Someone pointed out the other day that the first season of Rick and Morty premiered seven years ago. Sure enough, the show began in December of 2013 and that blows my actual mind somehow. I don’t recall first watching it until maybe a year or two later after the second season wrapped up. It was one of those things where ever nerd in the tri-city area told me to watch it, but that’s often a sign of extreme oversaturation already. Boy howdy was I wrong about how oversaturated it would eventually get seven years later.
The fifth season taken as a whole was, simply put, acceptable. It began well, puttered in some unsavory directions, ran a couple of good one-offs, before finally tying up several significant storylines from previous seasons. But where its last season was a complete dud, it ended this season on a significant finale that has me interested for what they might do next. I’ve spent a lot of time on here and social media forming a diss track of the show, and especially of Dan Harmon, for whom I continue to speculate the show would be much better off without him. I do so because it is genuinely one of the few science fiction shows, and science fiction animated shows, worth watching. Especially at a time when science fiction is still at a premium in entertainment. The problem I have with Harmon is less his style and more his attitude. Both him and Rolland pitched a show that Adult Swim couldn’t turn down because they were the shock-jock outlet of adult animation, and still are. But where I think Rolland wanted to just kinda make a funny Doc and Marty with sick shit, Harmon wanted to imbue it with his usual routine of high-concept processing. The two combined is actually really good, but when that was all anyone wanted from the show, it was hard to just scale back to the shenanigans. As good as Harmon might be, he will almost always sabotage himself, and you can tell from his white-hair disheveled look, it’s like he wants to die. Only, by now, like Community, the show can probably sustain itself without him.
Fuck it. This is dumb. It is very dumb. It is aggressively dumb. There are jokes in here that Family Guy, at its absolute shittiest, wouldn’t touch; and while sure, that’s probably because the Fox censors only let that show get away with so much, it’s still galling to see Rick And Morty, which usually does a great job at being an extremely smart kind of stupid (or stupid kind of smart) do something so half-assed. The episode commits to the bit, I’ll give them that. They dig down until they hit a bedrock of gross inanity, and then they keep on going. There are a few moments of self-awareness, a few winks at the audience that yes, everyone involved knew exactly what they were doing, but I’m not sure the winks were enough. Especially in the last five minutes or so, when it stopped trying to even be inventive in its bullshit and just did the same shtick that pretty much every adult cartoon has been doing for the past ten years—see, it’s a big asinine climax spectacle, but it’s ironic. Or something.
Zack Handlen – AV Club
A lot of this season got bookended by this episode, “Rickdependence Spray”. Considering it is one of two episodes featuring The President, I feel like this one was the afterthought upon the completion of the script for “Rick And Morty’s Thanksploitation Spectacular”. The former definitely felt like it was written by the writers for Family Guy after a weird night of cocaine and Call of Duty where the latter at least presents itself on a sort of pre-established premise, even if that was silly. It’s often times like this when I wish they would just lean in more on entire episodes of interdimensional cable, because at least that allows the writers to fire off byte-sized shitty ideas that don’t really matter overall compared to one long terrible running gag in an incest baby.
The other plot of that episode was Rick having to deal with CHUDs, a race of horse-people who live below the earth. Anyone who has been tuned into the culture wars or social media over the last five or more years knows what “chud” means. The writers love to lampshade their anti-fans more than they enjoy pissing off their actual fans by constantly denying them the elements to the show they crave, only to waltz in a few more episodes later and big-dick slam down some of that lore.
The bringing-back of Birdperson was definitely a highlight of the season given the events at the end of season two. He had been teased in various forms since then, culminating in his fight with Rick and Rick taking his body to presumably revive him. To find out he had a birdchild was an interesting bit, but I don’t think they will go too far with that. Rather, the mixing of Rick’s mind in the sequence led to some information that would really tip the scale in the finale.
I always tend to liken the fanbases of Evangelion and Rick and Morty together for their collective foolishness, but where it probably makes sense is that Rick and Gendo share much of that same high-concept path in their hubris. They both their wives, they both manipulated versions of their daughter (or “daughter” in Gendo’s case), and they both put a young boy through absolute shit in order to achieve their own ends. Gendo used Shinji to try and reformat that world in order to get Yui back, and Rick chained together infinite universes where he was the smartest man alive using his grandson. Still, even knowing that, this finale was actually really good on so many levels. It opened up President Morty’s real master plan, it provided that crucial closure as to what happened to C-137’s Beth, and what prompted him to go searching through dimensions and galaxies before resorting to letting the infinite versions of himself do as they please.
The Central Finite Curve, Rick and Morty’s version of Evangelion’s Additional Impact, probably. President Morty suggests that the only way to break free of essentially, this entire television show, is to channel all of the green portal energy and dead Ricks and Mortys into one point that breaks the curve and reality between spaces for him to travel past. The episode ends with him leaping into a yellow portal, presumably going to a multiverse where Rick isn’t the smartest. Maybe Beth is the smartest. Maybe there is an Evil Summer now. Maybe Jerry is President of Earth. Either this sets up future seasons of interesting shit, or a spinoff of more Morty-centric adventures without Rick.
But unfortunately, I do not expect Roiland and Harmon to really push this show out in the sort of Sliders-esque way it really could do. Because this is an animated comedy, and not a serious science fiction show. And that’s what is always going to hamstring it where that consideration doesn’t seem to manifest in Roiland’s Solar Opposites or Mike McMahon’s Star Trek: Lower Decks. Hell, that show has been throwing out some insanely good Trek-style high-concept sci-fi in two seasons where it’s taken Rick five to get to this point. And it really just comes down to good ol’ Harmon. You see it in every show he works on, including the next one. The Japanese-animated shorts that have been made have been so much better in terms of quality, and content. I’d almost love for a studio to take a stab at making the show less comedy and more sci-fi just for a season to prove a point. They even nailed the style pretty well in a way I thought was much better than the original. Because unfortunately, the way American animation goes with creators, even when they do other shows, it’s always the same style. I can’t tell you how many times I looked at Planetina and thought she was Tendi from Lower Decks. It was maddening.
Truthfully though, my endgame for this show is that Beth (or Space Beth) takes over from Rick and the show becomes either Beth and Morty, or Beth and Summer, or some variation thereof. I’m waiting for the arc where she winds up being the supergenius and just tears shit up. That’s what I am hoping the collapse of the infinite fucking crib will bring.
