Plankton-Karen relationship
Plankton and Karen are a married couple. Although they love each other, they often fight or have arguments. For example, in "Single Cell Anniversary," they fight after Plankton reveals he didn't get Karen a present for their wedding anniversary. However, Plankton soon learns from SpongeBob that he has to show his love, and plays a romantic song for Karen.
Positive relationships
- In "F.U.N.," Karen is supportive of Plankton and cheers him up by giving him an evil plan to steal the Krabby Patty secret formula. After he rants about SpongeBob, she asks him, "You're not letting him leave, are you? Can't you see? This is the perfect opportunity for revenge!"
- She later calls him a genius to encourage him. She says, "Get moving, genius, don't let him get away!"
- In "Welcome to the Chum Bucket," Plankton steals Karen's plan to show compassion and understanding to get SpongeBob to reveal the formula.
- In "Chum Caverns," Plankton steals Karen's plan to set up a restaurant underground.
- In "Jailbreak!," Karen visits Plankton in prison and brings a cake. When he asks if she put the "secret ingredient" in it, she asks him if he means love, and makes a heart on her screen.
- In "Eek, an Urchin!," Karen tells Plankton that she loves him over the phone. A little embarrassed, Plankton replies, "I love you too, snookums!"
- In "Plankton's Pet," Plankton adopts a pet named Spot and Karen helps him train Spot.
- In The SpongeBob Movie: Sponge Out of Water, Karen needs to use all of her processing power to fuel her time machine. Plankton admits to her that he is sorry to take her for granted: "I know I've taken you for granted all these years and I... I just wanted to say... I'm glad you're on my te-am." Karen starts to tell him that it is the sweetest thing he has ever said to her, but Plankton turns the switch that turns her system off. He starts to cry.
- In "Plankton Gets the Boot," Karen changes her screensaver to look pretty for Plankton, who tries hard to win Karen back.
- In "Plankton Retires," Karen feeds Plankton from a bottle like a baby.
- In "Spot Returns," when Karen gets flipped onto her side, Plankton frantically runs over to help her back up, even ditching the formula in the process.
- In "Spin the Bottle," Karen tells Plankton that he looks adorable in his genie outfit.
- In "Grandmum's the Word," Plankton sets up a romantic bath in a tub full of oil for Karen. Plankton dims the lights, lights up scented candles, scatters rose petals, and dresses in fancy attire. Plankton tries to kiss Karen, but gets interrupted by his grandmother video calling him.
- In "Bottle Burglars," Plankton and Karen are revealed to sleep in a bedroom together. Plankton blows kisses to Karen while she sleeps and says "Good night, honey."
- In "Karen's Virus," Plankton stays by Karen's side after she comes down with a computer virus. This episode shows that Karen has factory-like center inside her hard drive dedicated to Plankton, like a love center called the tunnel of love.
- In "Girls' Night Out," Karen is apprehensive when Sandy and Mrs. Puff try to convince her that she should prank Plankton.
- In "Captain Pipsqueak," Karen prepares a soothing bath for Plankton and helps him pick out a good supervillain costume.
- In "The Flower Plot," Karen is invested in Plankton's scheme and genuinely wants him to get the formula. She is confused at first when he takes a break from stealing the secret formula to become a full-time florist, but then she supports his new dream until his flower bouquets from the Krusty Krab explode.
- In "Blood is Thicker Than Grease," Karen comforts Plankton after he finds out the secret formula is worthless after his families restaurant becomes more popular than the Krusty Krab.
- In "Tango Tangle," Plankton gives Karen a coupon for a free tango class as a birthday present.
- In "Partial Recall," when Plankton goes missing, Karen puts up posters and searches the neighborhood for him. She is thankful when Scooter claims to have seen him, and shoots him with a laser when he turns out to be pranking her. At the end of the episode, Karen takes Plankton home and reacts with exasperation that he did not wear his helmet to prevent him from getting injured.
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Negative relationships
| “ | I was just trying to make myself pretty for you, but do you even care? All you do is make stupid schemes about making stupid sandwiches! | ” |
— Karen angry with Plankton about disliking her screensaver, "Plankton Gets the Boot"
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Often, Plankton will insist to Karen that he is capable of doing everything even though Karen always gives Plankton the best advice.
- In "Plankton's Army," Karen embarrasses Plankton by laughing about his first name, Sheldon. She takes it a step further by showcasing "Sheldon" in various fonts on her screens, making Plankton's cousins laugh hysterically.
- In The SpongeBob SquarePants Movie, when Plankton is happy for selling Krabby Patties, she tells him that she never agreed to marry him, but likely not really meaning it. Later when SpongeBob is foiling Plankton's plan through a rock solo, Karen does not hear Plankton when he begs her to do something. Instead, she crowd-surfs while Plankton fumes with anger.
- In "Krabs vs. Plankton," Karen tries to encourage Plankton by saying "Maybe today will be the day?" but he is mad and calls her comment "patronizing."
- In "Enemy In-Law," Plankton falls in love with Betsy Krabs despite being married to Karen, and turns the latter off altogether when she objects. Plankton then spends most of the episode trying to win Betsy's love. When Karen is accidentally reactivated at the end of the episode, she zaps Plankton with a laser in retribution.
- In "Goo Goo Gas," Plankton creates a gas which can turn adults into babies in order to get the Krabby Patty formula. Before using it in the Krusty Krab, Karen suggests that Plankton have to test it, but Plankton uses her as a test subject.
- In "Krabby Road," after returning to the Chum Bucket, Karen kicks Plankton out for an unknown reason.
- In "Plankton's Regular," Karen lies to Plankton by saying he never had a regular customer and does not care that he is sad.
- In "Komputer Overload," thinking what Karen does to him for his failure is just blaming, Plankton creates the robots to replace Karen.
- In "Sweet and Sour Squid," When Plankton comes up with his plan to be friends with Squidward, Karen responds with "What the door on your way out?" and Plankton calls her "Computer Brain" after she gives him attitude.
- In "Someone's in the Kitchen with Sandy," Karen says Plankton's plan (disguising as Sandy) to get the formula is repulsive.
- In "One Coarse Meal," Karen doesn't care about Plankton, who is afraid of whale and thinking Pearl is following him.
- In "Frozen Face-Off," after being left in the snow, Karen teams up with SpongeBob et alia to stop Plankton's plan.
- In "Walking the Plankton," Karen gets mad at Plankton after finding out he was trying to steal the secret formula on their honeymoon and then splits the ship in half, causing everyone to evacuate on lifeboats.
- In "Karen 2.0, getting the wrong meal, Plankton, who has created Karen 2, says he's going to replace Karen with his newest creation. This would cause Karen to get sad and would fight Karen 2 to get her back.
- In "Salsa Imbecilicus," Plankton mutes Karen and does not let her help make the salsa.
- In "Plankton Gets the Boot," Karen kicks Plankton out of the Chum Bucket for insulting her though he would later try to make it up to her.
- In "Karen's Baby," after Plankton tells Chip to run away from home, Karen gets mad at him and attempts to harm him and makes him go out and find Chip.
- In "Lockdown for Love," Karen gets angry at Plankton after he ruins their date night to steal the secret formula and then puts the Chum Bucket on lockdown. Later in the episode, After Plankton shows up for the secret formula reveal, Karen gets mad when she finds out Plankton used Patrick as an imposter of himself and then deletes the secret formula right in front of him.
- In "Karen for Spot," Plankton is shown to care more about Spot than Karen, unenthusiastically saying goodbye to her before leaving. When Karen's babysitting goes wrong, she and Plankton get into a heated argument.
The Relationship Climax
Their relationship is put to the ultimate test in Plankton: The Movie. As mentioned, Plankton oftentimes believes that he's the superior one, with the more genius ideas, disregarding Karen's advice and being unthankful, much to her indignation and sadness (which is one of the reasons why his plans have usually never come close to succeeding). Things take a bad turn on the night of the anniversary of the date that Plankton started his crazed quest for the Secret Formula, which has been going on for 25 years. Karen tries to surprise Plankton by changing up the Chum Bucket into a much more inviting place (as he has never had any customers), and it works. But Plankton, enraged about the changes, saying they're not evil enough, tears it down and chases everyone out.
This sends Karen in heartbroken fury, and she removes on the "empathy" chip from her CPU (When Plankton constructed her, he made four chips that makes up her personality, Smart, Snarky, Evil, and Empathetic). Both she and Plankton were unaware of the consequences that could happen if she did remove the chip, but she was too angry to care. It basically caused all her hurt to take over, and she transformed into an incredible war machine, the Hydra Karen, made up of several different heads that each represent an extreme part of her personality (although these are much more malicious). The original Karen, her personality separate from the Hydras, decides to get revenge on Plankton by destroying his dream of World Domination, deciding to do it herself. With a giant magnetization beam she outfitted in the Chum Bucket, the Hydra Karens tear all the homes of Bikini Bottom off their foundations, reassembling them together to construct a gigantic mech. Then, with the mech, she planned to rise from the ocean in the Mech and carry out a rampage on the surface that would continue only until the world would bow to her. Plankton is obviously furious about this, and plots revenge. But SpongeBob wants to get the two back together, knowing of the conflict in their partnership/romance, soon figuring out that Plankton's hurtful unappreciation was the cause. He learns of Plankton and Karen's origins, how Plankton had constructed her as a sentient calculator and eventually upgraded her to the computer he eventually married. However, the two were inseparable. However, when Plankton's obsession with obtaining the Krabby Patty secret formula began to take over, Plankton started paying more attention to his conquest than her, which lead to him being unappreciative. Karen's best friends, Gal Pals Sandy, Mrs. Puff, and Pearl also say that despite their love, Karen always has at least one complaint about Plankton every time they meet. Since Plankton had repressed his own empathy for so long, Sandy decides to insert Karen's discarded empathy chip in his own brain. This caused Plankton to not only become crazy with compassion but also showed him how poorly he had treated Karen, which he had thought at first was no big deal.
Determined to make things right, Plankton, SpongeBob, and the Gal Pals set off to stop Karen's Mech and for Plankton to rekindle his relationship. Karen orders the Hydras to stop them, but eventually, all three are dismantled by the Gal Pal trio, although Karen herself simply ejects them out of the Mech after that happens. SpongeBob and Plankton also run into Patrick, who has been inside the Krusty Krab (which has been part of Karen's mech), and the three separate, Plankton sending SpongeBob and Patrick to disable the Mech's power source (which is potatoes), while Plankton reaches the control central at the very top. However, as he goes in, the empathy chip in his brain fries from the overload of repressed empathy, restoring his evil personality. However, he still has genuine empathy in him, and heads to the Mech's bridge. At the wheel is Karen, who's not happy at first to see Plankton, and silently tries to stomp him with a Mechanical spiked boot (just like what had happened to him countless times throughout the series). But Plankton apologetically explains everything that he learned about empathy, and how he realized he was wrong. However, Karen, still hurt, believes Plankton is just trying to deceive her, seemingly having lost faith in him. Depressed and bitter, she reveals the Krabby Patty Secret Formula is now in her possession, and somberly gives it to him as a parting gift, believing it's all he actually wants in his life.
But much to her shock, instead he kicks it aside saying that the "real formula" was her. Karen becomes shell-shocked as Plankton had genuinely not acknowledged her for her loyalty and love in a long time. This causes her to cry, moved beyond words, overcome with happiness and love. The two lock in a long embrace and kiss. Even without her empathy chip, her empathy had still been inside her all along and she just needed that empathy in return to make her empathy function again. Karen also reveals to Plankton that despite how upset she was earlier, she held on to a glimmer of hope that he would turn around, and installed a tiny chair in the mech so they could control it together. Overjoyed, the two decide to take over the world together, having a blast as they rise out of the ocean, and prepare to make landfall on a beach.
The two prepare to fire the freeze-ray laser at the coastline, both heartwarmingly deciding to do it together. However, the mech suddenly fails, much to Karen's shock, as she didn't think it was possible for her to fail. But Plankton suddenly realizes he sent Patrick and SpongeBob down to the engine room, which they have already disabled (As SpongeBob cut all the potatoes with his spatula, serving them to Patrick, who ate all of them. Despite failing yet again, Karen is not mad at Plankton, because despite this, they're still back together and happily in love. The mech falls apart, leaving all the buildings from Bikini Bottom to simply fall back to their homes, with no harm whatsoever. The townsfolk are at first irate with Karen and Plankton, surrounding the now frightened couple. However, SpongeBob manages to dissuade the group from demolishing Karen and attacking Plankton, by saying that this whole mess was indeed just a crazy love story, which lightens up the town. Plankton finds the whole town to be morons for letting them off so easy, and Karen agrees, adding that they are their morons, saying that despite all the trouble they had gone through for the past 25 years, she doesn't regret living in Bikini Bottom with Plankton, as outside of villainy, it's a town that has changed them both for the better.