Adult Swim
The latest episode of Rick and Morty is called ‘Rattlestar Ricklactica’, another blatant name reference this time to Battlestar Galactica, and is once again not even remotely connected to the reference. Instead it’s all in service to the ‘Rattlestar’ pun about snakes, and their omnipresence in this episode with a fun take on time travel. Tied into that is a silly little Jerry subplot and you’ve got a pretty entertaining episode.
It starts off with Morty disobeying Rick in a seemingly pointless tangent and getting bitten by a ‘space snake’, with a suit and helmet reminiscent of the space alligators in the second episode of Futurama on the Moon. Here, it’s funny that a snake would bite someone despite having sentience and intelligence, likely killing itself because hey, that’s what snakes do, right? It turns out that it’s basically a snake astronaut and the first of its kind (her kind as it turns out). Not a direct parallel to Earth, but that doesn’t really matter exactly.
After that, Morty feels guilty and hilariously releases a local snake to the snake planet, leading to a great several minute sequence of almost entirely snake noises that’s mere prelude to the silliness that’s inbound. Because this leads to an extended time travel parody, starting with a classic Terminator-styled one, and then getting increasingly out of control. Rick and Morty being what it is, it takes the conceptual idea of time travel and pushes it to its logical conclusion.
So when time traveling snakes are becoming a severe problem, Rick and Morty (affected by their own time looped versions) send back snake time travel technology to the snake 80s, which is also a hilarious image. We get a hint of what’s to come, as Rick tells us that things will now work themselves out. So it gets into it with a series of escalating attacks and counterattacks on snake Hitler, and then the reveal makes sense.
Adult Swim
It’s our old buddy the time cop (voice of Keegan-Michael Key), noticing the time travel nonsense and cutting it off just like they messed with Albert Einstein. As per usual, this is Rick and Morty pointing out the inherent silliness in a classic sci-fi concept, juxtaposing the symbols we all recognize with a bunch of cybernetic snakes. The friendly terminator snake horrifically meant to look like a human was a nice touch.
On the subplot side, we get Jerry unable to handle wearing shoes and flying off into the atmosphere. And yet, despite what we expect, he manages to come home after all, despite Rick offering help, because he doesn’t want it. This is better than we’ve seen Jerry before, getting into a jam but mostly getting himself out of it. That’s progress, really, for our favorite listener of human music.
So overall it wasn’t the deepest episode, nor the most emotional or complicated. The connective tissue to the Rick and Morty canon was minimal but logical, mostly giving us a fun ride along the way. It’s a marked improvement over the childish humor of last week’s sex dragon episode, because although snake NASA 80s scientists are funny, they aren’t infantile. So we end the fourth season of the show as the year ends, and the rest hopefully to come next year along with the ending of The Good Place and maybe better things for humanity. Anything’s possible.
What did you think of this episode? Sound off in the comments below!
Share this post
