Last Seen Blogs
charlie-mala
Unbetitelt
lewdnightmares
Wet dreams
busakia-blog
Adam22
quinistiredd
quin // kieran
thricemarked
THRICE MARKED
Text
Morty’s Mind Blowers review
Oh thank god, it’s an easy one.
I was surprised that this turned out to the the answer to Interdimensional Cable this season. I thought Tales from the Citadel was going to be it, since it basically had the same anthology structure but more focused and less based on vignettes.
Actually if anything, the episode Morty’s Mind Blowers most reminds me of is the parasite episode, given that it focuses on the unpleasant memories you have about your mistakes or your family that you wish you could erase but have to live with because that’s a part of your shared history, for better or worse.
I can totally buy from a character perspective that Morty would want to erase the terrible things he does and Rick would allow him because when Morty gets emotional, it interferes with Rick’s work. I especially love the idea that Rick erases any evidence that he isn’t a hyper-capable genius in Morty’s mind (and that beating him at checkers is one such slight deserving of memory erasure to him). My one gripe though is when they hit the amnesia angle halfway through. It works for what the episode is trying to do because it means we get to see more Mind Blowers, but I’ve never been a fan of amnesia plots because they don’t really tend to use that opportunity to teach us anything new about the characters and just expect the audience to laugh at the characters rediscovering who they are, which is never as funny to me as putting characters in new environments or familiar but slightly off versions of them, which is where Tales from the Citadel really succeeded.
As good as all those Mind-Blowers were (I don’t think there’s a bad one in the lot), I kind of felt the framing story could have leaned into similar thematic territory. If you’ve read my rankings of Rick and Morty episodes from the first two seasons, you’ll see a pretty big disparity between the two Interdimensional Cable episodes. To my mind, Rixty Minutes works better over Interdimensional Cable II: Tempting Fate because while they both lean into the escapist power of television to distract you from getting involved with complicated family drama, Rixty Minutes uses that conceit for one of the most life-affirming character moments ever put to television and a thesis statement for the entire show, while Interdimensional Cable II takes what could have been an interesting reason to have all the characters watching television (to distract from worrying about a mortally diseased Jerry) and proceeded to do nothing interesting with it. I can’t really blame them though. From what I’ve gleaned about that episode’s production, Interdimensional Cable ran out of steam as a concept pretty quickly, as they initially thought was going to be their answer to Treehouse of Horror but then decided against it when they realised that they couldn’t make that lightning strike twice. And so instead we have Morty’s Mind Blowers, which gives the writing team time to really hash out a solid joke rather than rely on any random thing that Justin and company want to riff on in the booth.
There’s not really a whole lot to comment on here, so I’m probably just going to bullet point the rest of this one out. A freeform anthology review, if you will.
I’ve been trying to think of what regular episodes could count as mind-blowers, but then I realised that all of them take place after Jerry left, because he isn’t in any of them other than one brief one at Morty’s 13th birthday. Which is also an interesting continuity note, because Morty is 14 by the time the show starts and Rick had already been with the family for about a year prior to that point, since the anniversary of his coming back was in the first Council of Ricks episode. I’m guessing the 13th birthday one is either due to Rick’s shitty filing system and/or Rick deciding to remove that memory from Morty’s mind sometime after Jerry left, maybe because Morty reminded him about it and then removed it out of spite.
Hey look, it’s Neil Gaiman’s Sandman. This show is full of Endless possibilities. Also, the Truth Tortoise said “I’m a Beatle, Paul is dead” backwards, because of course it did.
I love how Jerry has a crappier version of the Mind Blower helmet with VHS tapes instead of vials of memory goo. One of them’s labelled “Sleepy Gary”.
They were pretty spot on with those Men in Black II jokes. “Save it for Youtube” made me chuckle, and also a little ashamed at the fact that I do spend a good chunk of my time online watching video essays.
Anyway, it seems like that The Ricklantis Mixup took up the majority of the time and budget and was an emotional gut-punch to boot, so Morty’s Mind Blowers is meant to serve as a breather for the fans and the writers before we get to what I assume is going to be a gut-punch Beth and Rick episode and a climax to either Rick-Shank Redemption or The Ricklantis Mixup. And structural nit-picking aside, while The Ricklantis Mixup was a better anthology this season, this one had enough good clips in it that it passes the bar. Not Rixty Minutes good, but not Interdimensional Cable II bad. Probably somewhere in the ballpark of Lawnmower Dog.
Episode MVP: Summer, for not getting paid enough for this shit.
Favourite bit character: Poor Beebo. If only it were Venzenulon Nine, then he wouldn’t have died in vain.
And instead of best joke, here’s my:
Top 5 Mind Blowers
5) Beth’s Choice
Only including this one because it got such a reaction out of me. I’ve mentioned before how I find Beth one of the more interesting characters on the show because of how the writers base her psychological profile out of Rick leaving her as a child and how that affected her ability to relate to people, including Jerry and her own children. Choosing Summer over Morty feels in line with that. It kind of the inverse of that bit in Malcolm in the Middle where Lois says if she was to choose between saving Reese or Malcolm, she’d choose Reese, because he needs all the help he can get while Malcolm is smart enough to look after himself since he’s smart and Reese is an idiot. Whereas Beth would choose Summer since she’s more capable and less of a hassle to look after than Morty, who I think she sees as a smaller Jerry and she probably made that Sophie’s Choice a long time ago in her mind.
4) Talking to Animals
RIP Erica Henderson and Ryan North’s mentions. I’m really only including this on the list for the hummingbird’s thoughts, since it reminded me of The Far Side. I find the idea of animals secretly plotting against us kind of rote because it is almost always something cute and innocuous like a squirrel or a rabbit or a dolphin, and never something more genuinely benign and out-of-left-field like...I dunno, anteaters. Also turns out Rick and Morty have hopped realities again, which at this point they could only really do as a throwaway joke, cause there’s no way in hell they’re going to be able to top the end of Rick Potion #9.
3) The Whole Enchilada
Speaking of hell, the bait-and-switch of the alien having has an actual objective afterlife was excellent, and something I’ve always wondered why that hasn’t been explored more. Especially if a species were to have a soul and what their notion of “life” would be if they know it continues to exist for them after their tangible existence. That’s been done, right? Trek’s probably done it, surely.
2) Wrong Light Switch
Great set-up, excellent punch-line. The less you explain it, the funnier it is.
1 ) “True Level”
My favourite kind of joke is to take an ordinary activity or thing and ramp it up to a ridiculous science fiction version of that thing. My favourite kind of Rick and Morty joke is to have Rick be the one to introduce the sci-fi version of a thing to Morty, only for Rick to get frustrated at Morty’s inability to wrap his head around it. My second favourite kind of Rick and Morty joke is to have a character gain a sudden cosmic revelation and having it crush their spirit so completely as to be permanently emotionally crippled, usually while woefully lamenting their own insignificance. So this is basically the perfect joke to me. My true level of jokes.
It does feel a little familiar though, mostly because I think I can tell that Dan Harmon wrote this segment. Rick’s rant about judging level with “your naked caveman eye and a bubble of fucking air” could have been taken from any first five minutes of a Harmontown episode, and the whole premise seems incredibly similar to that Community joke about the room where they get room temperature from. Be that as it may, there’s no sin in being familiar, and “REALITY IS POISON!” made me laugh my ass off, so it’s a very easy hit to my funny bone regardless.
Final Rating: 3 out of 5 grapples
#rick and morty#rick sanchez#morty smith#summer smith#beth sanchez#mortys mind blowers#dan harmon#justin roiland
35 notes
·
View notes
Text
The Ricklantis Mixup review
Rick and Morty is endlessly derivative by its nature, both in the way that most episodes tend to be an outright rip-off of a movie plot (Inception, The Purge, The Day the Earth Stood Still, to name a few), and also of itself, especially since they established not only an infinite multiverse but also a Council of Ricks that monitors it (itself a riff on the Council of Reeds from Jonathan Hickman’s Fantastic Four run). It makes for a pretty good format to explore the darker ramifications of those movie plots, given how expedient it is plot-wise to go “Rick and Morty do the Purge!” than to create a whole new concept from scratch
However, there’s a limit to how much characterisation you can have when there seems to be no new layer to their personality to explore, especially after episodes like Rest and Rick-laxation which have picked apart the two characters to almost granular detail. We know how these characters are going to react in any given situation, so how do you write a meaningful and interesting plot where all the characters are nothing BUT endless permutations of the same two characters? Rick, of course, criticises this:
“Anyone continuing to explore the Citadel is either stupid or one of the unfortunate millions held hostage by their terrible ideas.”
But this criticism is twofold. On my first watch I thought this was a fourth-wall-breaking dig at the likely hundreds of fanfictions people would have written about what happened to the Citadel post-The Rickshank Redemption that couldn’t possibly live up to anything the people who actually made the show and the characters would write. But after watching the whole episode, I came to think that the unfortunate millions held hostage are the Ricks and Mortys who decide to go along with rebuilding the Citadel instead of going on adventures. Unlike the original Council of Ricks, who went counter to their own Rick-ness to become the very type of organisation that they hate, the newly democratic Citadel inadvertently doubles down on their Rick and Morty...ness by becoming a democratic society that gives Rick the opportunity to make a society the way they see fit, only to force the smartest man in the universe to work a factory job for the comfort of “cooler” versions of himself. In trying to build a new system, the remaining Ricks and Mortys only managed to recreate the same kind of systematic inequality, government corruption, a skewed justice system and a factory line education system from their own universes. Would it turn out any other way, given that they built their citizenry on endless permutations of the same two people who already have an in-built power dynamic? And when everyone is the same, could it ever be possible to imagine anything different?
That’s what the The Ricklantis Mixup aims to explore, and it does an incredibly good job of it. While it spins a lot of narrative plates, but it never seems cluttered. It’s to the writing team’s credit that the two characters we’ve spent two and a half seasons understanding individually here become a series of archetypes we’re able to immediately invest in right from the get-go.
While the weakest in terms of relevance to the overall story, I found the four Mortys doing the Stand By Me riff the most touching, since it’s the longest period in the show we actually get to see Morty just being a kid away from his family and Rick. Slick Morty being injected with a drama chip is a good dig at how omnipresent and rote characters with a TRAGIC BACKSTORY are at this point in popular culture, but it almost works too well by accident, since the only way for a Morty to be anything different in this world is to be forcibly injected with a different one. The cop duo Rick and Morty had the best jokes, especially Cop Morty shaking down the tagger Mortys for information and affecting their “aw geez”, but beyond the novel idea of swapping their roles, with Morty as the embittered veteran and Rick as the naive newcomer who’s forced to compromise his values, it’s nothing you haven’t seen before in any other crooked cop story. And I’ll admit while I’m not the biggest fan of Evil Morty this episode was a great way to bring him back into the fold.
Sidenote: I’m not that big into R&M fan theories as they tend put an ridiculous amount of importance on exceedingly minor details that the creators probably don’t care about exploring as much as you might, not to mention that the show’s creators actively avoided seeding long term mysteries into the show knowing that someone on Reddit will figure it out in a couple days anyway. Rick and Morty is perfect for goofing on movie plots in episode sized chunks, but I doubt it's ever going to make the switch to building on its mythology like Adventure Time or Regular Show ended up doing.
To the dedicated fans, The Ricklantis Mixup is both an fantastic reintroduction to a long brewing plot thread and the best social commentary the show has done since Look Who’s Purging. It’s nice to have a diversion that can serve as its own pointed metaphor for our own society.
Episode MVP: For an episode about trying to make a change to a corrupt and careless system, you have to root for either Campaign Manager Morty or Factory Rick. I’m ultimately going to give it to Factory Rick. The fact that he’s as smart as the people who are his boss but is forced to work the very kind of menial job he hates Jerry for doing is a very good angle for a story, and his ultimate fate is incredibly sympathetic to any looking to get a taste of something better in their life.
Favourite bit character: The Mega Fruit farming Rick (or as I like to call him, “Hick Rick”) was a delight, and a nice callback to the pilot. At least now he doesn’t have to go through all the trouble to get those seeds.
Best joke: Two words: “mermaid puss”. Leave it to a genius like Rick to work out the age-old answer to the mermaid problem. Almost makes you wish we’d seen that adventure.
Final Rating: 7 out of 7 grapples.
5 notes
·
View notes
Text
Rest and Rick-laxation review
Man, can we just take a second to appreciate Justin Roiland’s voice work here? Not only does he have to do three versions of two characters each, he has to take them to their absolute vocal limit. That entire scene of them sitting in the UFO must have been hell on his throat.
So Rick and Morty decide to take a vacation at an alien spa, and as a result of an alien sauna...thing end up splitting off into two distinct selves. Which, if I’m parsing this correctly, represent the qualities they value about themselves or most wish to be (henceforth dubbed Healthy Rick and Healthy Morty) and the qualities they think are problems or that they view as toxic (henceforth Toxic Rick and Toxic Morty), as exemplified by their sickening, snot-like composition. It’s a pretty clever conceit for some character study, but the twist that the Detoxifier operates on a subjective notion of what each of the pair define as “toxic” about themselves becomes frustrating to parse if you look at it too closely.
Morty’s arc is pretty easy, given that it’s really his episode here. He starts off wanting to stop adventuring for a while so he can enjoy his high school years, even if they’ll be spent being too nervous and awkward to ask out his crush. After Rick admits that they need a break after the six week long Abadongo Cluster excursion and his subsequent detoxification, he’s split from all the insecurities that were “holding him back” and is left as a cool, affable smooth operator who doesn’t have to constantly work through his nerves and self-loathing to do anything. Of course, this is through the lens of what a 14 year old boy thinks a “healthy” self should be, which is basically a poster child for toxic masculinity — an ”alpha male” for whom emotions are merely performative actions to manipulate women into dating him, which is a really brilliant move to incorporate that idea on the writer’s part given the kind of fanbase Rick and Morty has garnered. It’s telling that the first thing a female friend messaged me halfway into watching the episode was “Detoxed Morty makes me so fucking uncomfortable” while it took me, an slightly oblivious straight male, until Morty literally said “red pill or blue pill” to get the point. And the end, he decides that living as a miserable, nervous teenager having to work through his issues is better than climbing to success and having no ability to appreciate it. So from that point of view, the subjectivity conceit works well. Where it gets a little fuzzier is with Rick.
Toxic Rick warrants little explanation if you’ve seen the episode, or really any episode of the show. His healthy self even gives a laundry list of the attributes he’s meant to represent. But it’s a bit unclear as to what “Healthy Rick” is really meant to represent, leaving this episode fairly lopsided in terms what we’re meant to take away from it.
The main inconsistency here to people is that Healthy Rick states that he’s “proud to be [Morty’s] grandfather” at the beginning, while he sees his “irrational attachment” to Morty is in his toxic self. While I don’t completely disagree with that complaint, I’ve been doing my best to surmise Healthy Rick’s attributes to keep the episode narratively consistent in my head. And the best I can come up with is this:
After Healthy Rick laughs at his toxic self showing concern for Toxic Morty and trying his best to deny it, we get this exchange:
Toxic Rick: “You think that’s funny?
Healthy Rick: “You’ve got to have a sense of humour about these things! Oh wait, you can’t. You’re literally incapable of seeing the bigger picture. I guess it’s just funny because you’ve never done anything but complain about me being in charge, but if I ever gave you the wheel, we’d be dead in five minutes...You poor dumb sick animal.”
If we’re to compare this to Morty and his arc in this episode, it’s pretty clearly set up that Morty wants to go on a date with Jessica, and his toxic qualities are the things getting in the way of that goal. Rick, on the other hand, doesn’t really have much of an arc here, instead facilitating the re-merging aspect of the plot. But if you consider Rick’s character and his usual goals of traversing the multiverse for his own gain and numbing himself of the consequences, the qualities that help him succeed at that are the things that his Healthy self insults his Toxic self for lacking. And when his toxic side does take the wheel..well, the show probably would have ended at Auto-Erotic Assimilation had he not passed out halfway through his suicide attempt.
Rick knows the grand scope of the huge amoral universe his genius has opened up to him, has calculated his frame of mind to operate well within it and being able to laugh off his mistakes and not stopping to dwell on them, even if they have world-ending consequences. Having a grasp of the “bigger picture” and having a sense of humour, given the world he inhabits and the goals he has is a pretty healthy view of things, at least in his mind. This extends to his view of other people. As he explains to Jaguar in Pickle Rick, his infinite scope of reference precludes the idea of attachment. So he can probably feel sentimental towards Morty as a grandson, but as an entity in the grand cosmic scope of things, he’s pretty disposable. Having an attachment to him beyond “grandson” and “sidekick” is irrational in his mind, and therefore toxic, because it interferes with his work. “Need” is a strong word, after all. He needs a doorstop, but a brick will do, and Morty is his most readily available brick.
While I appreciate the overall point that Rest and Rick-laxation is making, especially with regards to Morty’s arc (anyone find themselves thinking about what their own toxic/healthy selves would be?), the show has done character studies like this before and done them better, namely with Pickle Rick and the mythologues from Big Trouble in Little Sanchez. It’s still a decent episode, but since the whole season has been a character study in one way or another, it would be nice to have, I don’t know, a vacation from it.
Happy Labour Day, America!
Episode MVP: It was nice to actually get a glimpse at Jessica’s character rather than have her just be a focus of Morty’s obsessions. Plus she was pretty integral to the plot and Morty’s arc. I’m giving this one to her.
Favourite bit character: While AWESOME, the Voltron made of drones doesn’t count as a character in my mind, so this goes to the children’s entertainer yelling that Santa Claus is a lie and all the kids at the party were mistakes. May he rest in peace.
Best joke: Everything in the fight between the two Ricks using hidden weapons around the house to tear into each other. I especially loved the attack dog alien that grows with praise.
Final Rating: 12 out of 15 and a half grapples.
42 notes
·
View notes
Text
The Whirly Dirly Conspiracy review
Jerry is the most frustrating character in Rick and Morty, both inside and outside the show. In the latter case, it’s to the point that he’s become a kind of pejorative for people who either don’t like, don’t understand or actively whine about the show. If Rick and Morty presents any real moral lesson, it’s about reclaiming your own sense of agency in a universe without meaning that will not cater to your every whim or is actively out to destroy you. Through that lens, Jerry is symbolic of the kind of people who lack the agency to go out and make their own life happen and instead expect everything to come to them, be it love, a job or just general acceptance, and thus goes against the kind of moral architecture the show presents, to the frustration of many.
And that brings me to the moment that best contextualises my feelings on this, per Rick:
“You act like prey, but you’re a predator! You use pity to lure in your victims, it’s how you survive! I survive because I know everything, that snake survives because children wander off, and you survive because people think “Ooh, this poor piece of sh*t! He never gets a break! I can’t stand the deafening silent wails of his wilting soul! I guess I’ll hire him or marry him!”
Survival, from an evolutionary standpoint, is about exploiting what adaptations you have to thrive in the environment that you’re in. For Jerry, he has survived by being so pitiable you almost don’t want to hurt him, even if it would be incredibly easy. Look at his “mythologue” in Big Trouble in Little Sanchez: a spineless, deliberately submissive slug creature that disgusts even himself, and it’s hard not to see that creature in the jaws of that big child-eating alien snake. And while this makes Jerry sympathetic to us, it can also makes him casually despicable in Rick’s eyes.
And what I find really interesting about this episode is that a) it explains Jerry’s psychology in the same way that Pickle Rick did for Beth and b) provides a situation in its B-story which demonstrates just how Beth copes away from either Rick or Jerry. Beth doesn’t “do” emotion because she’s never learned to see the benefit of it, and that’s contextualised by her literally and figuratively messing Summer up as a result, allowing her to get continuously made into a monster by the Morphorizer. Beth is not as smart or as capable as she thinks she is (as her mythologue demonstrated) and she puts up that facade so that she can be the kind of person she thinks will impress her father or make her look better than her spineless wimp of an (ex)husband. She thrived (codependently) with Jerry as much as Jerry has thrived with her, and that lead to their toxic cycle of a marriage.
(That said, while Rick saw fit to end their perpetual cycle, he’s is equally at fault in this situation when you frame their argument in terms of who messed up Beth the most. “She was Rick’s daughter! She had options!”, he says, having never been around to nurture an interest in those options and prevent her from meeting someone like Jerry in the first place. Just throwing that out there if you’re using this episode to justify your Jerry hate.)
By placing Rick and Morty as the voices of reason, now that they’ve gone through their own ‘dealing with the divorce’ arcs in Rick-Mancing the Stone, they can hold each parent to task about their behaviour and ask them what kind of person they are going to be after the divorce. By the end of their adventure (with a stop for some cosmic apotheosis) Jerry is beginning to learn to not feel so sorry for himself and advertise that feeling to the world to gain validation. And while Beth will never be the maternal archetype, she can learn to start correcting her own behaviours as well. Her reconciliation with Summer works because by turning herself into a giant Attack on Titan monster, she’s opening herself up to be vulnerable and understanding to her daughter’s feelings.
I think this might mark the midpoint of Season 3. I’m really liking the direction so far of plumbing the characters for depth in addition to having crazy adventures. It’s hit a good stride, and hopefully by the end we’ll be in as interesting a place by the end as we were at the end of Season 2.
Episode MVP: Morty, by far, as the only sensible person in the whole episode, and proving himself to be more emotionally grounded than his parents and just a good little brother. I can kind of see him become a more compassionate version of Rick in a way, jaded by an amoral universe but doing what good where he can when he absolutely has the ability to step in and do so.
Favourite bit character: The gibble snake going “Oof” in response to Jerry being literally and figuratively chewed out over how pathetic he is.
Best joke: The Morphizer customer service employees escaping from the machine had me rolling.
Final Rating: 8 out of 8 grapples.
91 notes
·
View notes
Text
Vindicators 3: The Return of Worldender review
Rick and Morty tends to fare best, in my opinion, when it either juxtaposes the human pursuit for meaning with the cold careless infinitude of the multiverse, or when it takes a previously established science fiction trope and twists it in some horrifying but narratively satisfying way. At its worst, it picks an easy target, beats it up and kicks it while it’s down, without providing any kind of narrative catharsis. This is the reason why I hold Something Ricked This Way Comes as the worst episode of the show, because it introduces a concept, the Stephen King-esque devil and his store of cursed objects that punish people’s curiosity, that is set up for failure within the confines of Rick and Morty’s moral universe where people who hold that kind of inflexible logic are doomed by existing.
Vindicators 3 could have gone that route. The basic premise of setting up the Vindicators binary, self-serving hero morality against Rick’s nihilistic philosophy that the universe does not play favourites is a fun one on its face. It leads to some pretty excellent digs at how franchises like the Marvel Cinematic Universe have turned the Byronic heroes from the comics, who do the right thing at some great personal cost, and whittled them down into a bunch of populist, brand friendly one-liner machines because it had to make them appealing for the people who enjoyed high school and wear the shirts that they would have beaten you up for wearing. While I don’t think the MCU has run its course yet, they’ve definitely hit a comfortable stride where they only try to make the character “cool” instead of doing the narrative heavy lifting of actually making them compelling and continuing the plumb the depths of that character. Y’know, like Rick and Morty.
While I like them pointing out that idea, it’s a bit of an easy target for a show that considers any moral absolutes pointless at best and outright dangerous at worst, and has done better with critiquing how that ideal functions in their multiverse (see: Fart from Morty-Night Run and the nipple war from Auto-Erotic Assimilation). Rick’s traps basically point out the same superhero-are-actually-stupid-because cliches. That their personal tragedies make them boring and interchangeable instead of unique, that they fail to tackle the ‘real’ issues (which, at a stretch I think that Israel joke was getting at, he certainly sets it up that way) and that their might makes right and people love them for it, because they want the people who they like to be cool. Whether Avengers or Vindicators, people don’t want to challenge their heroes, because that would mean challenging themselves, and that’s something Rick can’t stand. But it’s set up as a conveyor belt line of jokes about why superheroes suck rather than a plot that builds off that idea, which on first watch I didn’t care for.
But after thinking about it for a while, the show manages to succeed where Something Ricked failed by tying it back to Rick and Morty’s relationship, which is the better story decision, and making Rick’s death-traps the result of a bender he went on from being unable to tolerate the Vindicators rather than being deliberately destructive because their existence offends him, which is the better comedy route. Morty is past idolising Rick in any way at this point, as he points out to Summer in The Rickshank Redemption, and you can’t help but feel for a kid for wanting to find comfort in familiar narratives of good fighting evil to escape a complicated family situation and a grandfather who thinks those narratives are for idiots. With that in mind, it ends up being tragically hilarious, as only Rick and Morty can be, when he decides to play along with Rick’s game just to let Rick get his way. And that final punchline at the end of Morty’s little Killing Joke style rollercoaster was worth the entire enterprise.
As a superhero fan, I probably went into this episode with the wrong mindset. Vindicators 3 doesn’t add anything particularly new or funny to the “superheroes are actually terrible when you think hard about them” discussion, but that’s probably not the point. The more I thought about it, the more I grew to love it, and as it stands, it’s another solid episode with a lot of good jokes, an interesting angle to explore Rick and Morty’s dynamic, and some memorable characters. They can do a lot worse.
Episode MVP: I have no idea who Logic is. I’m gonna go with Million Ants, because he reminds me of a comic book Facebook group chat I was in once about who would win in a fight between the Hulk and the Hulk’s weight in bees.
Favourite bit character: Noob Noob is my dude.
Best joke: “I could have just used a ghost train”. But mainly the build-up to that line, where Rick uses a convoluted, improvised and theatrically fatal method against the automated turrets instead of brute force signature moves like the heroes are used to. Great piece of character informing the joke.
Final Rating: 10 out of 15 and a half grapples
7 notes
·
View notes
Text
Pickle Rick review
Stop digging for hidden layers and just be impressed!
Depicting therapy in narrative is a tough line to walk, because it kind of does a writer’s job but from the other end. It spells out conflicts and relationships that narrative tends do more artfully, articulated through action, dialogue or clever juxtaposition rather than outright explaining why Character A is the way Character A is. But if done well, it can be a great way to really get to the inner workings of a character and see how they react to being confronted with how they act from an impartial source who understands them at their level.
One thing I think this episode does really well is really spelling out how maintaining relationships is a form of labour. And that’s a weird thing for some people to grasp, but it’s true. It’s work. Think of it like living in a village where everyone has a turn ploughing a field. Some people can do it incredibly well, to the point where it becomes effortless and ceases to feel like labour. They cannot wait to wake up in the morning, plough some dirt into rows and sow seeds. Some people find it difficult, but have found ways to do it in a way that suits them. Maybe they find the town plough-mule too temperamental and they use the town ox to draw the plough instead, or they do it at a time of day that suits them. But when you do it right and the work is done, you and everyone around you benefits from a bountiful harvest.
And then you have the people who, when it is their turn, don’t show up, or they insist on doing it in a way that is incredibly painful to them because that’s what they think makes sense in their mind. Or they could just starve. Or turn to other avenues...maybe I’m starting to get why family counsellors make great coprophagia therapists in this universe. Rick and Beth think themselves superior for avoiding that labour, or doing it in a way that feels right to them but from the outside is incredibly unhealthy, but still justifying to themselves that their relationship still functions. Or as Dr Wong puts it, they “use intelligence to justify sickness”.
Rick, ever the scientist, cannot accept the world the way it is and strives to change it to suit him wherever necessary. Failing that, he escapes. He can abandon one daughter, he can do it again, again and again across multiple universes. He has habituated so well to dealing with his problems in absurdist, science fiction ways that he’s forgotten how to use the plough the old fashioned way. He doesn’t know how to do the work because he considers it beneath him, and he tricks himself into thinking that it’s better the way he does it. But what scares him the most is that he is just like everybody else. He can make himself a pickle, or a tiny human, or anything else he can think of, but it’s still his mind in his body, and it runs on the same circuitry as everyone else.
And Beth completely buys into Rick’s myth and in turn what it says about her, that if Rick is brilliant scientist with more important things to care about, then what does that say about her? What does that say about him? As Dan Harmon has explained her in an AMA about the show:
We know that kids blame themselves for their parents breaking up, that's pretty standard psychology. But from there, we have different mechanisms for coping with the blame. And one of the strategies we see people employ, in the face of an absentee parent, is a deification of the parent that takes LESS responsibility. Beth thinks her dad is better than her mother because her dad had the brain and guts to leave her.
That's really, really fucked up.
Rick's daughter is more fucked up than Rick, and fucked up because of Rick.
Beth has built up a number of defensive mechanisms when she’s challenged about this. She is tries to deflect to her children or to justify Rick’s actions as symptomatic of the whole family rather just to her. But the thing is, she’s setting an example for them, and she learned from the best.
This leads to one of the most brilliant semiotic portions of the show. In that office, Beth literally holds the power to turn her father human, to stop seeing him as a brilliant scientist and acknowledge him as the emotionally toxic person he is. And the great tragedy of it all is, when she finally does turn him back human, it’s an afterthought. They’re in the car, literally driving away from that revelation, already trying to deny and misconstrue Dr. Wong’s words to protect themselves from having their relationship dynamic questioned, despite the gentle protestations of Morty and Summer. They can’t maintain and clean their system, so they let the bile build up inside them and call that “working” instead. You can fight the rats all you want, but sooner or later, you have to eat shit.
Episode MVP: Like, Jaguar was cool and all, but I have to stick to my guns and go with Doctor Wong dropping those truth bombs.
Favourite bit character: I want to know what that Concerto guy’s deal is, if only cause I have a thing for musical or sound-gimmick characters in general.
Best joke: “Jaguar is an animal. You’re an intelligent pickle. We can do business”.
Final Rating: 9 out of 9 grapples
88 notes
·
View notes
Text
Rick-Mancing the Stone quick review
I was hoping to get this up earlier, and now will probably be the only time I get to do it before Pickle Rick hits. So here’s a truncated version of something I hope to do as a regular thing, and review every new Rick and Morty episode as it comes (and maybe do retrospectives on the previous ones to go with my rankings).
Reading all the talk about this episode, I actually realised how this episode isn’t just a sort-of premiere, but you can also view it as the third part of a trilogy that starts at The Wedding Squanchers and continues with the actual season 3 premiere The Rick-shack Redemption. Rick and Morty has always been willing to play with format (the April Fool’s premiere for instance, but I’m still old enough a fan to remember when Rixty Minutes was first released as a collection of thirty second Instagram videos that I later watched stitched together as one episode on Youtube)
It looks like the show (or at least this season) is moving to more of a serial format in general, with the main throughline being how the Smith family cope with Beth and Jerry’s divorce. With most of the bigger impending sci-fi plots and antagonists like the Council of Ricks and the Federation/Gromflomites out of the way, the show can examine the emotional fallout over the season while still engaging in fun single episode adventures that will bring those conflicts out. I think the show really took off when it started using Jerry and Beth’s marriage, and by extension the whole Smith family’s dynamic, as the status quo for the whole show. The threat of the family falling apart was always kind of lurking at the edges but now actually comes to the forefront, and I’m glad this season gets to capitalise on the opportunity to see where the characters are at when they’re no longer part of a unit.
Speaking of which, It’s a pretty brilliant bit of thematic storytelling use an apocalypse as a perfect framing device to explore the fallout from a divorce, as they’re both on a surface level about how you survive after the collapse of something used to provide you with safety and security, however imperfect it may have been. The wasteland also gives Summer and Morty a relatively consequenceless backdrop by which to vent their emotions about the whole domestic situation. Summer going full native and then inadvertently living out Beth’s life by hooking up with Hemorrhage and then having the same arguments with her boyfriend as her parents had is both a great twist and a really interesting examination of the cyclical nature of trying to avoid our parents conflicts and end up repeating them inadvertently. Man hands on misery to man, etc.
One thing I saved for the Semantics Dome: Morty gaining Armothy, who not only still has a grudge but is also capable of having flashbacks is one of those perfect pseudo-scientific reinterpretations of a scientific concept that I love about the genre. There’s probably also something to wring out of Morty gaining a symbol of (what society typically considers to be) masculine physical prowess and using it to both take his anger at his weak-willed father out on others in the Blood Dome and eventually coming to terms with how he should probably let that anger go during Armothy’s quest for vengeance. But I’m not clever enough or educated enough about the performance of gender to follow on that thread.
But what I find really interesting is Rick’s role in all this. As the catalyst to Jerry and Beth separating and someone who tends to treat everyone around him as a subject or an obstacle to him in the wacky experiment of his life, I love how he gets to confront just what his actions have wrought on someone he genuinely cares about, his daughter. I’ve always argued that Season 2 is where we really start to deconstruct Rick and his “I don’t give a fuck” worldview, not in a way that changes him and the whole philosophy of the show as a whole in earnest, but gives him some character growth. And while we’re probably never going to see a proper Rick origin story, I’d be curious to see Beth’s, and how she wound up idolising the father who abandoned her.
Overall I liked this episode a lot, as it continues to fit my mould of how the show works at its best, blending and contrasting family drama and high concept science fiction. Here’s hoping the rest of the season is this good.
Episode MVP: Summer
Favourite bit character: That Blood Dome announcer with the orange Aladdin Sane bolt. Something about the way he talks just slays me (“mah PRETT-EHS!”).
Favourite joke: I’d say the Semantics Dome because it gave me my blog’s name, but I can’t go past Jerry feebly giving his unemployment cheques to that wolf.
“Unless my suffering...is your nourishment?” *HOWLS IN AFFIRMATION*
Final Rating: 10 out of 12...grapples!
1 note
·
View note
Text
With the third season of Rick and Morty on the horizon, and since I don’t think anyone’s done this before, I decided to give my ranking of all the Rick and Morty episodes (from the first two seasons).
My metrics for judgement are as follows: I’m attempting to judge the show purely on its own merits, which each episode being held to the question “is this the show at it’s best?”, which to my mind is a character-driven high concept sci-fi show that actively critiques but never outright condemns the humanist philosophies behind its chosen genre.
I’ve tried to avoid using other shows as a comparison unless it’s to illustrate a point, but in some cases it’s pretty unavoidable when this show unapologetically rips off its plots from movies wholesale. Episodes get more points for good story structure that adds to a good moral, strong critique or parody of an established science fiction trope that is otherwise well explored and strong character development that builds across episodes and firmly establishes a continuity. And when in doubt, it mostly comes down to “which would I rather rewatch if I only had those two competing episodes to choose from?”.
All clear? Alright, without further ado…
The Definitive Objective Extra-Schwifty Ranking of every Rick and Morty Episode
1. Rixty Minutes (S1E8)
Well, what else was it going to be?
What begins as an epilogue to Rick Potion #9 ends up becoming the central thesis for the entire show up to that point, that while the character’s existence isn’t significant on the cosmic scale and Summer’s birth basically creating the entire family was an accident of fate, sometimes seeing things from that perspective makes you realise how miraculous it is that you are here now, and instead of wrestling with your own insignificance and the possibility of “what could have been”, you accept and embrace the life that you have now, for all its faults. That those revelations are paired with the interdimensional TV both builds the tension for how the conflict happening outside of is progressing and relieves it by providing a reprieve from the revelations that happen from it. This episode is the show at its best, and probably one of the best episodes of television period.
2. Meeseeks and Destroy (S1E5)
One of the smartest writing decisions in the show is that it doesn’t do the old domestic magic/sci-fi show trope of having the main character’s adventures kept a secret from the rest of the family or having a convenient reset button at the end of each episode. Instead, it aims to explore the emotional consequences of interacting with Rick’s world, and Meeseeks and Destroy marks a turning point in the show where all of these adventures start to actually matter to the show’s continuity and to the character’s growth. This is actually my personal favourite episode, but I think it’s just shy of being the best for two reasons: the A-plot relies on a reversal of the normal story structure, with Morty leading the adventure instead of Rick so it’s not the most “typical” of the show overall, and the two plots don’t come together as fluidly as they do in Rixty. Still, it’s a very close call.
3. Auto-Erotic Assimilation (S2E3)
Beyond a few references at Beth’s mother and a few (potentially false) memories, we never really get to see how Rick operates in a romantic relationship. So it’s interesting to see Rick at his most vulnerable and with someone he actually has actually has some love for in Unity, the one-who-is-a-million that got away. An emotionally raw story about two people who are good together but aren’t good for each other, paralleled with a B-plot of Summer and Morty learning that given total freedom, humans (well, blue alien people) will undoubtedly give in to their worst impulses. Also, man, that ending is one of the most gut-wrenchingly depressing endings to a show I’ve ever seen, and it lands perfectly. Maybe a little too perfectly.
4. Morty-Night Run (S2E2)
Probably the show’s best straight-forward adventure episode, which helps set up the Galactic Federation conflict that will eventually pay off at the end of Season 2 and is probably the best demonstration of Morty attempting to apply idealistic Earth morality to a more morally complicated universe to which Rick is perfectly adapted. A plethora of memorable characters like Krombopulous Michael and Jemaine Clement’s crooning sentient gas cloud, some excellent psychedelic animation and art direction, and a consistently funny B-plot of Jerry’s time in a daycare full of alternate versions of himself and confronting just how pathetic he is make this episode a real winner.
5. The Ricks Must Be Crazy (S2E6)
This is the best of what I like to call the “nesting doll” episodes of the show, where the adventure is a continuous descent or ascent through several layers of the sci-fi trope of the week. The first two thirds of the episode are a great slow boil before the “oh, shit” moment of the Mini-Verse scientist killing himself, and the final race out of the teeny/mini/microverses, intercut with Summer in Rick’s car is one of the most expertly paced sequences in the entire show. It’s also the only episode that gives Rick a compelling nemesis in the form of Zeep Zanthorp - a being he unintentionally created who is smart enough to challenge him, which annoys Rick to no end. I really hope they bring him back, since Rick is pretty short on compelling enemies (besides the Council of Ricks). Fingers crossed for some car trouble in Season 3.
6. Close Encounters of the Rick Kind (S1E10)
The idea of Rick being the only person(s) able to challenge him could have served to make Rick a little too smug and perfect for his own good, but the Council of Ricks serve as the perfect synthesis and literalisation of Rick’s self-loathing and his detest for sprawling authoritarian institutional bodies. Every alternate timeline/universe/dimension (do they ever settle on one definition? They’re all used fairly interchangeably) strike a perfect balance between absurdist weirdness and incredibly internal consistency, and every rewatch makes you pick up on new details you didn’t notice before. And look, I’m not made of stone, Jerry and Doofus Rick’s friendship is actually quite sweet, and I hope they get reunited someday.
7. Look Who’s Purging Now (S2E9)
The main character throughline of Season 2 is seeing how Rick and Morty start to rub off on each other over the course of their adventures. This comes to a head in this episode as we see how willing Morty is to emulate Rick in his amorality when he goes “full Purge” and how Rick is taken aback by what his grandson could become following in his footsteps while also confronting the limits of his joy/apathy of the bloodshed that ensues from his adventures. It also has the sharpest piece of social satire the show has ever done, where after the newly freed aliens try to rebuild society after the overthrow of their aristocratic overlords devolve into arguing over the division of labour and wind up reinstating the Purge again anyway from the frustration of having to create a functioning society again. Defeatist? Maybe. Hilarious? Absolutely.
8. Rick Potion #9 (S1E6)
Probably the episode that’s most important to the overall canon of the show. It sets the tone for the adventures to follow, gives a true point of no return for the show as a whole, as well as a great deconstruction of status-quo beholden storytelling and the creepy ethics of love potion plots. Had this just been a ranking of season one episodes, it would probably rank higher, but as you can probably tell by this list, the show has definitely topped this one since. I also want to point out just how incredible the show’s art direction and character creation is when it comes to all the varying designs of the Cronenbergs. I really hope the animators got a raise after this episode.
9. Total Rickall (S2E4)
The Thing through the lens of a Community clip show turns into a paranoid existential thriller that escalates perfectly, has an excellent twist that probably ended up ruining a load of friendships in real life and revealed a ton about how the Smith family operates and sees each other. It does test the limit for how many wacky characters you’re willing to put up with, and it can’t really escape the insular insubstantial feeling of bottle episodes as a whole, especially if you buy into the theory that this episode and Morty-Night Run take place in another universe and so it doesn’t really matter to the show’s continuity as a whole. But it give us Mr. Poopy Butthole, so I’m willing to forgive it.
10. Big Trouble in Little Sanchez (S2E7)
This is a tough one to rank, because it has the greatest disparity of quality between the A plot and B plot. Beth and Jerry’s “mythologue” oriented marriage counselling is such a perfect science-fiction idea of making a metaphorical conflict real that it probably had enough to be the plot of the whole episode. Unfortunately, it’s paired with a B plot that tries to do the same thing with Tiny Rick. He’s funny as a visual, but the episode has to go to some lengths to inject tension into the proceedings. Why can’t Rick just stay in his young body forever other than some convoluted explanation about how teenagers push all their bad feelings into the back of their minds and therefore Old Rick will be erased (I think?). I felt it could have used an additional conflict where Rick loses some of his scientific brilliance because of his young brain overwriting his old one, or maybe a better acknowledgement that Summer was the one that pushed Rick into a self-described hackneyed high school plot that even he found too simple a pitch. Still, it cracks the top ten on the strength of the Beth and Jerry plot alone, which I plan to go into more depth about later, so stay tuned.
11. Anatomy Park (S1E3)
There are three inevitabilities in this world: death, taxes and sci-fi shows doing a Fantastic Voyage plot. Rick and Morty’s take is to fuse it with Jurassic Park and also have it be the show’s Christmas episode, which gives us a story which is never dull and has a lot of great jokes (“Oh, never mind, I was thinking of the T. rex”) but doesn’t come together in any interesting way other than the blood raining at the end, which also raises the question of whether the show was planning at this point to keep Rick and Morty’s adventures a secret from the rest of the Smiths. Also, I’m of the mind that Christmas episodes tend to work better when they’re placed later in the show’s run, as all the familial conflicts can play out better when you’ve had more time to get to know the characters and how they became the way they are It’s good, Maybe could have been better had it aired later in the show’s run and the writers had a better idea of what the show’s status quo was.
12. Raising Gazorpazorp (S1E7)
Having an adolescent raise a baby warmonger alien is some great application of science fiction to the mundane, and Morty’s relationship to Morty Jr. yields some touching moments. Tthe gender politics of planet Gazorpazorp feel a bit rote and stereotypical and an excuse to make a lot of obvious “battle of the sexes” jokes, and raises a lot of gripes I have regarding how mainstream science fiction comedy approaches and incorporates women and the feminine into its worlds, even if it does a little bit of softball criticism by drawing attention to Rick’s casual misogyny. Good, but could have been better.
13. The Wedding Squanchers (S2E10)
A great finale that pays off the long-brewing confrontation between Rick and the Galactic Federation, and sets up a lot of interesting developments for Season 3. But as a result of that, it kind of feels a little incomplete in a way that the first season finale didn’t because they knew they were getting renewed.
14. A Rickle In Time (S2E1)
I loved the multiple timeline split-screen bits and Rick explaining at length about how he doesn’t care about Morty and Summer, which sets up what I believe to be Rick’s arc through Season 2 revealing his softer side. But the Beth and Jerry B-plot is basically just trying to give them something to do, doesn’t really contribute any tension to the situation back home and doesn’t tell us anything new about their relationship.
15. Pilot (S1E1)
As pilots go, Rick and Morty’s one is pretty good. It tells you everything you need to know about the scope of the show, its characters and the type of humour you can expect from it. The “Rick and Morty hundred years!” rant is one of the show’s best moments. But it was clearly still finding its voice, and there’s a bit of weirdness in that you think the show is going to pivot the way having the rest of the Smith family not know about Rick and Morty’s adventures, which they thankfully did away with.
16. Ricksy Business (S1E11)
Despite introducing us to Birdperson and Abradolph Lincler, this episode feels kind of unremarkable in retrospect, and ultimately just feels like they threw in all of the ideas they couldn’t fit into the earlier episodes into this one in case they didn’t get renewed.
17. M. Night Shaym-aliens (S1E4)
The second best of the “nesting doll” episodes. The simulations inside simulations are a great Inception riff, even better than their actual Inception parody (more on that in a second). We really get a good look at Jerry’s insecurity and what drives him as a character, and the first real demonstration of Rick’s cunning and preparedness that also helps lay out the cosmic scope of his reputation. However, I don’t find the Zigerian scammers that funny, despite David Cross’ best efforts as the voice of their leader, and they’re a little too similar to the nudist scammer aliens from the first Futurama movie for my liking - the fact that they’re squeamish about nudity had to be a dig at that, surely?. But the overall set-up is solid and seeing Jerry casually strut through a low-res simulation of his life is pretty hysterical.
18. Lawnmower Dog (S1E2)
The worst (or really, the least good) of the “nesting doll” episodes. The direction the Scary Terry plot goes in is unexpected, clever and genuinely touching, but I don’t find the “dogs take over the world” plot that remarkable in any way, especially in comparison to the rest of the show.
19. Get Schwifty (S2E5)
This episode got a lot of shit when it aired, and it’s easy to see why, seeing that it had to follow a hat-trick of three great episodes. It’s a fairly solid Independence Day/Day The Earth Stood Still parody, but it’s definitely the show’s most lazily conceived plot, not to mention that I’m fairly sure that entire sections of the script appear in the previous episodes. That said, the giant space heads are a great visual (and gave us some great meme fodder), and it sets up the endgame of The Wedding Squanchers by reintroducing us to Birdperson and Tammy, if very inelegantly.
20. Interdimensional Cable II: Tempting Fate (S2E8)
On my first watch of this, I didn’t find this episode that funny, and the only TV bit that really made me laugh out loud was “Man vs Car”. The context for the Interdimensional Cable here, instead of being a distraction from the potential collapse of Beth and Jerry’s marriage is them waiting in a hospital for Jerry to recover from a fatal alien illness, which could be a potentially interesting idea if he hadn’t been immediately cured at the episode’s beginning, which immediately sucks all the tension out of the episode. Where the tension in Rixty Minutes (the episode this is self-plagiarising) lies in whether the Smith family will ultimately be broken up for good, this one ends up hinging on...the fate of Jerry’s penis. It keeps trying to ring some tension out of Jerry wanting to feel significant for having saved the galaxy’s answer to the Dalai Lama, and while I like the ultimate lesson that you can’t make people love you, the journey to get there doesn’t really work as well as it could have. They even make a meta-dig at themselves that they can’t improve on perfection, and at that point you kind of give this episode the ranking it deserves.
21. Something Ricked This Way Comes (S1E9)
At its best, Rick and Morty subverts and deconstructs well-worn science fiction tropes and the plots and lessons that tend to play out when played straight, and works best when it incorporates those proceedings with examinations of the American family dynamic and how we fight the daily battle of finding some kind humanist purpose and meaning in our lives in a universe for which that pursuit is bound to end in failure. While this episode has the best Summer plot and arguably the show’s best joke in the form of the Butter Passing Robot, Ricked is probably the most lazily conceived version of itself possible, picks a lot of very easy targets and ends up feeling very bored with itself as a result. While it aims to be an examination of how science fiction stories have replaced or perhaps better refine the old superstitions and morality lessons that horror stories play off, while actively critiquing how similar the two genres are in execution, the actual plot is basically Rick becoming a mouthpiece for how much the writers hate superstitious thinking and going “haha you brought Stephen King to a Kurt Vonnegut/Stanislaw Lem fight, get riggedy-riggedy-rekt son”. The B-plot of Jerry insisting that Pluto is a planet pokes fun at climate change denialism, and while a great demonstration of how facts and evidence have become summarily rejected in political discourse in favour of dogma and superstition, it doesn’t escalate into anything bigger like the best episodes of the show do. Hell, they can’t even agree on what the moral is at the end, and instead just resolve to literally beat up some political strawmen in lieu of actually finding a cohesive message. While that might be cathartic to some, for a show that isn’t content to give its audience easy answers, it’s punching well below its weight.
1 note
·
View note