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The latest episode of Rick and Morty is called ‘Rick: A Morty Well Lived’ which isn’t a specific pop culture parody but instead a sort of reference to the common aphorism of a ‘life well lived’ and specifically the video game in the show ‘Roy: A Life Well Lived’. Here we have two interconnected storylines that have to do with the video game originally referenced in Season 2’s ‘Mortynight Run’.
The episode starts in an uncanny fashion as we see a bunch of broadly drawn people using broadly phrased comments that all sound like they’re being voiced by Morty. Quickly enough we realize when ‘Roy’ shows up with the voice of Rick that they’re stuck in a video game. Apparently something went wrong and Morty’s mind got merged with the five billion other fake character NPCs in the fake video game world, so he’s somehow split into billions of mental pieces.
When Rick as Roy derides that it’s a new religion, it’s a pretty obvious commentary on real world religions and theoretical prophets that speak of a ‘true’ reality and that there’s really someone actually above them all. It gets even more explicit later when Rick meta-comments on how it sure does sound like a religious thing except that this time it’s true — kind of a funny commentary in a sense because of Rick’s angry atheism.
In the outside world, we see that terrorists have taken over the gaming establishment and Rick asks Summer to ‘do a Die Hard‘ which she’s never seen. After that we get an extremely belabored series of meta-Die Hard moments, but some of it is funny enough. The head Hans Gruber alien terrorist is played by Peter Dinklage, and he’s definitely intentionally channelling some Alan Rickman in his performance.
The idea that Die Hard is a universal story is a cute one, and there were little things I liked, such as the leader’s book ‘The Nakatomi Paradigm’ or the leader saying that because Summer hates Die Hard it makes her the ultimate McClane. It’s all pretty silly even for the sort of self-referential rabbit holes the show has done in the past. The related end tag that refers to the third Die Hard movie with an overly broad sign that says ‘I hate everybody’ is also cute, but it serves as kind of a reminder that sometimes this show really does obsess over pop culture parodies.
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As for Morty’s storyline, it’s ultimately far more depressing and complicated. We start following a young woman whose ‘video game name’ is Marta, rejecting the fake Judaism that Morty wouldn’t know about (I did find the dad’s fake Yiddish funny, like ‘schmoitenheiven’). She ends up being essentially the leader of most of the world, but part of this is that she represents an incredibly strong, self-possessed part of Morty’s identity.
After she dismisses the talk of the nihilistic President piece of Morty’s mind, she spars with Rick-Roy about leaving the video game and it takes relative decades in the space of the virtual world. Rick as Roy says out loud that he loves and respects Morty (Or Marta? A name that’s certainly eerily similar to Morty).
Marta offers a final compromise at that very end, allowing everyone to leave, but wanting to live out a life as herself in the game instead (Alone, you wonder? It’s unclear how the game would work in that case). Rick is shown later that he’s agreed to it, but the aftermath is that Morty says he ‘trusts Rick implicitly’ — we haven’t really seen that sort of lack of backbone from Morty in years and it’s certainly a troubling notion.
How I feel about that plotline will entirely depend on how the show manages the continuity going forward — if they forget about it I will consider this episode worse in retrospect, but if it’s considered — I feel like it could really be a fascinating glimpse into more understanding of the Rick and Morty relationship. Otherwise it was an entertaining episode, but for now, my ranking will be fluid until we see how it progresses.
What did you think of this episode? Sound off in the comments below!
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