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The season finale of Rick and Morty is called ‘Ricktional Mortpoon’s Rickmas Mortcation’, an unwieldy reference to National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation that’s so unwieldy I have to respect its silliness. The episode actually skips the opening theme altogether, showing the title card with a Christmas theme, pretty unusual for this show. In this season in that one odd metafiction episode they also messed with the opening, but this was a much more straightforward cute thing.
We see the now friendlier Rick giving out perfect gifts to the family, including the much longer cut of Miracle on 34th Street to Jerry — this is one of the little running gags in the episode, which is pretty funny, if more so in aggregate than individually. Morty’s gift is an actual Star Wars lightsaber and a bunch of fruit he can slice in half like that old game. But he accidentally drops it perfectly vertically (in another running gag that is okay at best) which means he’s put the Earth at risk.
And reveals that the 22% nicer Rick has actually been a robot, at least since the beginning of the last episode with the Knights of the Sun. At the very least, Rick hasn’t been away for the whole season — he explains that he can’t be a good person to his family with the threat of his longtime nemesis still out there. Obviously Morty is quite displeased to hear that, and even cries when the President (a returning Keith David) shows up to confront them.
The President actually gets involved at that point, working with Morty to recover the weapon — with a particularly funny little runner about blaming the Saudis for Rick’s rogue lightsaber hurting a bunch of Italians. His odd anti-Star Wars rants feel a bit more like showrunner nonsense, what with complaining about the Ewoks as those ‘Muppets’ in Return of the Jedi, which is what Star Wars nerds complained about before they had the prequels to complain about — I definitely remember that sort of discourse back in the day, and both Justin Roiland and Dan Harmon are in the right age range to be either kids or teenagers when the first movies came out.
All of the Star Wars jokes were pretty inconsistent, although I did like the one robot with lightsabers for eyes being unable to see. The characterization of the President is still pretty inconsistent even until this point, but it’s always helped by Keith David’s pitch perfect delivery and epic voice (which is why he did voice over stuff in Community too). Naturally there’s even an anti-Disney joke, which feels lazy at this point, just more trolling — mainly because Star Wars is so heavily an inspiration for all modern sci-fi.
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Ultimately it ends with Rick admitting he could use Morty’s help finding his nemesis and he shouldn’t have excluded him — and gets end-of-season meta about it, saying it’s going to take over their lives, at least for most episodes, and will be the darkest stuff Rick’s ever had to deal with. Considering how the season started with that bit of backstory, the fact that it’s taken until now to really deal with it again certainly feels like a troll sort of move.
The end tag is our old pal Mr. Poopybutthole wrapping things up like last season, another sort of self-aware trolling and slightly lazy speech about things that happened and things to come. As a finale it’s decent enough, even if it does have that light trolling quality to the whole thing and perhaps to the season as a whole. Some episodes were pretty good but some were not that great — kinda an inconsistent quality overall. The show also never followed up with Morty losing part of himself from the second episode of the season, which I suspected and worried would happen.
I don’t think the season hit any of the heights of season five but there were some fun episodes — and some progress in a few ways, so it wasn’t a total wash either. Just feels like ultimately they had a bunch of ideas and some just worked better than others, but I’m always optimistic about this show turning things around.
What did you think of this episode? Sound off in the comments below!
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