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The most recent episode of Rick and Morty is called ‘Rickdependence Spray’ which is obviously a reference to Independence Day, although there’s no alien invasion here nor anything blowing up like in that movie, nor any character similarity in any way. No, it’s simply a joke (I would guess) about the word ‘Spray’ because the episode was an extended sperm joke filled with mostly tired sexism jokes.
At first I was more interested in the episode as a silly sort of thing, but it felt a bit more light in the theme department and super heavy in the nonsense department. One consistently great part of the episode is everything with the President (voice of Keith David), who hilariously knows everyone in the Sanchez family by name and can sell every line perfectly (my favorite was probably telling Jerry, ‘Yes, and I’d love a glass’, because of its utter mundanity).
But some things, like the ‘Sperm Queen’ (voice of Michelle Buteau) seemed to be just silly and not that funny, just a weird meta-commentary on the nature of the sexist dialogue in the episode. Naturally the leader of the sperm monsters is a female, because that makes no sense at all and why should it?
Also I hated the ‘incest baby’ plotline, it’s just gross and not funny — it was an unnecessary addition to the episode to have the egg literally be Summer’s, really, a very poor writing choice — maybe it’s the worst thing Rick and Morty has ever done? And perhaps this is also the worst episode they’ve ever done? I suspect it is.
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It’s funny because if you just take out the intentionally taboo and intentionally disgusting monster sperm storyline, you do have some funny stuff here despite all that. All the stuff with the ‘CHUD’ horse-people was amusing enough, and it included a weird voice cameo from Christina Ricci as the CHUD princess Rick has knocked up.
Perhaps it’s a joke to say this, but it feels like it’s a failure to achieve its potential, even in terms of jokes — the simple inversion of cool dude Blazen being not cool is not that clever and the show has done that joke before in far more effective ways. The ‘lesson’, if you could call it that, that maybe you shouldn’t be honest or maybe you should is inherently muddled and pointless.
Although I think that was actually the voice of Kathy Ireland as herself? [Editor’s Note: According to IMDb, it was also Christina Ricci.]
The extended run of jokes about ‘let a man do this’ type stuff was almost entirely stupid, with two exceptions — one being Beth telling Summer that she’s now a woman after having her idea stolen by a man, and the other when that random Marine says he’s calling them girls derogatorily.
Maybe I need to think about it more later, but honestly I don’t really want to — I checked the Reddit immediate responses to see if there was something I missed, but I don’t think I did. Rick and Morty has trolled its audience before, but if that’s what this is, I didn’t care for it.
What did you think of this episode? Sound off in the comments below!
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