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- What's up guys,
Michael here to unpack the wild two-part finale
of season five of Rick and Morty.
The last two episodes dropped back to back,
putting a bow on a season that's been
a little all over the place.
Featuring incisive commentary on things like climate change,
an objectively dumb detour into incestual space babies,
and a lot of bird based content in between.
And not to reveal ourselves
as overly predictable political philosophy nerds,
but episode 10 had our ears perking up
when the show explicitly talked about capitalism.
- It's a metaphor for capitalism Morty what do you think?
- Twice.
- Wow I thought my capitalism metaphor was on the nose.
- So what are the writers trying to say?
And is what they're saying actually smart
and above all did it effectively tie up this wild season?
Let's find out in this quick take on Rick and Morty.
Are we free to imagine?
and as always spoilers ahead.
But before we get into it,
I want to give a shout out to this video sponsor Wren.
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And now back to the show.
Now this season of Rick and Morty,
arguably more than ever before,
is really focused on relationships between characters
and are those relationships healthy?
Of course they aren't.
Things are just as toxic as ever between Rick and Morty,
Rick and the rest of Smith family,
and Rick and a recently resurrected bird person,
just to name a few,
Most obviously,
Morty is stuck in Rick's endless cycle of abuse.
- Gross
- Dad
- Summer you (beep) idiot, we're not decoys.
- Why, why did I get punished.
- He's constantly belittled,
with Rick even replacing him as a sidekick
with a pair of crows, which he picked
through a price is right style spinning wheel,
just to be a dick.
- I never said you're worthless.
In fact, I've given you a very clear metric of your worth.
Two crows.
- What's more,
Rick only seems to care about Morty
when he can get something out of him.
Hell the entire reason they adventure together
is because Morty's dumb little brain provides Rick cover
to hide from his enemies in the multi-verse.
- When a Rick is with a Morty,
the genius waves get canceled out by the Morty waves.
- Their relationship seems to be largely transactional.
So when Morty does break away from Rick
in these most recent episodes
and seemingly bonds with this guy, Nick,
via their portal orifices,
it seems like he's finally found a partner who will respect
and value him.
But, not so fast.
Eventually we find out that Nick was also just using Morty,
specifically to get access to Rick's fancy tech.
Morty has to literally sacrifice a hand
to escape this new abusive relationship.
All the action of that movie, 127 hours,
but in three seconds.
Meanwhile, Rick starts training his new pair of
winged sidekicks to whom he serves a similar platter
of condescension and low expectations.
Seeing them as only valuable
for the various services they can provide.
And when we get to the Citadel,
now run by evil president Morty.
We find a world of rampant subjugation,
with hundreds of gruesome Mortys laboring underground
to power a cheerful futuristic metropolis
slash massive weapon where president Morty
lives in well-protected luxury.
Things only get darker when we learned
that tons of Jerrys and Beths,
have been manipulated into mating
in order to produce ever more Mortys
to keep the Morty Citadel functioning.
They've essentially been instrumentalized
to provide an endless supply for the so-called Morty market.
So what does all this have to do with capitalism?
Before you accuse us of being depressingly obsessed
with the economic system
that everyone in pop culture loves to hate.
Remember that the show drops the big C word twice.
First, when Rick produces a weird Rick haired blob,
who seems to get off on experiencing Rick's battle,
- That's a metaphor for capitalism Morty, what do you think?
- And then it comes up a second time.
- Wow. I thought my capitalism metaphor was on the nose.
- But let's go back to the blog for a second.
If we're to see the show as being sincere
or as sincere as you can be about a masochistic blob.
We could see the entire Citadel
as a critique of capitalist economies.
A manifestation of the harshest imaginable version
of the capitalist system.
It's a world built and sustained on class bi-furcation.
I.e the separation of a society into two separate classes,
where one gets to drink wine,
while the other never sees the light of day.
Here, the blob gets off on being defamed,
off of basically being tortured and abused
to facilitate Rick's Craven pursuit of power.
Power he couldn't obtain without a lower-class Rick blob
to take the punches for him.
This show is seemingly telling us
that anyone who wields power
is usually doing so on the backs of something much uglier.
Indeed, each network of relationships
that we see in the Citadel,
is built upon pure exploitation.
A larger scale version of the kind of exploitative
individual human relationship
Rick and Morty have shared for all these years.
Unfettered capitalism here becomes a metaphor
for abusive relationships.
And it seems like they might be setting up an infinite cycle
where abusive relationships lead to exploitative systems,
which lead to abusive relationships and so on.
And this repeats endlessly
in a seemingly infinite number of dimensions
with a seemingly infinite number of Ricks
abusing Mortys without owning up to their cruel behavior.
- None of them have to be responsible,
they're all victims of themselves.
Oh, it's so hard to be a genius.
- In fact, we learned that Mortys
are literally bred to be forgiving,
which reinforces the cycle of abuse.
- Geez, you guys really aren't bred for forgiveness.
- Rick pathologically behaves like a dick.
Morty, pathologically forgives him.
And so this cycle can begin again.
In a universe dominated by all powerful Ricks,
there are only so many ways that any given Morty can behave.
So many choices he has and how he responds to his material
and emotional conditions.
Similarly, some critics of capitalism argue
that the economic system thrives by offering all of us
plebes the illusion of choice while simultaneously limiting
our imaginations for what is possible.
This is what scholar Mark Fisher identified as
capitalist realism.
I.e the widespread sense that not only is capitalism,
the only viable political and economic system,
but also that it is now impossible
even to imagine a coherent alternative to it.
This seems contradictory since so much of capitalism is
based on supposedly rational actors
making choices about how to interact in the free market.
And sure there's a free market.
We can pick from any of hundreds of healthcare plans,
but chances are,
most of those plans will cost about 33% of your income.
So how much choice do we really have?
And like most people, most Mortys don't see any choice
other than to work within the system.
Our central Morty accepts a world
where Rick has power over him,
while constantly trying to convince Rick
to practice basic human decency.
Morty's stuck in his own cycle of forgiveness
of Rick's abuse,
followed by hope that Rick will eventually do better.
His choices are severely limited by
the relationship structure created by Rick's evil genius.
That's where evil Morty comes in,
motivated by the emotional damage of seeing Rick
instrumentalize Morty after Morty for his own purposes,
he seeks to break out of this infinite loop.
To imagine an existence outside of
the Rick mandated universe is where a blue headed,
geriatric jerk runs things.
Good Morty versus evil Morty's approach
to the problem of Rick's abuse
is like the difference between asking your exploitative boss
to treat you better
versus seeking out a new universe where bosses don't exist.
Evil Morty is obviously otherwise super evil.
It's hardly incidental that his goals are dependent on the
forced labor of hundreds of other abused Mortys.
But can we really break these cycles of abuse
and arguably abusive social conditions
that can accompany capitalism?
This show investigates that question in several ways.
First, we see Rick unexpectedly form an empathetic
relationship with his crow sidekicks
when he learns how smart and bad-ass they are.
Rick stopped seeing his bird friends as mere tools
to serve his ends and sees their intrinsic value.
Problem solved, right?
Not so fast.
We eventually find out that the crows
were actually using Rick as a rebound
after breaking up with a very horny scarecrow.
- What do you mean using me as a rebound?
- This relationship had always been transactional
and Morty seeks out a quality in his friendship with Nick,
who it turns out was just using him too.
The show seems to suggest
that even the most apparently heartwarming relationships
still can transcend systems of transaction
and exploitation, except for maybe Beth and Jerry,
but that's a topic for another day.
- Dr. Wong suggested we experiment.
- We've been watching pornography together.
- Gross
- I might never come back
- And then we get to evil Morty.
Who's characterized as evil,
not because he's turned everyone's portal guns
into murder machines, but specifically
because he wants to break out of the Rick ruled system.
But this raises a question.
What if evil Morty's desire to break free
is the one good thing about him?
Arguably, he's freeing his imagination
to consider not just making
improvements to the Citadel's brutal reality,
but tearing the whole thing down and freeing himself.
This show even makes the limitations of imagination inside
Rick's version of reality literal
through the central finite curve,
which separates all the universes,
where Rick is the smartest
from all the universes where he's not.
On the side of the curve we know,
Rick will always abuse.
Morty will always forgive,
and there's no alternative to this system.
Some scholars would call this analogous
to the way we view capitalism and contemporary society.
Any variation on capitalism is possible.
Heck, the United States will even demand it
from certain countries in exchange for humanitarian aid.
But while you can revise capitalism any which way,
the adage attributed to Frederick Jameson remains,
"It is easier to imagine the end of the world
than the end of capitalism."
But the show eventually seems to suggest that evil Morty
searched for a reality outside the cycle of exploitation
is a valuable goal.
With this season concluding as he blasts into
a different unknown universe,
presumably not run by any version of Rick.
So, maybe the shows writers are once again,
using the animated multi-verse
to get us to reflect on some of the nihilistic tendencies
baked into our own society.
Maybe they're digging even deeper into the dark depths of
Rick's relationship to Morty,
or was this just a way to cram five seasons worth of canon
and lore to a couple of episodes,
So the next season they can just get back
to dark wacky serialized adventures.
I guess we'll all have to wait and see,
but what do you guys think?
Is Rick and Morty slyly critiquing capitalism
or just throwing us off to send
with the occasional reference?
What's next for evil Morty?
And is there any real alternative to capitalism?
Let us know your thoughts in the comments.
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