Adult Swim
The latest episode of Rick and Morty is called ‘Childrick of Mort’, which is a reference to the sci-fi dystopian movie Children of Men and that movie does center around children, but that’s really where the comparisons end. Here we see ultimately three storylines that are fairly light, that all converge at the end, Seinfeld style to a resolution. The problem is that none of these storylines really pushes the envelope as you might expect from Rick and Morty, and while they’re often entertaining, it sort of stays there.
The family is off on a camping trip led by Jerry, but a chance call from a former flame of Rick calling about potential children gets Beth annoyed enough to have a detour. In one of the funnier visual gags of the episode, Rick flips a switch that turns the station wagon into a spaceship and switches places with Jerry. But once there, the planet, named ‘Gaia’ (an odd choice, since that’s the name of the Earth in Greek mythology) starts spewing spiky haired clay men.
Jerry tries to get his kids invested in camping in the meantime, but Summer very cruelly puts him down, to the point where Morty lampshades the out-of-character moment by saying she needs to stop hanging around Rick so much. Summer and Morty end up by themselves, lost, and it’s almost a cool idea — the two rarely get storylines, just the two of them. Instead though, they stumble across a crashed spaceship and use the power of ‘video games’ and ‘partying’ to figure out how to use it.
It’s already a stupid idea, made less relevant by the failure — this sort of subversion doesn’t feel as clever as the show usually is, really just more of the same. If there’s a point to it, it doesn’t feel particularly strong-toothed at all.
Meanwhile, Beth and Rick quickly create a regimented society out of the claymen, and their callous jokes bond them anew — this is again a nice touch of something that doesn’t really get followed through. It’s funny to see playwrights being formed by physical abuse, but after that, where does it even go?
Jerry ends up the leader of the ‘Unproductives’ naturally, using his camping skills as the lowest bar to get over to lead a bunch of them in armed rebellion. It seems like it’s almost leading to a legitimate conflict in the family, until a giant ‘Zeus-like’ god in the skies shows up in a literal deus ex machina to generate new drama. Rick tries to defeat the god Reggie and seems about to die when his grandkids accidentally save him.
The point of the whole exchange seems a bit too light, and it’s hard to feel like it had any weight to it. Gaia never really felt like a real character, just a vague voice in the background, so it’s hard to really care about her and Rick’s backstory. The funniest scene in the episode is probably the final one, where Rick gets caught looking at a sort of planet porno catalog. ‘Young, dumb, and orbiting the sun’ is some very amusing wordplay.
Overall, it’s entertaining but lightweight. The ideas are the sorts we’ve seen before, and things that are potentially interesting are only lightly touched before being abandoned in the silly destructive finale. Not a bad episode by any means, just one that feels a bit out of place in the recent ones — we’ll see how it all wraps in next week’s season finale.
Rick and Morty airs Sundays at 11:30 PM on adult swim.
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