A Flea in Her Dome

It's a flea story, alright...but hideous and revengeful.

**A Flea in Her Dome** is a super-infamous episode of *SpongeBob SquarePants*. In this episode, Sandy accidentally brings a flea from Texas back to her tree-dome, which leads to disastrous consequences.

**Airdate for this episode: August 1, 2007**

## Plot

At the beginning of the episode, SpongeBob and Patrick are crying, because Sandy has gone to Texas for two whole days. They decide to take the time until she comes home to prepare for and throw her a welcome home party. During their party, SpongeBob and Patrick notice that Sandy is scratching and biting her fur. Sandy explains that upon her return from a science convention in Texas, she unknowingly brought back a flea.

Sandy asks SpongeBob to open her briefcase and take out the flea collar. The flea jumps out of her fur and lands on SpongeBob. SpongeBob gets bitten and grabs the collar. The flea then lands on Patrick and bites him, causing Patrick to take the collar. They then fight over the collar, which causes Sandy to grab the collar and wrap it around all three of them. The flea then reproduces, causing the flea collar to be eaten away, rendering it useless. Fleas take over Sandy's tree dome, and no one can escape the dome.

Patrick blames Sandy for bringing the flea and getting them infected, then blames SpongeBob for throwing the party, which causes SpongeBob and Patrick to fight. Sandy breaks up the fight and tells them that arguing is not going to help save themselves as they must work together. Patrick comes up with the idea of creating a tower to the tree, only to climb up and get an apple.

Sandy is annoyed at Patrick's stupidity and the group takes refuge in the tree. But it proves to be useless as the fleas continue to spread all over the tree-dome. SpongeBob states they may be living in a sea of fleas instead of saltwater, thus giving Sandy an idea of how to get rid of the fleas. Sandy then crashes through the masses of fleas, opens the treedome and floods the entire dome with saltwater. This drowns and gets rid of the fleas, but all the Bikini Bottom citizens are stuck in the dome at the end. SpongeBob tells Sandy it's good to have her back, as the episode ends.

## Why It Bites (NO PUN INTENDED)

1. For beginners, this is just a painful SpongeBob, Patrick, and Sandy torture episode.
2. The beginning with SpongeBob sobbing and moping around about Sandy being gone to Texas for two whole days is not a great way to start an episode.
	* Not to mention, this is not even a remotely funny scene to watch. Having to watch SpongeBob cry over someone he knows being gone for two whole days like this is more childish than it is funny. Come on! How’s two days is such a big deal?!
3. The fleas are extremely unlikeable and creepy kinds of characters to the point where they try to invade the trio's bodies.
	* They even ate the collar just to torture and bite them severely. Then, they morph into cannons and round shot balls so that they can attempt to shoot Patrick, SpongeBob, and Sandy in anger.
		+ Not to mention that the fleas' face designs are pretty creepy.
			- Even a scene where they morph into a resemblance of a supervillain is just plain creepy and very scary.
4. The infamous scene where the flea inside Sandy's fur poops out two eggs from its butt, and more start to evolve, which is just plain disgusting and inappropriate.
	* In fact, this scene was banned in Indonesia.
5. There's another infamous scene where the camera zooms into the Flea and the way that it screeches will get on your last nerve.
6. The way that SpongeBob, Patrick, and Sandy beg for and snatch a flea collar (while it creates humor), is just generic.
7. Squidward is also a one-shot idiot in this episode, instead of helping our 3 main protagonists, he just ignores them making him useless to the point he had no impact on the story whatsoever. Not only that, but he's a complete a-hole.
8. Patrick's plan in the scene where he asks Sandy to stay on the bottom, and SpongeBob in the middle, and Patrick goes on top is dumb.
9. The overall storyline is bizarre.
10. **Bad ending**: While the water was a good idea for the fleas, the problem was that the dome sucked up not just Bikini Bottom, but also the entire ocean. This is stupid because it would be impossible for Sandy's tree-dome to empty the entire sea, with or without the mass of the Bikini Bottomites.
	* In reality, the tree-dome would just break apart if it tried to fit all of the ocean water inside of it.
11. Speaking of the ending, it also created a Plot Hole. Why didn't they think of using water on the fleas earlier?
12. Unfortunately, this episode can be considered a nightmare fuel episode (mainly in the latter half).
13. The fleas are favoring disgusting in this swoony episode.

## Redeeming Qualities That Don’t Bite

1. SpongeBob, Patrick, and Sandy (despite their arguments) are still likable.
2. At least they kinda got rid of the fleas.
3. Although the fleas' faces can be look creepy, their high-pitched squeal, surely a bit scary, but is cute. And their realistic design looked decent.
4. Some funny moments like at the decorating scene when Patrick eats the cake and spits it out and it turns into Texas, when SpongeBob and Patrick are painting "welcome Sandy" on a banner, but they run out of room and it says "Welcomandy" and, of course, the "So much pain!" scene.
5. The plot, despite being bizarre and scary, is interesting.
6. As mentioned above, the infamous birth scene was banned in Indonesia.
7. The Fleas were never seen again in later episodes

## How should this be fixed?

* Make SpongeBob and Patrick not cry when Sandy’s gone for two days, like mature people.
* Make fleas look cuter than creepy.
* Tone down the torture scenes.
* Squidward should help out SpongeBob, Patrick and Sandy, though sure he still hate both SpongeBob and Patrick.
* Remove the argument scene.
* Make the ending sensible where all the Bikini Bottomites never get sucked inside Sandy’s Treedome.
* Make sure the f\*\*\*\*\*g laying eggs by the fleas are removed due to it being inappropriate and very disgusting.

## Trivia

* This is the first time in the series that "Tentacally Speaking" plays.
* When Squidward is power walking, the song he is listening to sounds similar to the smooth jazz song from "The Thing."
* This is one of the few episodes of SpongeBob to use the static Nickelodeon Logo after the end credits.