Rick and Morty, a great show that's had some less than great recent seasons.
What's going on there?
Almost every episode in the first three seasons is a classic.
They're are sharp, funny,
have interesting ideas at their core,
and are very unpredictable.
It's some of the most rewatchable TV I've ever seen.
I can throw on total recall at anytime,
watch it all the way through and still laugh.
But I found most two seasons 4 and 5 to be a little lackluster.
There are some winning episodes in the bunch and only a couple that are actually
painful to revisit but most of the episodes have been just pleasing,
passable, nothing terribly wrong about them,
but they're just not quite as tight or impactful as what came before.
At least, that was my initial impression of the seasons,
some good episodes, some bad episodes.
But after thinking about it,
I've come to believe that the problems go a little deeper than episodic issues.
The real problems affect even the good episodes.
Here's what I mean. The core dynamic
of the show is between Rick who seems to
know everything and he deeply cynical about life.
I'm a love doctor.
Morty who seems to know nothing but is naively optimistic.
Nobody exists on purpose,
nobody belongs anywhere,
everybody's going to die. Come watch TV.
The dramatic question all of the episodes engage with is this, is existence meaningless?
That question is posed as a result of Rick
inventing a way to travel the multiverse with his portal gun.
Because he can do that he's concluded that nothing
matters like literally everything you think has meaning has no meaning at all.
Nothing matters so I may as well pull out our dicks and
rub them on fades glaring teeth like we're brushing fades teeth,
but we're using your gross dirty dick. Must be nice.
He can do whatever he wants.
Because if he screws up,
you can just move to a dimension where he didn't screw up.
There's an infinite number of realities, Morty,
and a few dozen of those I got lucky in turn everything back to normal.
I just had to find one of those realities in which
we also happen to both die around this time.
Now we can just slip into the place of
our dead cells and this reality and everything will be fine.
As a result, he believes having emotional attachments
is irrational because if one of his family members die,
he can just go and get an alternate version of them with little hassle.
Something he repeatedly reminds those around him
as a way to prove that he does not actually care about them.
Well, what is this supposed to accomplish?
We have infinite grandkids.
You tried to use Disney bucks at a Caesars Palace here
or our family means nothing in which case don't play that card.
My access to infinite timelines precludes in necessity of attachment.
Rick, can we not leave without my sister?
You have infinite sisters.
Morty, not that I want to spend the rest of my data looking for another one.
Even his connection with Morty is given a logical not an emotional explanation.
He keeps Morty around because.
You're a camouflage.
Camouflage?
What are you talking about Rick?
Rick's have a very distinctive and traceable brainwave due to our genius,
the best way to hide from an enemy's radar is to stand near
someone with complimentary brainwaves that make ours and visible.
When Rick it is with a Morty,
the genius waves get canceled out by the Morty waves.
This mindset freeze Rick from any responsibility or accountability.
He's free to live a hedonistic lifestyle,
to do and say whatever he pleases,
to act on every impulse,
and to be abusive towards everyone else who behaves differently.
This is the heart of the conflict on the show.
In almost every episode,
one member of the Smith family is obsessed with something,
whether that's being a good father, getting the girl,
being popular at school or having an impressive career.
They're caught up with the day-to-day of average American life.
Then in walks Rick to tell them how dumb at all is and
that drives the dramatic conflict of the episode. Who is right?
Does family mean nothing or is it the only thing that matters?
Does being popular matter or going your own way?
Now, it's no secret that Rick and Morty is heavily
influenced by the ideas of H. P. Lovecraft,
an American author who along with being extremely racist,
is also the writer of dozens of horror stories which
collectively invented the cosmic horror sub-genre.
In cosmic horror, the horrors the characters encounter are so alien,
enormous or strange that it makes
the characters question the meaning of their own existence
as in what purpose could my life
possibly have if something is biggest Cthulhu is out there,
if I'm just an insect and a universe so vast
that I can never have a meaningful impact on it.
What am I doing going to work every day in watching baseball games
when my entire planet could be stepped on by an alien god
on its way to the bathroom or entered into a reality TV show music competition.
Rick and Morty takes a comedic approach to all of these ideas.
The cosmic core is the vast scale of the universe,
as well as the very concept of the multiverse itself.
When Rick challenges the Smith's families preoccupations and calls them frivolous,
he is pointing at the inherent cosmic horror
of the world they live in to prove his points.
This is one of the key elements that gives so much of the show such energy,
especially in the earlier seasons.
Because in those seasons the Smith family could still
reasonably pushback against Rick's ideology.
There was a lot of tension there,
seeing whether the characters would hold
onto their values or slip into Rick's way of thinking.
In the last few seasons though,
there's been a subtle shift in the way Rick's ideology is handled.
In that it's both been quietly sidelined while also being tacitly accepted.
The third season of the show is largely about Rick
exerting his dominance over his family.
He returns from prison,
overthrows the galactic government and causes Beth and
Jerry's divorce in the premier episode, as he puts it.
No more dad Morty, he threatened to turn me into the government,
so I made him and the government goes away.
Let's replace them in the Defacto patriarch of your family and your universe.
The rest of the season has him abusing this newfound power until Beth and Jerry get back
together and Rick is forced to accept
a more diminished and subordinate role in the family.
As a result in the following seasons,
he is not nearly as tyrannical.
He doesn't have the power to force his ideology
down everyone else's throats quite as much.
But at the same time,
the rest of the family has come to acclimate themselves to Rick's universe.
Morty has long ago dropped the childhood innocence that defined his earlier character
and now simply deals with whatever problem Rick
causes in his life as if he's doing chores.
Summer regularly adopts the hedonistic lifestyle of her grandfather and Beth,
who Rick clones at the end of Season 3,
gets to live both the life of a space hero and the mundane life of a suburban mom.
She gets to live both the life she thinks her father
approves of and the one she wants to think matters.
The only moral counterpoint is Jerry who wants to live a life without Rick.
Real talk buddy, where yeah.
Go to hell Rick.
But all of them are at least now aware of the love, crafty,
and scale of the world they live in and they're fine with it.
That has a lot of consequences on where the show can go
and it's where the last couple of seasons have struggled I think.
Once the characters themselves have accepted the cosmic horror of
the universe and then still go back to living their regular lives,
accepting that what really matters are the moments that you're living right now,
it's hard to challenge them anymore.
In Season 1, when flesh eating grass hopper monsters attack the Smith's house,
it's terrifying for Summer,
but in Season 4 a bunch of time traveling terminators snakes can
show up on their doorstep and it's just another day for the Smith family.
These stories aren't threatening to the characters or
to the audience because we've seen it plenty of times
before and so have they that the characters are so
often unfazed by the story that they've just experienced,
leaves many of the episodes feeling pleasant enough to watch exciting as it's happening,
but they're not really impactful.
The thing is though, I think the show is totally aware of that.
I think the relative frivolity and expandability of
the later seasons is something the show is intentional about.
Is it possible the show is purposefully
making episodes that feel frivolous and expendable?
One of the things Rick says constantly,
especially in seasons 4 and 5,
is something along the lines of,
let's stop doing these over serious continuity driven episodes.
Let's just go on light self-contained adventures,
classic Rick and Morty adventures,
just an easy episode that's a parody of
a movie that wraps up and we never think about again.
From now on Rick and Morty doing a little of this and a little of that.
Yeah, sometimes we'll do classic stuff.
Other times we'll do whatever.
Sometimes we won't even do anything.
Rick and Morty not doing anything.
Morty, the idea was to get back to simple adventures.
The citadel runs on Cannon.
These asides are everywhere and they strike at a difference between what
the creators of the show want to make and what their audience wants them to make.
Let's back up a second.
Season 2 aired in 2015 and ends on a big cliffhanger.
Rick's friend Birdperson got shot by his fiance Tammy,
and Rick turns himself into the galactic government.
The fact that it's a cliffhanger contributes to the fan base
is intense anticipation for the next season.
Then season 3 drops in 2017.
This is where the popularity of the show hits its peak
and where the fan base starts to go insane.
It's when you get headlines of people harassing
poor McDonald's employees for Szechuan Sauce.
It's when everyone starts screaming,
Pickle Rick at each other and it's when you need
a high IQ to understand Rick and Morty meme proliferates.
It's at this time that the hardcore Rick and Morty fan base earns
a reputation for being extremely confrontational.
Now, one of season 3's best episodes feature the return of evil Morty,
who takes over the citadel of Rick's,
setting up a big confrontation with the main Rick and Morty in a future episode.
Another one trolls the audience by offering them a plausible backstory for Rick,
but then telling them that it's all fake.
By the time season 3 is finished,
what the fan based wanted was clear continuations of all their favorite plot lines.
What's going on with Phoenix Person and Tammy?
What's going to happen with evil Morty?
What's Rick's backstory?
I think the creators of the show really felt this pressure to deliver on these stories,
but also felt an extreme reluctance to go back to any of them.
Something they directly tell the audience in several different episodes.
In the story train episode,
they make fun of the idea of finishing the Tammy Berg person and
evil Morty story lines as burning the show out on marketability and broad appeal.
Yeah, you're right, Morty.
We got all that medican and shit out of the way and now we can just be ourselves.
In all of the big continuity driven episodes of seasons 4 and 5,
the writers through Rick make fun of the very idea of continuity and serialization.
She died the way she lived over serialized.
Rick often breaks the fourth wall, but in the past,
he usually did it to make fun of whatever genre the episode was perioding.
I'm sorry. You're right.
Got to take it real serious.
The reason those are fun is because they play on
the audience's knowledge of that genre or movie to work,
so the audience feels in on the joke.
But whenever the show makes fun of the very idea of continuity,
the target of the joke is the audience.
The show's making fun of you for wanting these kinds of
episodes rather than the classic standalone episodes.
But it's hard to get invested in a story when that story is explicitly self-conscious.
It feels like the writers are regularly trying to lamp shade
their own frustrations with their work by pointing out its shortcomings,
which just makes me a little more distanced from the episodes themselves.
Am I not supposed to like this?
Am I not in on the joke if I like this?
We're removing ourselves from the sloppy up story and letting
snake time travel eat its own tail. I was funny.
Sometimes, mostly burping. Come on kids,
we have to go do our fucking piece of shit Star Wars.
But at the same time, the fourth wall breaking critiques of
continuity aren't just thesis statements by the writers,
but what kind of storytelling they prefer.
They are also another way to express Ricks ideology,
as in, since he believes nothing matters,
nothing from the past should affect the future.
Continuity implies that their actions have consequences.
When Rick wants to live in a fantasy of doing whatever he wants without reprisals.
When characters from previous episodes come back to haunt Rick,
it messes with his philosophy.
This is exactly what evil Morty's criticism of Rick is at the end of season 5.
In that episode, it's revealed that the central finite curve,
which has been talked about since the first season,
is actually a section of the multiverse that Rick has separated from the rest of it,
so that in every universe within the curve,
he's the smartest person alive and the only one with access to multiversal travel.
It basically allows him to never truly be
challenged within this section of the multiverse.
Every version of us have spent every version of all of our lives in one infinite crib,
looked around an infinite baby.
The infinite crib is
both the central finite curve and the concept of the standalone episode.
In both, Rick always wins.
His mistakes never come back to haunt him.
He can do whatever he wants.
I think the show constantly harping on about this idea fits
pretty nicely with all of the ideas the show is already about.
At the same time, it means that for most of season 4 and 5,
it really feels like we're living in that infinite crib where
the stories don't have much of an impact on the audience or the characters.
I think that's where my general sense of malaise comes from and watching them.
But at the end of season 5,
evil Morty tears down
the central finite curve and travels to a place where Rick never existed.
This seems to promise that the show will go in a new direction,
that Rick's obsession with
classic episodic adventures have to be shelves so that he can actually grow.
I hope the show can deliver on that and find
a way to overcome the challenges it's faced in the past.
Because like Rick, it can't keep doing the same things and achieving the same results.
It has to discover new stories to tell.