Adult Swim
From its very first episode, Rick and Morty has been self-acknowledging and completely embracing of a fourth wall breaking, meta-complexity — the show often is about the show. The first episode did this a little, but it truly embraces a meta narrative about subverting and commenting on sci-fi comments — Jerry literally complains about ‘high concept sci-fi rigamarole’.
Coming from meta-weirdos Justin Roiland and Dan Harmon, the latter of whom was all about meta stories on Community, it really makes sense that Rick and Morty gets out of control. This latest episode was called ‘Never Ricking Morty’, and it was an insanely jam-packed, overloaded tale that was uniformly entertaining except for the final joke.
The ‘joke’ about consumerism and capitalism felt a bit too much like a rant or screed, a commentary on the capitalist nature of our society and pop culture like Rick and Morty in particular. Certainly it was an understandable reaction to the whole business, but it didn’t really feel like the sort of thing that Rick as a character would really say, only the representation of the show through Rick, which might be a meta perspective, but it wasn’t really funny.
However, basically everything else worked. The episode starts with a mysterious alien played by classic voice actor Clancy Brown amusingly talking about his evil lair and telling a story about how Rick Sanchez attacked him. The show sets up the nature of commenting about itself as the alien says that Rick would tell the story differently, and in retrospect, we know he’s talking to the actual Rick (sort of) in disguise.
Disguised Rick goes through additional narrative train cars that are all pretty funny, including a ‘Christmas Rick Tale’ one referencing a little pointless alien of Rick and Morty design called Glooby, round and blue. On the other side, a disguised Morty (sort of) amusingly discovered by Rick because he was feeling himself up goes to another funny car about dating Rick, which included all manner of nonsense including what looked like a Yoda alien.
Once the two meet, Rick reveals that they are in a Story Train combining unrelated narrative fields and begins the explosion of ridiculousness. The ‘Tickets Please’ guy falls out of the train and is no longer in ‘canon’ so we have a one-off gag about an entire new universe related to him which is pretty great, referencing all manner of things we’ve seen before. More meta concepts are included, which seem to be stories about the Rick and Morty show itself.
Morty tells a terrible story to attempt and break through a narrative contrivance, but what actually works is a ‘feminist masterpiece’ Rick badly tells about his mother and sister. This certainly seems like a considered thought about the lack of stories about women in the show, the completely different perspective breaking the nature of the story.
After that we run to the ‘bad guy’ of the episode, the Story Lord (Paul Giammati) who wants to drain story ideas from the pair. There are even more one-off gags about breaking canon during their fight, including some really great thoughts about the external gags commentating on the unreality of it all.
I got a kick out of Story Lord’s machine, which included indicators for Narrative Energy, Story Potential, Marketability, Broad Appeal, and Relatability. His reference to a ‘fifth wall’ is one of those things that’s not as clearly defined as the fourth wall, but the most common definition is the ‘wall’ between the fictional world and the actual actors of the show. I also liked how the console had a circle that referenced Dan Harmon’s ‘Story Circle’ concept about developing stories.
Then we had the truly funny moment (laugh out loud), as we see the endgame shot of Rick and Morty against a multitude of foes led by Evil Morty. But then Rick breaks the story with someone that makes no sense by introducing a contrived Christian method and then we see a bunch of 100% inspired by real things from Christian pop media including Crossy and Biblesaurus. And a completed arc joke about guys with great six packs as Jesus (Christopher Meloni) also takes off his shirt.
The final breaking of the train was pretty funny as the Jesus from the internal reality breaks it with a line of ‘Father of Omens, give me blood beyond sight’ — which is actually a reference to the classic stupid 80s cartoon Thundercats, where Lion-O says, ‘Sword of Omens, give me sight beyond sight!’ That’s a pretty ridiculous deep cut.
Despite that ‘eh’ final joke about capitalism, this was a deliriously clever and joke-packed episode, self-aware to the extreme and capable of some levels of emotional resonance in that one scene about Summer heading off to college. It’s a great return for the show.
Rick and Morty airs Sundays at 11:30 PM on adult swim.
What did you think of this episode? Sound off in the comments below!
Share this post
