Adult Swim
Rick and Morty is back after over a year, with an episode entitled ‘Edge of Tomorty: Rick Die Rickpeat’, an obvious reference to the Groundhog Day sci-fi movie Edge of Tomorrow: Live Die Repeat with Tom Cruise and Emily Blunt. Here, it’s not a direct riff on it, because nobody is repeating the same day over and over after dying, but there are a few split riffs. Rick keeps getting cloned and brought back to life in parallel universes, while Morty pushes himself towards a theoretically idealized future by relying on his visions of death.
Of course, things are directly followed up on last season — here, Jerry snarks at Rick about proving that ‘Grandpas aren’t real’ while also making sure Rick follows the new rule of actually asking Morty if he wants to go on his trip to Forbodulon Prime for death crystals. It’s an explicitly silly name riffing on ‘Forboding’, but the death crystals present a few interesting sci-fi angles. At first, it’s about Rick casually ‘accepting’ his death to predict when his foes are out of ammo, but then it leads into Morty screwing everything up because he sees a future as an old man, with an old Jessica telling him she loves him.
After that, Morty ignores every and all things to get there, killing many people, refusing to bring Rick back to life, and even missing on obvious opportunities, like Jessica offering to go skinny dipping with him and her friends. His incredibly narrow perspective leads to the mini-lesson that if your life is simply about avoiding death and dangers, you cannot claim to be living. At the same time, we get a lot of direct references to the classic movie Akira, which is explicitly called out as something Morty is doing — the funniest part about it being Jerry’s correct but annoying pronunciation of the movie and ‘anime’ at the end of the episode.
There were a lot of callback jokes to older Rick and Morty adventures, like all of the Meeseeks helping out or the hilarious ‘Kirkland’ brand knock off Meeseeks. Rick’s adventures through a series of fascist, Nazi alternate worlds, one after another, was funny because of the visuals of shrimps and teddy bears, but it was also a direct commentary on the show as a whole. When you have Nazi Morty literally yelling at Rick to have a ‘classic’ adventure without politics or metacommentary, it’s hard not to see that as a follow-up from Dan Harmon’s angry retorts to those sorts of fans.
Naturally the tag at the end of the episode, that Morty misinterpreted his death vision as Jessica giving him hospice care, was exactly the sort of expected twist — he was chasing an idea of something that wasn’t even what he really wanted and hurt people around him and himself to get there.
The show continues to be absurdly meta, from the literal quotes about meta-commentary to Rick’s many references to ‘seasons’ and Summer messing up the season premiere. The funniest moments to me were the holographic Ricks protesting Morty not resurrecting him and Morty’s teacher giving him an A+ for confidence. That guy has been funny since the first episode.
The other extremely unsubtle meta-reference was the comparison of the family of wasp-people, which are ‘wasps, but not monsters’, surprisingly empathetic despite horrific, and of a direct comparison to say ‘well at least they’re not Nazis’. Unsubtle but useful.
It’s overall a very strong premiere, with a world pushing back on itself and its problematic fans, and capable of maintaining real continuity. Funny, if not as deep as it can be, but the potential is there perhaps for the best season yet.
What did you think of the premiere? Sound off in the comments below!
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