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The latest episode of Rick and Morty is called ‘Full Meta Jackrick’ which is an obvious reference to Full Metal Jacket but it’s way more about the ‘Meta’ than anything Kubrickian. The entire episode is a follow-up from the great ‘Story Train’ episode from Season 4 in that our old friend the Story Lord has somehow managed to reach ‘reality’ that is the main show.
Rick and Morty has always played with fourth wall breaking, sometimes absolutely explicitly talking to the audience even starting in the first season. In general Rick is usually the one to do this, which he does a lot — but he’s not the only one. So his protestations about being too meta feel a bit self-indulgent and self-referential to what the episode is really about: The annoyance of the writers about writing an overly meta-fictional television show.
As a theme, it’s one I’d call ‘cute’ but not even remotely deep. All of the nonsensical meta-jokes were pretty amusing to hear, even if it all feels pretty thin. The very start of the episode where we get a ‘Previously on Rick and Morty‘, very atypically and suddenly Rick realizes it’s an attack of some sort had a lot of very funny quick jokes, like Morty delighting in raining meatballs or Jerry dying doing what he loved — getting stung by bees (with Summer’s thirsty friend crying in the pews).
The culprit is ‘Previous Leon’ which is one of several intentionally dumb pun names, but they’re all pretty funny. The ‘Self-Referential Six’ has a great set of stupid people with Miss Lead, Flash Back, Connie TinuityError, Protago Nick, and Mr. Twist. Every little narrative aside was pretty funny, like the ‘Previously on Jesus’ where we get a twist on Jesus as just an immortal man who keeps meeting women named Mary.
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I also liked the little aside with ‘Marvin the Cowardly Security Guard’ and Brett/Rhett Caan’s retconning that they’ve always been in an orange — it’s delightfully stupid. But when integrated into the Story Lord stuff it’s not quite as interesting — he confronts his creator, a writer hired by the Citadel of Ricks apparently, and gets motivation as motivation.
As it’s noted, it’s lazy and the entire Joseph Campbell side story feels ‘inside baseball’ even for this show. Although the final moment of Cambell’s ghost frantically trying to stop the writer from writing a movie about a writer feels self-referential again — they wrote this episode about being too meta and they also complain about being too meta in the episode. That sort of back and forth ‘have your cake and eat it too’ feels a bit annoying for this show, which delights in being thematically complicated but also trolling the audience all the time.
Thankfully the episode is pretty funny, and the stuff with the various narrative superpowered people is clever — it felt like it could have gone even further, but instead we get a note from Rick that they’re simply overpowered. Not the most clever of approaches. The actual ending wasn’t so clever, just another action oriented scene and not one with any clever fighting — and the end tag with ‘Tag-Man’ was just stupid.
I suppose I’m a little mixed on this one, because some of it was pretty successful and some of it wasn’t as good, so it’s still a potential positive perspective on the rest of the season. At least I’m hoping that’s the good sign for it.
What did you think of this episode? Sound off in the comments below!
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