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The seventh season of Rick and Morty arrived with a lot of new baggage — co-creator Justin Roiland and voice for Rick and Morty (along with others) had been let go due to quite serious allegations against him. He was replaced by relative newcomers Ian Cardoni as Rick and Harry Belden as Morty — both had a bit of a rough start and were imperfect, but as the season got going it became less and less apparent until I didn’t notice a difference at all. And best of all? Absolutely no weird incest plotlines this season whatsover.
The season starts with ‘How Poopy Got His Poop Back’ in a difficult voice acting challenge for the new voice over artists, and it was a pretty decent season opener with an amusing cameo by Hugh Jackman as a crazy version of himself. The funniest joke was the ‘fake friend’ runner, and the theme of being a good friend manifesting in different ways felt pretty on point for this series — but it was also an example of being self-knowingly silly with the character with the stupidest name in the show.
After that was ‘The Jerrick Trap’ which delivers some fantastic Rick/Jerry content and a lot of great characterization building between them — the ultimate lesson here too about how much the two care about Rick connecting them more than dividing them was also a pretty good one too, and the gangster scene had some fairly funny moments too — a good if not great episode.
‘Air Force Wong’ brought the return of President Curtis (voiced by the great Keith David as always), Dr. Wong (Susan Sarandon also returning), and Rick’s ex Unity (also returning Christina Hendricks meaning it was a particularly cameo full episode). The point of Unity returning to ‘help’ by taking over people was because she was worried about Rick’s obsession with tracking down Rick Prime (the murderer of his wife) is a great continuation of the meta-plot while delving deeper into the character moments that keep things strong.
The ultimate lesson about the President and Rick mirroring each other in negative ways continues too, and the ending about Curtis pondering therapy too is certainly a good lesson in general. Fairly funny episode and it was nice to see Christina Hendricks back here, always good to see her working.
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The fourth episode ‘That’s Amorte’ is the season highlight, with an extended commentary and metaphor on the destructive nature of capitalism with the way people were literally eating the dead and how that was destroying a planet. All this was impactful and disgusting enough, but the absolutely gorgeous scene that still stands out was the final moments where Rick shows the entire life of a man ready to commit suicide only if it will end the eating of the dead.
The montage is set to a beautiful cover of the Oasis song ‘Live Forever’ by Kotomi with show composer Ryan Elder — it’s a wordless, powerful sequence about the ups and downs of someone’s life filled with loss and joy, happiness and sorrow, mistakes and triumphs — as the episode says it was ‘the complexity of life’. This is precisely how great Rick and Morty can be and hasn’t been to this level since we got another Kotomi song, ‘Don’t Look Back’ in season four.
Even if the rest of season wasn’t up to this level (and it wasn’t), this demonstrated how great the show can be — this was written by Heather Anne Cambell who also wrote the season finale, and she definitely needs a promotion.
Episode five, ‘Unmortricken’, was more of the plot forward impactful one, giving us a fantastic adventure where Evil Morty returns to help Rick and Morty take down Rick Prime once and for all, being the most competent one in the episode, which was delightful. The voice work was a standout, with pretty complicated emotional beats to hit by all of them. And the ending with Rick feeling lost also hits hard, and this was only the middle of the season and this storyline was already over! It was a great show of confidence.
Episode six, ‘Rickfending Your Mort’, wasn’t quite as powerful but was absolutely hilarious, itself a meta-commentary on the show with the ‘Observer’ aliens and a very cutting, deserved jab at the new Space Jam movie. The standout joke was Jerry simply smugly explaining that everyone expects incompetence from him, so you can’t embarrass him — fantastic.
The seventh episode ‘Wet Kuat Amortican Summer’ was an extended reference to the great movie Total Recall, and was the ‘Summer’ episode of the season. And ultimately a pretty good one, with a great series of bonding moments between her and Morty after initially fighting — mostly just a good episode here.
Sadly the eighth episode was the exception — ‘Rise of the Numbericons: The Movie’ was a pretty dumb story that felt like an extended version of one of the episode end tags, but without the plot or point to maintain it to thirty minutes. They even had a very dated joke about ‘Your cousin Marvin’ that sadly was the highlight of a weak episode. My notes ended with ‘Rap fighting — very stupid episode’ and that about sums it up.
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Episode nine, ‘Mort: Ragnarick’, was therefore a huge step up, and had some fun lore building, adding a new antagonist with the Pope as a legitimate threat to Rick. It’s also a stupid episode in a lot of ways, but it’s fun and pretty funny so I can grant it a lot of forgiveness — especially considering the season finale.
The finale was ‘Fear No Mort’ and was all about a ‘Fear Hole’ where we see Rick and Morty experience a series of ‘greatest fear’ scenarios that ultimately are layers upon layers of complication, and are finally just about Morty and his fear that Rick sees him as replaceable and unimportant.
But we also see an extended set of scenes with Diane and for the first time, see how she and Rick made sense as a couple. It makes her loss that much more biting and difficult, and the temptation for Rick at the end even more impressive that he avoided it. Liev Schreiber as the sort of Fear Hole Devil was great, a more impressive Devil than the actual one they had on the show way back.
And the final moment worked very well, with the reveal that Rick had a photo of Morty the whole time in his wallet — a more subtle indication of the not so replaceable feelings he has about Morty. Overall looking back the season was remarkably solid considering the circumstances — some growing pains at first, and one particularly stupid episode, but a few real bangers, one all timer, and a fantastic season finale. Hard to argue that this season is anything but a return to form.
What did you think of this season? Sound off in the comments below!
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