Mrs. Puff, You're Fired (Episode)

Mrs. Puff, You're Fired is an episode from season 4 Template:Spoiler

Characters

• SpongeBob SquarePants
• Sergeant Roderick (revealed in credits)
• Mr. Fitz
• Bikini Bottomites
• Mrs. Puff
• Patrick Star
• Phil
• Timmy

--Plot== At Mrs. Puff's Boating School, Mr. Fitz (Boating School Superintendent) is talking to Mrs. Puff on her high record of failing students, in which SpongeBob is the only one, who has failed 1,258,056 times. Mrs. Puff needs to show Mr. Fitz everything she taught SpongeBob. A few seconds later, SpongeBob has failed another driving test. Mr. Fitz fires Mrs. Puff, and a new boating instructor named Sergeant Roderick (most likely a shark) comes in and takes over the school. He has various strict rules in his class, but one student is thrown out for talking and another is thrown out for eating. The other students run away, except for SpongeBob, who is his only student. The new boating instructor has set up a difficult course, in which, before driving, SpongeBob must crawl, walk, run, then walk blindfolded. As soon as SpongeBob masters this, he has to face a driving test, without the blindfold, which he could not do. When he starts driving, he ends up destroying the boating school and destroying about half of the town. Mrs. Puff, meanwhile, is painting a field, but the boat drives through it and Mrs. Puff is caught in the boat. Roderick is removed, but Mr. Fitz then realizes that SpongeBob is "unteachable" and he rehires Mrs. Puff.

Cultural References

• When Roderick comes in and talks about his second rule (no eating in class), then he offers bon-bons to one of the students, and after one of the students eats one, he literally throws the student through a wall. This scene is remarkably like the scene in the movie, Matilda, where the "Trunchbull" offers a piece of cake to a young boy, and punishes him for it.
• After all of the other students flee from the classroom, Roderick says to SpongeBob, "Looks like you're the man, sponge," a reference to Finding Forrester, and the site YTMND.

Trivia/Goofs

• The Season 4 Volume 1 DVD case resembles the episode.

Mrs. Puff says that only SpongeBob has ever failed her lessons. This is contradictory to a subtle reference to *another catastrophic driver in the episode, No Free Rides (Episode).

• SpongeBob can only drive non-catastrophically when he is blindfolded.
• SpongeBob runs into an acid-filled trench and comes back out as a skeleton, but sponges are invertebrates.
• This is the seventh episode in the series that shows that SpongeBob has bones. The first was in MuscleBob BuffPants, second in Mermaid Man and Barnacle Boy III, third in Prehibernation Week, fourth in Squid on Strike, fifth in I Had an Accident, and sixth in Shell of a Man. However, in Squirrel Jokes, he says that he has no bones.
• Roderick says that its illegal to drive with a blindfold on in Bikini Bottom.
• Monroe has been in more episodes then Mrs.Puff only as a background character.
• Spongebob could have easily closed his eyes in his boating test to substitute a blindfold.
• Closed-captioning error: at the beginning of this episode, Mr. Fitz says that he represents the Boating Teachers Accreditation Bureau. However, the captions said "voting" instead of "boating."