People may not be as fond of cartoons as they used to be, but there’s no denying one hasn’t heard of Rick and Morty, which is arguably the most famous adult cartoon today. If you’re a fan of Back to the Future’s Doc and Marty, the dynamic is pretty much the same. Rick and Morty is about a scientist and his grandson going on wacky adventures throughout time and space.
The third season of Rick and Morty is its most awaited season yet, after the second season’s finale – a finale that set a high bar high adult cartoon TV. Rick Sanchez surrendered and was incarcerated in the Galactic Federation’s maximum-security prison, having been arrested for “everything.” After an almost 2-year hiatus, the show returned on April 1, 2017 with a surprise airing of the third season’s pilot episode “The Rickshank Redemption” as an April Fools stunt. For a show that took such a long hiatus, you would think that people would be over it by now, but Rick and Morty reels you back in with its scifi creativity, absurdities, and dark humor and proves that it’s a show worth coming back to.
The pilot episode of the season started with Rick in a diner with the entire Smith family, telling them how he got out of the prison – by using “handmade scifi tools to take out highly trained alien guards,” which would seem like a pretty lazy explanation. But it was all actually in Rick’s brain, which was being used by a Galactic Federation agent to gather information via brain-link. Along the agent’s mission to get the code of Rick’s first portal gun, they were able to revisit his memories – specifically 1998, when McDonald’s had Rick’s favorite Szechuan McNuggets sauce (a promotional campaign for Disney’s Mulan) and also the day Rick lost Beth, which turned out to be the same day he invented the original portal gun.
Of course, this all turned out to be a fabricated origin story (I still believe it, though) as the code was actually a virus for Rick to take control of the brain-link. He was able to transfer his consciousness to the agent’s body, escape the prison with the help of the Citadel of Ricks (more or less), and dismantle the galactic government by changing its centralized currency from one to zero. What a domino effect, huh? It was all going back to normal until Jerry, unhappy with his father-in-law’s return, finally put his foot down and made Beth choose between him and Rick. Naturally, Beth chose his father and thus began the overarching plot of the entire season. “Welcome to the darkest year of our adventures,” as Rick has said, proved to be correct.
After the controversial lack of female writers for Rick and Morty – and Adult Swim in general – the show added female writers for the rest of the third season. While there was an outcry (which Harmon addressed), presumably from the male audience, against this “feminist” move, I would argue that this was a great – if not the best – season.
The rest of the season was heavily driven by the effects of Beth and Jerry’s divorce towards Summer and Morty. In “Rickmancing the Stone”, both Summer and Morty were acting out. Summer was behaving uncharacteristically as she unflinchingly kills the habitants of the diesel-fueled post-apocalyptic Earth they went into. She even got into a relationship with one of the Death Stalkers that mirrored Beth and Jerry’s. Meanwhile, Morty was able to vent his frustrations concerning the divorce through his arm which was serum-injected with “muscle memory” – a serum that gave memories and enormous strength to body parts.
In the famous “Pickle Rick” episode, the show gets unnecessarily gory. Rick turned himself into a pickle to avoid having to go to therapy with Beth, Summer, and Morty. While it has become well-known for how brutal and violent it is, this episode was actually surprisingly insightful. The therapy session revealed that Summer had apparently been sniffing enamel and Morty had a desk-wetting incident. While both of them denied that those behaviors had something to do with the divorce, they might have been factors subconsciously. Beth defended Rick for turning himself into a pickle, another instance showing that Beth immensely admires him, despite Rick leaving him when she was young, on top of all other things he has done. In “The ABC’s of Beth,” Beth realizes how similar she is to his father. She went into a killing frenzy in Froopyland and as a young girl, Beth would often make Rick invent borderline psychotic weapons to use on other kids. She also discovered that Rick could replace her with a clone so she could travel and “find herself” or she could choose to stay with her family and be content. However, her choice was ambiguous.
Having previously mentioned Beth’s issues, the season does not shy away in pointing out Jerry’s flaws as a person as well. Living alone in an apartment, Jerry was wallowing in loneliness and self-pity as seen in “The Whirly Dirly Conspiracy.” Rick had to drag him out of the apartment to an intergalactic resort. However, trouble ensued as Risotto Groupon conspired with Jerry to assassinate Rick. Jerry agreed when Rick admits that he was the reason why Beth broke up with him. In the end, Rick ended up being the one having to save him, while telling Jerry how awful he is – how he uses his pitiful nature to control others, how he ruined Beth’s life by making her feel sorry that he got her pregnant, etc. In “the ABC’s of Beth,” he began dating Keara, an alien, as a rebound. Jerry wanted to break up with her but was scared of her powers and warrior nature. In the process of helping Jerry break up the relationship, Summer and Morty got him to admit that he was a selfish, sexist, closeted racist.
This season wasn’t always focused on the divorce. There were still Rick-and-Morty-centric adventures, some of which even poked fun of how the show’s storyline patterns tend to be. In “Vindicators 3: The Return of Worldender,” the duo join the Vindicators once again on a mission to defeat Worldender. Apparently, there wasn’t a second Vindicators episode as the team didn’t want to invite Rick. The next day, however, Rick had apparently already killed everyone in Worldender’s base, including Worldender, and had set up Saw-like games while he was inebriated. Morty unenthusiastically solved every puzzle correctly, each puzzle revealing how ineffective the Vindicators team was. Normally, Morty would panic and scream in a similar situation, so it was fascinating to see how his attitude towards dealing with their adventures has evolved.
Two other episodes that poked fun of the usual Rick and Morty plotlines were “The Ricklantis Mixup” and “Morty’s Mind Blowers.” The Ricklantis Mixup, which I must say was the best episode of the season (and of the whole show), was supposedly going to show Rick and Morty’s adventure to the lost city of Atlantis, but instead was focused on the Citadel of Ricks. The episode tackled institutionalized discrimination, police brutality, and corruption, which almost felt like a critique of present day America. The episode also set up a new villain, Evil Morty – the new president of the Citadel of Ricks.
In “Morty’s Mind Blowers,” we find out that Rick occasionally erases traumatic parts of Morty’s memories, some of which he voluntarily wanted to be removed, and some weren’t. After finding out that Rick had intentionally erased some it, Rick and Morty fight and accidentally erased both of their memories, which Summer restored later on. Rick and Morty woke up believing they slept through an entire interdimensional cable episode – one that the show regularly does every season, except the third.
After what one could assume was a traumatic escapade, Rick and Morty go to a spa to rid themselves of their bodies’ toxicity in “Rest and Ricklaxation.” Their toxic selves – Toxic Rick was the rude, evil genius part of himself and Toxic Morty was the anxious and self-loathing part of himself – were flushed out from their real selves. Toxic Rick turned out to be the one that cares for Morty as Healthy Rick convinced him to merge back and save the world.
In the finale episode, “The Rickchurian Mortydate”, Rick and Morty confront the President of the United States about their lame Ghostbusters-like tasks. Rick and the President fight for Morty to get a selfie with him, while Beth ponders her existence. She believes that she was actually a clone and the real Beth took off, which Rick continually denied until the end of the episode. Beth and Jerry get back together, and the Smiths were happy once again. As Beth said, “things will be like season 1, but more streamlined.” She doesn’t seem to care anymore if she was the clone.
Compared to the previous season’s finale, this wasn’t as greatly received by fans. The season introduced Evil Morty and Phoenix Person – an evil, reincarnated Bird Person – which a lot of people expected to draw out as a bigger plot, but didn’t. However, while people liked the fight scenes between Rick and the President, I thought it didn’t help much with the plot and was completely unnecessary. It was also disappointing to see certain character arcs develop but then trashed since the finale pretty much ended as a reset, but one could assume that beneath the Smith’s fool’s paradise lies a darker truth.
Overall, this season may be the darkest season yet; each episode showed how certain situations bring out the worst in each character. Morty and Summer, particularly, became noticably apathetic and warped with every misadventure they face.
However, it wasn’t all dark; Rick and Morty was unusually more meta this season. Even though the former seasons did not have a lack of meta jokes, this was the most self-aware season yet, making fun of the show itself – its episodic narrative, storyline tropes, etc – instead of existential nihilism that almost comes off as pretentious.
The season revolved mainly on Beth and Jerry’s divorce, but the fans are not as invested with Beth and Jerry’s marriage as they are with Rick and Morty’s adventures, especially the nerdy male audience; they only care about the scifi and philosophy mainly focused on existential nihilism – just look at how the scenes that stick to them are related to it: “Wubba lubba dub dub”, “Existence is pain”, “What is my purpose?”, etc).
In my opinion, it was a good season, more so that it didn’t try to top last season. Dan Harmon has a story breaking process that he uses for episodic, character-driven writing. It was great to see this unfold in Rick and Morty in a way that the story was in a different stage, but the structure, tone, and certain elements that the fans loved from the show remained.
Lois Lorraine Reyes
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