBob had won as part of the bet. After all, he came up with it in the first place.
   • Unlike most cases during seasons six through eight, Squidward gets his rightful comeuppance rather than be given the excessive punching bag treatment.
5. As mentioned in WIMYWTC#9, it is the first episode to play "Aloha Bikini Bottom" and "Coconut Cream Pie."
6. There are some clever jokes.

How To Fix This Episode And Wipe Away It's Tears

• Well, for a plot where someone's crying for the most part is pretty much unfixable, the least thing we can say is just make the flashback scenes actually contain clips from actual episodes.