Why Does Rick and Morty Feel Different?

[00:00] So, Rick and Morty, a great show that's had some less than great recent seasons. What's uh, what's going on there? Almost every episode in the first three seasons is a classic.

[00:12] Their sharp, funny, have interesting ideas at their core and are very unpredictable. It's some of the most rewatchable TV I've ever seen. Like, I can throw on total recall at any time, watch it all the way through, and still laugh.

[00:25] But I found most of seasons 4 and 5 to be a little lackluster. There are some winning episodes in the bunch, and only a couple that are actually painful to revisit. But most of the episodes have been just pleasing? Passable?

[00:40] Nothing terribly wrong about them, but they're just not quite as tight or impactful as what came before. At least that was my initial impression of the seasons. Some good episodes, some bad episodes. But after thinking about it, I've come to believe that the problems go a little deeper than episodic issues.

[00:55] The real problems affect even the good episodes. Here's what I mean. The core dynamic of the show is between Rick, who seems to know everything and his deeply cynical about life,

[01:08] and Morty, who seems to know nothing but is naively optimistic. Nobody exists on purpose, nobody belongs anywhere, everybody's gonna die.

[01:21] Come watch TV. The dramatic question all of the episodes engage with is this. Is existence meaningless? That question is posed as a result of Rick inventing a way to travel the multiverse with his portal gun.

[01:34] Because he can do that, he's concluded that nothing matters. Like literally everything you think has meaning has no meaning at all. Nothing matters, so he may as well pull out our dicks and rub them on fate's glaring teeth,

[01:47] like we're brushing fate's teeth, but we're using your gross dirty dick. Must be nice. He can do whatever he wants, because if he screws up, he can just move to a dimension where he didn't screw up. There's an infinite number of realities, Morty, and in a few dozen of those, I got lucky and turned everything back to normal.

[02:02] I just had to find one of those realities in which we also happen to both die around this time. Now we can just slip into the place of our dead selves in this reality, and everything will be fine. As a result, he believes having emotional attachments is irrational.

[02:15] Because if one of his family members die, he can just go and get an alternate version of them with little hassle. Something he repeatedly reminds those around him as a way to prove that he does not actually care about them. What's this supposed to accomplish?

[02:27] We have infinite grandkids. You're trying to use Disney bucks at a Caesar's palace here. Or, family means nothing in which case, don't play that card. My access to infinite timelines precludes the necessity of attachment. Rick, can we not leave without my sister?

[02:41] Ah, you have infinite sisters, Morty. I mean, not that I want to spend the rest of my day looking for another one. Even his connection with Morty is given a logical, not an emotional explanation. He keeps Morty around because...

[02:53] You're a camouflage. Camouflage? What are you talking about, Rick? Rick's have a very distinctive intracible brainwave due to our genius. The best way to hide from an enemy's radar is to stand near someone with complimentary brainwaves that make ours invisible.

[03:05] See, when a Rick is with a Morty, the genius waves get canceled out by the... Morty waves. This mindset frees Rick from any responsibility or accountability.

[03:18] He is free to live a hedonistic lifestyle, to do and say whatever he pleases, to act on every impulse, and to be abusive towards everyone else who behaves differently. This is the heart of the conflict on the show. In almost every episode, one member of the Smith family is obsessed with something.

[03:33] Whether that's being a good father, getting the girl, being popular at school, or having an impressive career. They're caught up with the day-to-day of average American life. Then, in Wog's Rick, to tell them how dumb it all is,

[03:45] and that drives the dramatic conflict of the episode. Who is right? Does family mean nothing, or is it the only thing that matters? Does being popular matter, or going your own way? Now, it's no secret that Rick and Morty is heavily influenced by the ideas of HP Lovecraft,

[03:59] an American author who, along with being extremely racist, is also the writer of dozens of horror stories which collectively invented the cosmic horror subgenre. In cosmic horror, the horrors the characters encounter are so alien, enormous,

[04:15] or strange that it makes the characters question the meaning of their own existence. As in, what purpose could my life possibly have if something as big as Cthulhu is out there? If I'm just an insect and a universe so vast that I can never have a meaningful impact on it.

[04:29] Like, what am I doing going to work every day in watching baseball games when my entire planet could be stepped on by an alien god on its way to the bathroom? Or entered into a reality TV show music competition? Rick and Morty takes a comedic approach to all of these ideas.

[04:43] The cosmic horror is the vast scale of the universe as well as the very concept of the multiverse itself. When Rick challenges the Smith family's preoccupations and calls them frivolous, he is pointing at the inherent cosmic horror of the world they live in to prove his points.

[04:58] And this is one of the key elements that gives so much of the show such energy, especially in the earlier seasons. Because in those seasons, the Smith family could still reasonably push back against Rick's ideology.

[05:10] There was a lot of tension there, seeing whether the characters would hold onto their values or slip into Rick's way of thinking. In the last few seasons though, there's been a subtle shift in the way Rick's ideology is handled, in that it's both been quietly sidelined while also being tacitly accepted.

[05:26] So the third season of the show is largely about Rick exerting his dominance over his family. He returns from prison, overthrows the galactic government, and causes Beth and Jerry's divorce in the premiere episode. As he puts it,

[05:48] The rest of the season has him abusing this newfound power until Beth and Jerry get back together, and Rick is forced to accept a more diminished and subordinate role in the family. As a result, in the following seasons, he is not nearly as tyrannical.

[06:01] He doesn't have the power to force his ideology down everyone else's throats quite as much. But at the same time, the rest of the family has come to acclimate themselves to Rick's universe. Morty has long ago dropped the childish innocence that defined his earlier character,

[06:15] and now simply deals with whatever problem Rick causes in his life as if he's doing chores. Summer regularly adopts the hedonistic lifestyle of her grandfather, and Beth, who Rick clones at the end of season three, gets to live both the life of a space hero and the mundane life of a suburban mom.

[06:32] She gets to live both the life she thinks her father approves of, and the one she wants to think matters. The only moral counterpoint is Jerry, who wants to live a life without Rick. Real talk, buddy. Where ya at? Go to hell, Rick. But all of them are at least now aware of the lovecraftian scale of the world they live in,

[06:48] and are fine with it. And that has a lot of consequences on where the show can go, and it's where the last couple seasons have struggled, I think. Once the characters themselves have accepted the cosmic horror of the universe and then still go back to living their regular lives,

[07:02] accepting that what really matters are the moments that you're living right now, it's hard to challenge them anymore. In season one, when flesh-eating grasshopper monsters attack the Smith House, it's terrifying for summer.

[07:14] But in season four, a bunch of time-traveling terminator snakes can show up on their doorstep, and it's just another day for the Smith family. These kinds of stories aren't threatening to the characters or to the audience, because we've seen it plenty of times before.

[07:26] And so have they. That the characters are so often unfazed by the story that they just experienced, leaves many of the episodes feeling pleasant enough to watch, exciting as it's happening, but they're not really impactful.

[07:38] The thing is though, I think the show is totally aware of that. I think the relative frivolity and expendability of the later seasons is something the show is intentional about. Is it possible that the show is purposefully making episodes that feel kind of frivolous and expendable?

[07:55] Okay, so one of the things Rick says constantly, especially in seasons four and five, is something along the lines of let's stop doing these over-serious continuity-driven episodes.

[08:08] Let's just go on light, self-contained adventures. Classic Rick and Morty adventures. You know, just an easy episode that's a parody of a movie that wraps up, and we never think about it again. From now on, Rick and Morty doing a little of this and a little of that.

[08:22] Sometimes we'll do classic stuff, you know, other times we'll do whatever. Sometimes we won't even do anything. Rick and Morty, not doing anything. Morty, the idea was to get back to simple adventures. The Citadel runs on cannon. These kinds of decides are everywhere, and they strike at a difference between what the creators of the show want to make

[08:37] and what their audience wants them to make. Let's back up a second. Season two aired in 2015 and ends on a big cliffhanger. Rick's friend, Bird Person, got shot by his fiance Tammy

[08:49] and Rick turns himself into the galactic government. The fact that it's a cliffhanger contributes to the fanbase's intense anticipation for the next season. Then season three drops in 2017, and this is where the popularity of the show hits his peak,

[09:01] and where the fanbase starts to go insane. It's when you get headlines of people harassing poor McDonald's employees for sejuan sauce. It's when everyone starts screaming pickle Rick at each other, and it's when the, you need a high IQ to understand Rick and Morty meme proliferates.

[09:16] It's at this time that the hardcore Rick and Morty fanbase earns a reputation for being extremely confrontational. Now one of season three's best episodes featured the return of Evil Morty, who takes over the citadel of Rick's, setting up a big confrontation with the main Rick and Morty in a future episode.

[09:31] And another one trolls the audience by offering them a plausible backstory for Rick, but then telling them that it's all fake. So by the time season three is finished, what the fanbase wanted was clear. Continuations of all their favorite plotlines.

[09:43] What's going on with Phoenix Person and Tammy? What's going to happen with Evil Morty, and what's Rick's backstory? I think the creators of the show really felt this pressure to deliver on these stories, but also felt an extreme reluctance to go back to any of them,

[09:56] something they directly tell the audience in several different episodes. So in the story train episode, they make fun of the idea of finishing the Tammy Bird Person and Evil Morty storylines as burning the show out on marketability and broad appeal.

[10:09] Yeah, you're right, Morty. We got all that meta cannon shit out of the way, and now we can just be ourselves. In all of the big continuity driven episodes of seasons four and five, the writers, through Rick, make fun of the very idea of continuity and serialization.

[10:22] Start the way she lived over serialized. Rick often breaks the fourth wall, but in the past he usually did it to make fun of whatever genre the episode was periating. Oh, I'm sorry. Oh, you're right.

[10:34] Oh, real serious. Gotta take real serious, huh? The reason those are fun is because they play on the audience's knowledge of that genre or movie to work, so the audience feels in on the joke. But whenever the show makes fun of the very idea of continuity,

[10:47] the target of the joke is the audience. The show is making fun of you for wanting these kinds of episodes, rather than the classic standalone episodes. But it's hard to get invested in a story when that story is explicitly self-conscious.

[11:00] It feels like the writers are regularly trying to lampshade their own frustrations with their work by pointing out its shortcomings, which just makes me a little more distanced from the episodes themselves. I mean, am I not supposed to like this? Am I not in on the joke if I like this?

[11:15] We're removing ourselves from the sloppy fucked up story and letting snake time travel eat its own tail. I was kind of funny, sometimes mostly burping. Come on kids, we have to go do a fucking piece of shit star wars.

[11:28] But at the same time, the fourth wall breaking critiques of continuity aren't just thesis statements by the writers about what kind of storytelling they prefer. They are also another way to express Rick's ideology.

[11:41] As in, since he believes nothing matters, nothing from the past should affect the future. Continuity implies that their actions have consequences. When Rick wants to live in a fantasy of doing whatever he wants without reprisals.

[11:53] When characters from previous episodes come back to Haunt Rick, it messes with his philosophy. And this is exactly what Evil Morty's criticism of Rick is at the end of season five.

[12:05] In that episode, it's revealed that the central finite curve, which has been talked about since the first season, is actually a section of the multiverse that Rick has separated from the rest of it. So that in every universe within the curve he's the smartest person alive

[12:19] and the only one with access to multiversal travel. It basically allows him to never truly be challenged within this section of the multiverse. Every version of us has spent every version of all of our lives in one infinite crib

[12:31] built around an infinite fucking baby. The infinite crib is both the central finite curve and the concept of the standalone episode. In both, Rick always wins. His mistakes never come back to Haunt him.

[12:43] He can do whatever he wants. So I think the show constantly harping on about this idea fits pretty nicely with all of the ideas the show is already about. At the same time, it means that for most of season four and five, it really feels like we're living in that infinite crib

[12:57] where the stories don't have much of an impact on the audience or the characters. And I think that's where my general sense of malaise comes from in watching them. But, at the end of season five, Eva Morty tears down the central finite curve and travels to a place where Rick never existed.

[13:12] This seems to promise that the show will go in a new direction that Rick's obsession with classic episodic adventures have to be shelved so that he can actually grow. I hope the show can deliver on that and find a way to overcome the challenges it's faced in the past

[13:26] because, like Rick, it can't keep doing the same things and achieving the same results. It has to discover new stories to tell.

[13:38] One part of Rick and Morty that I've always liked is its unique sci-fi world. And a part of writing that I've often struggled with is world building. Or rather, keeping all of my world building ideas sorted in a way that helps me add new ideas or combine them in an interesting way.

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[14:35] Keep writing everyone.