Rick and Morty Hits Cruising Altitude
After a bumpy few seasons marked by drama both real and in-universe, the hit animated series appears to be settling in for a relatively normal new batch of episodes.
What is the platonic ideal of a Rick and Morty episode? For co-creator Dan Harmon, the answer hasn’t changed much since the animated sci-fi series premiered in 2013.
“Rick and Morty inside the flying saucer heading from point A to point B. And then having a disagreement that is basically ideological between Morty's idealism and Rick's nihilism. And then having them crisscross, etc.,” Harmon tells Inverse.
The opening episode of Rick and Morty’s eighth season has almost none of these things. Instead, the plot follows digitized versions of Morty and Summer after Rick traps his niece and nephew in a simulation as punishment for stealing his phone charger, forcing them to live out their adult lives in an absurd world where everyone is obsessed with not stealing chargers. And yet, despite sounding nothing like Harmon’s core concept of the show, the episode, titled “Summer of All Fears,” still feels like classic Rick and Morty. There’s a clever sci-fi premise, which gets pushed to its limits, ultimately revealing a dark twist and a tidy ending that returns our characters to their chaotic status quo.
Harmon readily admits that the episode has the “energy” of the show in its most basic form, even if some of the key components are missing. “There's no inventing of any wheels,” he says, adding that the idea came out of his desire to see Morty and Summer grow into adults without committing to a canonical version of those characters. “It was an emotional inspiration from watching Succession unfold,” he says. “Watching these actors play these adult children.”
Weaving The Matrix and Succession together into a 20-minute cartoon with a delightfully stupid premise may sound impossible, but that’s the kind of thing Rick and Morty has been doing for over a decade. And in Season 8, the show appears to be finally returning to a more stable form after a handful of unruly seasons. With major plotlines like Evil Morty and The Citadel of Ricks mostly resolved (and real-life issues like problematic co-creator Justin Roiland deftly dealt with), the series is cruising towards 100 episodes with a new season that feels surprisingly normal — at least by the cartoon’s ludicrous standards.
Back to Basics
After wrapping up some complex storylines, Season 8 brings Rick and Morty back to its roots.
Adult Swim provided me with four episodes from Rick and Morty Season 8, and they all offer a similar experience: creative sci-fi stories without any of the larger canonical plotlines that fans have demanded for years, even as it weighed the franchise down.
Episode 4, “The Last Temptation of Jerry,” turns Easter into a body-horror adventure as Jerry transforms into a grotesque version of the Easter Bunny and gets hunted by warring alien species pulled directly from the mind of Ridley Scott. (It feels like a spiritual sequel to the show’s excellent Thanksgiving episode, in which Rick transforms himself into a turkey to get a presidential pardon, while accidentally exposing the extraterrestrial origins of the holiday.) Meanwhile, Episode 5, “Cryo Mort a Rickver,” comes closest to Harmon’s vision of classic Rick and Morty, sending the duo deep into the universe where they infiltrate a space-based civilization with a brutal caste system.
Even Episode 3, “The Rick, The Mort & The Ugly,” which returns to the ruins of the Citadel (a multiversal metropolis ruled by an army of Ricks and their obedient Mortys), manages to skirt the plot-heavy storytelling that previous episodes indulged in. Instead, we get a Western post-apocalyptic adventure in the style of Fallout or Mad Max.
While your mileage may vary with each episode, they’re all smart, self-contained stories. That’s not necessarily something you could have said a year ago, when Rick and Morty was still digging its way out of some complex narrative arcs. But the question remains: How long can the show keep this going?
The Future of Rick and Morty
Rick and Morty’s future is looking strong.
The very first episode of Rick and Morty ended with a bold promise: 100 episodes. At the time, it felt like a joke (and perhaps a reference to Harmon’s previous series, Community, and its rallying cry of “Six seasons and a movie”). But in 2018, Adult Swim renewed the series for 70 additional episodes, bringing the total to a clean 100. Since then, Rick and Morty’s run has been extended through Season 12 (and that Community movie is actually happening).
The series is cruising towards 100 episodes (and beyond), but what will Rick and Morty look like by the time it reaches that impressive milestone? One possibility is that the series becomes more like The Simpsons, with a focus on adventure-of-the-week episodes that always reset to the status quo in 20 minutes or less.
“I do agree with that,” Harmon says when I bring up the possibility.
Scott Marder, who’s acted as Rick and Morty showrunner since Season 5, pushes back slightly, suggesting that even as the series continues to stabilize, we’ll still see some larger plotlines and character evolution over the years.
“Most weeks will feel that way,” Marder says. “You can come in, come out. Things will reset.”
Rick’s background antics may become more important in future seasons.
However, if you’re paying close attention, you may notice some larger plotlines playing out in the background. This is how Rick and Morty hopes to reward fans who still want bigger story arcs that move the entire narrative forward.
“They're happening in the background,” Marder says. “Stuff Rick is doing that we don't know we see him doing. But when a season's done, we're like: Oh sh*t. He was kind of working on an XYZ all the way through.”
Based on the episodes I’ve seen so far, there’s not a whole bunch of bigger plot happening. Then again, maybe I’m not paying close enough attention (or maybe that’s why Adult Swim didn’t send me Episode 2). Regardless, one thing seems clear: after a turbulent few years and a few more spent trying to stabilize, Rick and Morty has hit cruising altitude. And there’s no reason to think the show won’t be able to keep this up for many years to come.
No matter where it goes, Rick and Morty will never stop being about Rick and Morty.
One thing is for sure: Dan Harmon has no interest in dramatically changing the show’s format in the future. I’ll leave you with this slightly unhinged quote from the show’s co-creator, which offers a peek into the TV-obsessed mind behind Rick and Morty.
“I just finished binging The Pitt,” Harmon says, unprompted. “And so I don't think things are as simple as declaring which way is the right way to do TV, because that's an obvious example of how TV is absolutely benefiting from eschewing craft that was only necessitated by time-slot-driven, advertising-driven, tune-out-driven sort of things. Knight Rider had to explain Knight Rider every single episode, otherwise you wouldn't understand what the hell was going on. But now, you can spend real time in an emergency room and put it all into immersion.”
Harmon continues: “From my standpoint, 10 seasons into a half-hour animated sci-fi show, for purposes of pragmatism and philosophy, you have to look at it like opening a box of chocolates and not being able to pull one out without the rest of the chocolates coming out on a string. You’re eating them, and they’re going into your throat. So you have to either puke them back up or eat the entire box. These are maybe great techniques to sell chocolate. But that's not the school I come from. I learned to make chocolate differently. I think Rick and Morty has that in its DNA and has to obey that.”
Rick and Morty Season 8 streams weekly on HBO Max.
