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The latest episode of Rick and Morty is called ‘A Rick in King Mortur’s Mort’ after the ’90s dumb kid’s wish-fulfilment movie A Kid in King Arthur’s Court (which insanely starred a young Daniel Craig and Kate Winslet as romantic partners). It was dumb but you can be sure I watched it with my siblings nonetheless.
Dumb but still fun also seems to have been the entire idea behind this fake Game of Thrones-style of planetary nonsense in this episode. Things start off with legitimate continuity and growth, with the recent events percolating with Rick to the point where he doesn’t want to be as toxic anymore. Morty gets weirdly pushed into accepting a mysterious sword from two knight-looking people — of course after he does, the knight kills himself with the sword to Morty’s shock.
Although should he really be shocked anymore? Once there, Morty is pretty on board with the whole invulnerability thing for these Knights of the Sun, defenders of Helios (which is the old Greek or Roman name for the Sun) until they say he has to cut off his private parts to join. Rick saves him from that and promises to be 22% more agreeable — and that’s all nice enough.
Morty even acts like Rick, disillusioning the Knights by explaining the truth of cosmic physics as the new King of the Sun. But it turns out that apparently there are intelligent beings on all of the planets (we only get a reference to the Pluto episode with Jerry which is amusing) and they are all varying sorts of medieval sci-fi fusion nonsense. It’s funny if a bit overly complicated, although I suppose that’s the point.
I will say that the funniest of those is a man looking like Santa showing up calling himself the ‘Earl of Earth’ which is the right side of silly. Morty also notes there’s a blind witch lady reading bones too but inadvertently starts a war between the planets — Rick continues to be supportive, seemingly legitimately.
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We get a montage of a worsening war set to ‘Goodbye Blue Sky’ by Pink Floyd to a war that goes increasingly worse in terms of technology and warfare. At the end of it, Morty decides to try and fix it and Rick offers support again — Morty feels burnt (for good reason) but accepts that maybe Rick is really trying.
After a bunch of cute cameos (Jack Black plays one of the Venus leaders, Daniel Radcliffe and British comedians David Mitchel, Robert Webb, and Matt King play some of the knights) Rick gives Morty a promise to fool the audience. But all of Rick’s obfuscations fail, and in retrospect, the next step makes sense.
They run and jump into the Sun, revealing it to be a Vat of Fake Sun after all — and before that Rick apologizes for letting it come to that, but Morty says it’s okay. It’s real growth after all from them, it would seem — a real change from the Vat of Acid episode where it was about screwing with Morty for not agreeing with Rick.
The end tag is pretty fun with ‘Special Agent’ Mongo Bongo investigating and freeing a ring of alien hotdog trafficking. I’m not sure there was much depth other than the growth between Rick and Morty as the space war stuff was pretty silly — but it was fun to watch at least. And I do appreciate that there’s legitimate growth finally.
What did you think of this episode? Sound off in the comments below!
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