Until recently, it was thought that Steven Hillenburg had completely recovered from whatever was making him act so strangely during the Squidward's Suicide incident and that it had affected his normal life afterward.
Recent claims from the employee who found the Squidward's Suicide video, however, indicate that Steven Hillenburg went through another, similar, incident ten years ago. It was the summer of 1999 and SpongeBob SquarePants had recently premiered.
Hillenburg was working on two shows now and had started showing signs of stress, when he announced that he was working on another episode that would be 100% of his own writing. This terrified some of the staff who worked on both shows, but they were hesitant to bring up Squidward's Suicide and the SpongeBob SquarePants crew saw no reason to reject Hillenburg's idea. An early version of it was made and the employee who found Squidward's Suicide managed to make a digital copy of this as well. The episode was called "After All These Years."
The episode started with SpongeBob and Patrick going on a trip. The summaries don't say where exactly they're going, but SpongeBob brings a camera. When they arrive there it is a empty, desolate field. SpongeBob snaps a photo of a bird and they start walking down the dried out desert. As they are walking, SpongeBob gets angry at Patrick for some reason, and the two seperate.
They both go in different directions. Patrick is walking towards the sun, while SpongeBob is walking towards civilization. He walked for quite a while, never encountering a single person. Patrick was then on his knees, crawling towards the sun.
He then was in a surreal, indescribable place. There were a huge variety of shapes and colors, but it wasn't bright or fanciful. It was closer to the faint colors you see if you close your eyes too hard. Patrick got to his feet and started walking, the surreal void he was in seeming to go on and on. He kept walking for a few minutes. The colors kept making shapes you could kind of make out, but none of them were pleasant.
After his long walk, Patrick found a picture on the ground. It was completely out of place in his new environment; it looked like something drawn in the normal SpongeBob style. It was a photo of himself and SpongeBob. Patrick looked at it for a few seconds before beginning to cry again. The picture soon turn to dust and Patrick continued walking.
The view zoomed out until Patrick couldn't be seen until the colors all blended together and turned to solid black. The view continued to zoom out and we see that the black was a tiny fragment of the pupil in Patrick's eye. When it zoomed out completely, you can tell that it is his dead body laying in the field. He was drawn in the same hyper-realistic style as Bart's corpse (from the Simpsons episode, "Dead Bart").
Squidward walked into the room. He saw Patrick's body and said, "He got what he deserved." He checked his watch and said, "Looks like I need to get home. " He headed home.
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