Some Thoughts About Rick and Morty

When the first series of Rick and Morty came out, I was completely smitten. It hit all the right notes: dark humour, cosmic horror, interesting speculative ideas. I liked how it was creative with its position as an animated sitcom, like with its absurd multiple universes and segments built around improvised nonsense. I liked how sharp and merciless the comedy was, and how its episode ideas had this Twilight Zone science-fiction ethos to them. It was like all our weird Christmases had come at once.

Word spread, with me doing lots of the spreading, and when the long-awaited second series arrived, the show was the hottest new thing, riding a hype it well deserved. I was duly excited – after all, in my experience, the first series of any show, particularly sitcoms, often suffers from its position as the starting point, and it’s usually by the second or third series that a show truly finds its footing, and has greater confidence in what it needs to be. Therefore, I figured that the next few series of Rick and Morty would be even better than its impressive beginning.

But within the second series, flaws were beginning to show – flaws that had always been there, but were magnified by the increase in content, and were flaws I dismissed as being part of the first-series-immaturity I just mentioned. To clarify what it is I’m going to be talking about, the three main flaws of Rick and Morty are: 1. Ham-fisted emotional storytelling, 2. Veneration of Rick as a character, 3. Belief in its own hype. Now the third series is over, I’ve realised how the things I dislike about the show have been gnawing at me so hard that I can’t just shut up and not puke out an essay about it. So, because I need to get it off my chest, I’m going to talk about what I love about Rick and Morty, what I hate about Rick and Morty, and, to explain myself, the value of shitting on the things people love.

But first, the good things.

It’s worth talking about this, even though it’s impossible to ignore the praise Rick and Morty receives almost everywhere, but I want to remind everyone that I really like Rick and Morty, even if I find it supremely frustrating. Like I said, when its first series dropped, I was staggered by it. The main thing it has going for it is that its basic premise is a hard-sci-fi animated sitcom. You’ve got the dysfunctional family of returning characters, and you have an endless wealth of conceptual situations to stick them in. Its best moments are when the mundanity of a standard-white-American family meets the fantastical and ridiculous.

The thing I love the most about Rick and Morty is that it’s really getting mileage out of being an animated sitcom. It knows that animation is the only visual medium where anything can happen, and it’s great to see the show play with this, whether it’s with throwaway jokes like the universe of bums and shit, or with entire concepts like the ten million nonsense characters in Total Rickall. This is where the show can flex its imagination, and deal with massive ideas like cloning or alternate dimensions or artificial reality or intergalactic travel completely effortlessly. When it works best, it’s because the conceit of the episode itself is hilarious, like Jerry failing to realise he’s in a low-powered simulation of his own life, or how Rick built a society whose whole purpose is to power his car. Also, as an aside: the animation itself is totally fantastic and I absolutely love it.

For specificity’s sake, let’s talk about my favourite episodes from each series, and why I think they’re brilliant.

RICK POTION #9: Morty asks for Rick to make a potion to make Jessica fall in love with him, only for it to go horribly wrong and lead to the end of humanity.

This is my favourite episode of Rick and Morty, and it succeeds because of how it takes a small-scale premise and escalates it to demented extremes. It gets funnier and funnier the worse the situation gets, until the dilemma is solved with what was, in the early days of the show, a bold and unforeseeable solution: Rick and Morty move to an alternate reality where the world is fine but they’ve both been killed, and replace their dead selves.

Most notably, it ends with maybe the one successful moment of emotional storytelling within the entire show – the brief sequence of Morty burying his own corpse and returning to his normal life, completely traumatised. Nothing gets said because nothing is needed to, which is a rarity for the writing, which I’ll get to later. What’s more, it’s an inspired twist on a sitcom’s necessity to solve all its problems by the end of each episode, since the world that Rick ruined isn’t technically saved, but left to rot, and while Morty returns to normality, he carries the baggage of the episode’s events with him.

It’s funny, it’s powerful, and its ending leaves you with something to think about. Also note that it presents the idea that the family would be happier with Rick (and Morty) gone.

TOTAL RICKALL: The family find themselves fighting against a parasite that implants fake memories of itself into their heads.

This is another episode that makes it into a lot of people’s favourites, and it’s hands-down the finest of series two. The premise is an absolute gift to the writers as the introduction of each ludicrous character is funny in itself, and much like Rick Potion #9, the escalation becomes hysterical. Also its final conceit, that the parasites can only create pleasant memories, adds to the believability of the characters and their imperfections, and what’s more, it’s Morty who figures it out and technically saves the day.

The whole episode is everything that Rick and Morty wants to achieve: an outlandish and thought-provoking situation, loaded with creativity, and it ends with a satisfying moral: that the faults of individuals are part of their authenticity (Keep this lesson in mind as we talk about Rick’s character).

THE RICKLANTIS MIXUP: A portrayal of the theoretical day-to-day world of the Citadel of Ricks, populated entirely by Ricks and Mortys from around the multiverse.

This is my favourite of series three – I’m about to shit on series three significantly in the upcoming sections, but this was the episode that most captured my imagination. The cleverness of it is how it takes the power dynamic between the two central characters and creates a bizarre analogous scenario out of it – this is what I like about all the episodes involving the Citadel. The Ricks are the superior ‘race’ of sorts, with complex variations and hierarchies of their own, while the Mortys live in ghettos and are treated condescendingly and with disdain. The stories involve a Rick and a Morty chalk-and-cheese cop dynamic, and a Morty running for office to improve the lives of his fellow Mortys.

I mean… this whole thing is ridiculous, even writing it feels ridiculous, and I love it. It’s a ‘what-if’ scenario that not only mocks movie clichés and aspects of the real world, but the jokes just keep coming because the central idea is such fertile soil. All the different Ricks and Mortys are hilarious, the deconstruction of what Rick and Morty’s characters mean to each other is smart and interesting, and what’s more, none of it’s bogged down by the running soap-opera drama with characters monologuing about their feelings towards each other – this exploration of character here is a fascinatingly creative one.

Overall, Rick and Morty has so much going for it, and maybe the best thing about it is how it sculpts large ideas about existence and the universe into an easily-digestible show that everyone’s on board with. I’ll always love it for that. But…

THE PROBLEMS WITH RICK AND MORTY

As I said, the issues I have with Rick and Morty have been there since the beginning, only as time has gone by and, in my opinion, the more that the show has become popular, the weaker the series has become overall. As we’ve all noticed, Rick and Morty is huge. It’s ginormous. I’m yet to meet a person from its youthful target demographic who hasn’t watched it. And, without wanting to betray myself too much as one of those people whose adoration for something curdles the more popular it becomes, I think its near-universal praise is at least a part of the problem.

So I have to shit on it. I’m not shitting on this show because I hate it, I’m shitting on it because it infuriates me to see a show that so captured everyone’s imagination, and had me so excited with its first series, succumb to its own bullshit, and begin to curl up into its own rectum. I believe that the near-religious adoration for the show is what’s damaging its overall quality, particularly in its attempts to be so much more than just a comedy. Aside from the jokes becoming a little lazier and retreading ground it’s already covered, my biggest issue with the show is the reality that its storytelling ambitions don’t match the ability of its creators, and even more unforgivably, it thinks it’s smarter than it actually is.

Because it’s a nice, organised way to get information across, let’s go over the three main issues I have with Rick and Morty’s writing:

ONE: Ham-fisted Emotional Storytelling

What bugged me about the show from the very beginning is the way is handles the ‘emotional’ side of its comedy-drama ambitions. Rick and Morty has very little subtlety in its storytelling. Every character motivation is telegraphed with spoken dialogue; everything that it’s trying to get across is stated plainly, doing a complete disservice to its smarter elements by concerning itself more and more with a central family-oriented plot that leaves very little for the audience to take away and, in my opinion, to resonate emotionally.

This is very much a problem with the third series. As I said, my favourite Rick and Morty episodes are the ones where the concepts create the depth, and particularly the ones where the concepts and the character storylines compliment each other, as with Total Rickall. But as the show has continued, it feels the need to focus on plots involving the relationships between the central characters first, and attach a weird sci-fi concept to keep it going. Take The Whirly Dirly Conspiracy, or Pickle Rick, or The ABC’s of Beth, or The Rickchurian Candidate, where the focus is way more on the interpersonal drama. This wouldn’t be too bad if such storylines were well-handled, but they’re not, and frankly, I don’t think the show knows what the fuck it’s doing sometimes.

Okay, let me show you what I’m talking about. First of all, one of the main things that irritates me about Rick and Morty is its overreliance on dialogue to express character motivation and even the straight-up themes of the show. This isn’t so bad every now and then; it’s not like this is a completely unacceptable and barbaric way to write fiction, but it’s awkward, and it’s inelegant, and I find its prevalence betrays the writers as wanting to endow the show with more depth and poignancy than they’re capable of giving it.

Here are few examples:

S03E01:

MORTY: “He bails on everybody! He bailed on Mom when she was a kid. He bailed on Tiny Planet. And in case I never made this clear to you, Summer, he bailed on you! He left you to rot in a world that he ruined. Because he doesn’t care, because nobody’s special to him, Summer. Not even himself.”

S03E05:

MORTY: (About Beth solving a problem without Rick) “Is that what this is about? Like you wanna prove yourself?”

MORTY: “You wanna be like Rick? Congratulations, you’re just as arrogant and just as irresponsible! Kissing Rick’s ass isn’t gonna help keep him around, Mom.”

S03E09:

BETH: "Am I evil?"

RICK: "Worse, you’re smart. When you know nothing matters, the universe is yours. And I’ve never met a universe that was into it."

And yes, I’m sorry, but even:

S01E08:

MORTY: "Nobody exists on purpose. Nobody belongs anywhere. Everybody’s gonna die. Come watch TV?"

Look, I get that this is what people like about the show. People like that it's an animated sitcom that addresses nihilism. People like that it has character growth and development (albeit poorly-handled ones) in a sitcom format. And that’s fair enough, because the show is awesome, and if you think it’s flawless, you’re a luckier viewer than me. But, in my opinion, none of the above examples (and plenty more that I can’t be bothered sitting through every single episode to find) feel at all natural, as in they don’t feel as if they’re spoken by the characters, they feel more like they’re spoken by the episode’s writers, either to signpost a character’s motivation or attribute, or to spout some trite concept that the show wishes to get across. The artifice of the dialogue is often way too blatant.

Maybe I’m being unfair. Maybe this is more of a sitcom problem than a writing problem. After all, it makes sense to have characters constantly exposit what’s going on between their characters when you’re not expecting everyone watching to be following every single episode. But you can’t have it both ways and be both a wacky sci-fi sitcom and an introspective family drama if the latter element is so crudely shoehorned into the former. The two aspects of the show just fail to connect a lot of the time, which means that it ends up feeling unnatural and forced, and it aggravates me as a viewer to be told what to think, and especially what to feel.

As is the typical summary of its major flaws, the show is simply trying too hard. Instead of being a fun show about wacky concepts that also has interesting, well-rounded characters or ideas, a lot of the time it feels as if it’s a little desperate to keep things emotional and dramatic when it really doesn’t need to be, and even if it did, the writers just don’t have the capability – they want way more emotional investment than they’re able to properly create. There’ve been a lot of ‘emotional’ moments in this show that have been bum notes for me – Rick’s suicide attempt after Unity dumping him, all the diatribes about meaninglessness that always feel pushed, the sequence with fucking Hurt by NIN. To me, these moments feel like they’re groping for an emotional resonance which hasn’t been earned by the writing.

I mentioned when talking about Rick Potion #9 that its ending was the only time I saw any deftness in its handling of an emotional moment, because it’s nearly the only time where nobody says anything. Nobody has a dramatic speech with a transparent philosophical objective or anything, because there’s no need for it; you can think and feel those things yourself. And that makes it the only ‘emotional’ moment in the whole show that doesn’t come across as forced, but feels completely natural, and is supremely effective.

The best part of episodes like Rick Potion #9 or Total Rickall or even Meeseeks and Destroy is that the concepts were more of a priority than the need for deeper stories between the characters, or at the very least, the characters and the concepts went together, usually because there wasn’t any sort of clumsy character development being written alongside a main plot that didn’t effectively support it. In series three especially, more and more of the core episodic concepts seemed to revolve around the characters and their poorly-realised psychological subplots, which are not nearly as interesting in themselves as when the characters are challenged by the bizarre setpieces, rather than having them occurring alongside, in the background.

TWO: Veneration of Rick as a Character

Rick Sanchez is an escapist fantasy – he’s constantly, constantly, constantly referred to as the smartest man in the universe, he can go anywhere, do anything, is a badass who can fight his way out of any situation, he berates everyone around him, including his family, as being inferior to him while still holding onto their affection simply because he’s so amazingly brilliant and exciting that they can’t bring themselves to imagine life without him. If I had less respect for his creators, I might even mistake him for a Mary Sue.

You can tell that across the globe, and through the yang-infested tubes of the internet, a certain type of man likes to see something of themselves in Rick, what with being smarter than everyone and ultimately brilliant despite being a heartless dickhead. As with Tyler Durden – the number one idol of the arrogant male lacking in self awareness – the obvious counter to complaining about admiration of Rick is the argument that he’s a flawed, complex or misunderstood character who you shouldn’t really want to be like due to all these negative aspects of his personality.

In Fight Club, the moral of the story is that Tyler Durden is everything that’s egregious about masculinity, although this obviously goes under the radar with people who see what they want to see, and this is what the show tries to say about Rick – like, sure, he’s fantastically brilliant and a genius and is the whole reason for the story’s existence, but he’s also got a “bad side”. The problem is, the show doesn’t actually seem to believe it. Rick is still framed as the greatest, coolest person in the universe, even better than other versions of himself, with all his arrogance and contempt being justified because nobody else in the universe can best him.

The problem with Rick being an interesting character is that he’s portrayed as not only a genius but a fucking cosmic force, capable of taking down literally anyone and everyone, and there are no real consequences to this. Morty knows all his bad traits and yet follows him along anyway, even now starting to emulate him, Beth worships the ground he walks on with no adequate justification, Jerry dislikes him but it’s okay because no-one likes Jerry and he gets kicked out anyway. What I’m saying is that Rick is not a compelling character, because he doesn’t have any true complexity. It’s hinted at, talked about, even acknowledged in terms of how much of a nob he is, but none of this actually counteracts his infinite strengths. Even when he does things like, say, get himself imprisoned at the end of series two for the sake of his family, it's completely thrown in the bin the next series as being actually part of a meticulous masterplan that Rick was totally in control of, which is not a real consequence.

Honestly? I don’t like Rick as a character. I dislike him more than Jerry, I dislike him more than Beth.

And let’s talk about Beth. Beth is the most poorly-developed of the show’s central characters. Summer is often left with very little agency, but at least her character is expressed through her shallow adolescence and her haughty attitude. She’s even the one who takes the most jabs at Rick. Beth’s entire existence as a character is in service to Rick, and every one of her character traits stems from her wild adoration for her father (aside from the tacked-on horse surgeon occupation, of course). Beth is emblematic of what’s wrong with the show. I want to know more about Beth, I want to understand the personality she has aside from all her Rick-related neuroses, but the show doesn’t see this is as worth discussing, as Rick is held to be the main event.

What Rick needs is a foil – someone to highlight his weaknesses, and counteract them. Morty does not do a good enough job at this. Originally, it looked like Morty would be the heart of the show, the likeable human side to Rick’s unlikeable outlandishness, but it seems like this has been forgotten about, with Morty’s personality simply aligning itself with Rick’s. Jerry is another contender, because he’s stupid, ineffective and cowardly (he’s also my favourite character, in terms of comedic value), but because of the reverence the show has for Rick and his de facto infallibility, Jerry is left with no redeeming qualities, and as the series has progressed his idiocy is framed more and more as something the audience should despise, despite its comic value, which is a little dissonant considering he’s the character I enjoy watching the most.

One of my favourite moments in the whole show was in Close Rick-counters of the Rick Kind, where Jerry meets a Rick from another timeline who is simple-minded, humble, and kind. This almost made up for Rick’s characterisation the rest of the series, as it presented us with a counterpoint to Rick in the cleverest way, by using a literal, alternate Rick, who gets along with Jerry and is friendly and sympathetic. I adored this character because it was a great way of suggesting that if Rick wasn’t so intelligent, he might be a better person. This is never explored again, however, and Rick’s genius is consistently portrayed as something the audience should find awe-inspiring.

In the end, the show is inconsistent with what it wants from Rick as a character. His motivations, whether it’s his adoration of his family or his self-centred lust for Dr. Who adventures, or maybe even nothing at all because he knows everything’s meaningless, changes depending on what’s needed for a scene, or, more accurately, to explain a decision the scriptwriters need him to make. This leads to a character that, rather than being complex and multi-layered, is shallow and lacking in any concrete foundation. To me, rather than being a good character, I get the feeling that people like Rick because they want to be Rick, and they like to see him run rings around everybody. This is especially apparent in how Morty is becoming more and more like Rick, and how the show seems obsessed with how amazing and brilliant Rick is, even though it’s completely unearned and Rick himself is really a bit of an unlikeable cunt. A character like this might give people what they want, but it doesn’t give anyone what they need.

THREE: Belief in Its Own Hype

This is the show’s biggest crime, and the problem from which all its others are spawned. The first series of Rick and Morty is pure gold, absolute brilliance. It’s hilarious and challenging and all the stuff I wanted it to be. And series two wasn’t bad, either, in fact it was great – a few blemishes here and there, but we were all just so happy to have the show back on the air that nobody really cared; I certainly didn’t. But the show is now stratospheric. It’s a pop culture phenomenon. And it deserves to be – I can’t express enough how refreshing it was to discover its deranged, smart, hysterical universe. But this is, of course, the problem. Fame is a disease. It giveth, and it taketh away. It blesses, and it corrupts. Especially when it comes to the creation of art.

Now this is all speculation. I don’t know why Rick and Morty got worse for me after series one, I’m not privy to the ins and outs of its production, but what I do know is that as the show grew in popularity, it also grew in arrogance. I’m talking about the tone of the show, its very soul. The direction the series has chosen is not at all where I believed it was heading, or should’ve taken. Much of what I’ve just talked about is due to the Belief in Its Own Hype, particularly Rick’s development from wacky and snarky but pretty funny mad scientist to spiteful, humourless, superior god-figure, but returning to my point about the show’s inability to achieve what it wants to in terms of emotional power and storycraft, what irks me about the show is how clever it thinks it is, and how it wants you to know it.

I’m going to shit in everybody’s dessert and declare that I do not like the Pickle Rick episode. I think it’s probably the episode where the problems I have with Rick and Morty are most apparent. First, it’s worth noting that Rick and Morty has a tendency for forced memes, with Szechuan Sauce being the one with the weirdest coverage, and Pickle Rick maybe holding the top spot. Forced memes are an irritating side-effect of the Self-Hype Belief. While the show has played with and lampooned shit like this (The montage of Rick’s ‘many catchphrases’, for instance), I can’t help but feel that the show’s popularity has given it an attitude whereby it anticipates the success and the virality of its ideas in a way that wasn’t possible early on.

But, yeah, Pickle Rick. The episode I mean. What is this episode about? Rick turns himself into a pickle, which I guess is a play on words, to get out of a family counselling session. He’s then batted around by cats and weather until he goes down a drain and has to escape using nothing but his own nonsensically contrived intelligence. The jokes are thin, the dialogue is overwritten within an inch of its life, and while the situation does certainly escalate, unlike in Rick Potion #9 where the escalation is horrific and warped and doesn’t exactly paint Rick in a decent light, the escapades of Pickle Rick turns into one long, trite pastiche that exists for its own spectacle. What’s more, all you get from it is the usual message that Rick is a supercool megagenius, martial artist and general badass. This would all be excusable if its self-indulgence didn’t outweigh its ability to make me laugh.

The secondary storyline, which I guess is technically the central storyline as far as the episode’s purpose is concerned, is Beth, Morty and Summer’s counselling session that Rick refused to attend where, naturally, they talk entirely about Rick. The therapist character herself exists as yet another method to lay all character motivation on the table to be stared at like specimen jars, and after Rick finally decides to arrive just to shit on therapy as something for people below his mighty threshold of wisdom, she responds (a little obtusely) by saying that he’s essentially right but also notes how intelligence doesn't perfect someone's free will and Rick needs to understand the choices he makes and get his shit together. Is... that what all the preceding events were about? At the end, Rick’s back as a human, with him and Beth driving home dismissing the speech and the events of the episode completely, making me wonder what the point of all those gunfights and rat amputations was.

To me, this episode epitomises what is wrong with Rick and Morty’s current mentality. It wants to be seen as nuanced and deeply philosophical while also wallowing in narcissism through proxy. It doesn’t challenge itself, or its viewers, it simply exists as a masturbatory fantasy about ‘intelligence’ (as in ‘magic’) and superiority based entirely around that, and its awkwardly-interjected ponderings are there to service this, while meaning nothing, really. The only other part of series three that made me rage more than Pickle Rick was the end of The ABC’s of Beth where they wax lyrical about intelligence and nihilism, but at least it had some substance in the idea that if Beth has no doesn’t know her own personality (which I think is more due to poor writing than interesting concepts), she could disappear and replace herself with a clone to live another life. That’s actually a cool idea, and actually thought-provoking rather than simply attempting to be, although nothing really comes from it other than a contrivance to bring Jerry back into the family. After all, this is a sitcom.

Therefore, considering this, I posit that Rick and Morty is a show that was originally genuinely smart, cutting-edge, etc, etc, but its wide acclaim has left its creators, if not complacent, then a little too assured of themselves. Being told you’re clever and interesting creates a crushing expectation to carry on being clever and interesting, moreso in fact. And this leads to choices where the thirst for further glory weighs down the quality. I think the creators feel like they need to squeeze an overly cerebral sense of depth into the show that just doesn't fit. I liked Rick and Morty as a hilarious show with strangely touching moments, not a ‘deep’ show that’s also a sarcastic comedy. Because that’s not where Rick and Morty succeeds. It’s just where it wants to succeed.

CONCLUSION

If you’ve made it this far, congratulations, and, y'know, thanks for bothering. I want to reiterate that I don’t hate Rick and Morty, as I know a lot of Twitter users do. Everything I’ve complained about I’ve complained about because I love Rick and Morty because it is really funny, and I don’t want it to turn into shit. I don’t want it to gradually turn into something that’s so up its own arse that I don’t want to be around it anymore, and even more so, I don’t want it to turn shit and people just accept that this is the best Rick and Morty they could get. I’m not trying to say this is an Emperor’s New Clothes situation, but it is, at the very least, an Emperor’s Questionable Choice of New Hat situation.

Or, obviously, everything I’ve said is subjective crap based on misinterpretation and personal bias. In which case, sorry for wasting your time!