Adult Swim
Rick and Morty was a great cartoon that came out last year on Adult Swim, created by Justin Roiland and Dan Harmon (of Community fame). It was a bizarre take on the kind of mad scientist and sidekick concept, with Doc Brown analogue Rick Sanchez taking his grandson Morty on wild sci-fi adventures (or as it was called in the first episode, high concept sci-fi rigmarole). It would take far too long to explain everything that worked about that first season, so instead I’ll just discuss the first episode of season two.
So Spoilers for all of season one.
The episode “A Rickle in Time” begins soon after the first season finale, with reality still frozen in time so Rick, Morty, and Summer (the granddaughter) could repair the damage to their parents’ house. Immediately the show plays off expectations, throwing us for a loop when Rick tricks his grandkids into agreeing with a nonsensical reference he just made up. The episode then tackles the bizarre nature of superposition and Schrodinger’s paradox by having split timelines.
Specifically, the line about the Schrodinger’s cats being there but not there cracked me up.
It’s terrifyingly amusing to watch two versions of reality happen at once, and you shudder to think how much time it took. Until they raise the stakes and square it to four realities, then sixteen, and then sixty-four. The episode takes the time to play off the new rivalry between Summer and Morty for Rick’s attentions, which is a welcome development. It’s a different take on the sidekick cliché, so I was glad that the show has still kept it going.
I found the concept of a fourth-dimensional timecop hilarious, and the fact that they used the same physical space led to an amazing gag where the cop gets beaten up by sixty-four versions of the Rick gang. Of course, it all gets resolved in the end, including the hilarious end tag, but I’ll get back to that in a second. At one point Rick makes a meta-reference to his daughter Beth (the horse surgeon) and her hapless husband Jerry.
The sideplot with Beth and Jerry is indeed not as interesting as the main storyline, but it has some funny lines, and it works to keep the characters well balanced. They may not be as interesting as Rick or Morty, but the better the show is at expanding them, the more ideas they can mess with. And that’s sort of Rick and Morty’s oeuvre, if you will. Taking sci-fi concepts and going nuts with them.
After all, you don’t often see two versions of a person from parallel timelines try to kill each other. That’s unique to this show. Getting back to the end tag, it was superb. I knew exactly where it was going, and I loved it. Hopefully they bring back Albert Einstein and his “messing with time” in another episode. I’m super optimistic for this new season, and I can’t wait for the next episode.
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