Rick and Morty's writers seem to have finally succeeded in letting go of all the "shoulds" they thought they were beholden to: We should address the fandom's toxicity, we should take back our show from the edgelords, we should go back to the beginning, we should keep outdoing ourselves, we should be smart, we should raise the show's narrative stakes every season.īy replacing its "shoulds," it's more grounded than ever in simply doing. But these more ambitious long-term arcs are kept as added background texture, while the full focus of the episode remains on a self-contained and joyfully non-sequitur plot that packs a whole season's worth of emotional stakes into 22 minutes. Beth and Jerry's ongoing marital journey is another highlight, of course. Some storylines have definitely carried over, like Rick dealing with the Season 4 power dynamic shift that ousted him as the Sanchez family's authoritative patriarch. Another internal battle debated among critics and fans revolved around whether or not the show was still properly balancing its own headassery with enough humor, or too often belaboring highfalutin concepts and/or emotional character arcs that lost the pure comedy of it all. But the episode's straightforwardness, relying more than anything on the show's trademark rapid-fire joke-to-page ratio, is a welcome shift. The Season 5 premiere doesn’t necessarily feel like a return to "classic" Rick and Morty, and nor does it feel like a dramatic departure. Guess we won't be getting Rick and Morty as Blade :( Credit: adult swim After crash landing back home, the episode then launches into a wholly unrelated and delightfully bizarre plot about a nemesis of Rick's we've never seen before. While more subtle than Season 4's overt meta-commentary, the symbolic message to viewers reads loud and clear. When they take off on their spaceship, Rick and Morty leave behind these potential plotlines (some maybe even referencing popular fan theories) to implode on themselves. Instead, the titular characters walk, wounded and bloodied, through what appear to be various portals revealing glimpses into their other potential realities. While the premiere does start in medias res, with Morty fighting to save the duo from some interdimensional threat or another, it isn't a plot carried over from the last season - as some of the show's most popular premieres have been in the past. Season 5's premiere instead delivers an episode that makes good on the promise that last season only paid lip service to: a hard reset for one of the internet's most contentious and hotly debated shows. The show is at least trying to mature past that overly self-conscious and self-referential back-and-forth with its own fandom over what Rick and Morty should or should not be. Whether or not the creators took this general consensus about Season 4's disappointments to heart, what does seem clear is that Rick and Morty Season 5 is done getting in the mud with us. Rick and Morty Season 5 is done getting in the mud with us. The effect of this excessive navel-gazing on the overall season was, to many critics and fans, lackluster - though even a lackluster season of Rick and Morty is still pretty damn great. More egregiously, the sixth episode's plot basically boils down to a string of dense, straight-to-camera in-jokes about co-creator Dan Harmon's now-infamous storytelling structure. More than once, characters echoed a common online edgelord refrain that demanded they go back to “classic" Rick and Morty adventures. Season 4's response was to double down on the show's natural tendency toward meta-commentary, embedding the creators' anxieties about the show's identity into the episodes. 'Solar Opposites' Season 2 gives 'Rick and Morty' a run for its money There was the added pressure of sky-high expectations causing year-long delays between Seasons 2 and 3, and a vocal minority of fans who harassed Season 3 and 4's new women writers, and the subsequently memed stereotype of those insufferable Reddit edgelord-type fans, and then the creators' public denouncements of said fans, and open discussions over how to create a more sustainable writing process for their unprecedented 70-episode deal in 2018. But if the Season 5 premiere (titled "Mort Dinner Rick Andre") is any indication of what's to come, the beloved Adult Swim comedy is treating 2021 like the clean slate it so desperately needed to not buckle under the weight of its own cultural significance.Įver since its transformation from the weird little fucked-up cult favorite underdog into a full-blown mainstream phenomenon so popular that hardcore fans nearly caused riots at various McDonald's in 2017, the subculture bred around Rick and Morty has threatened to overshadow the show itself. There are few shows that carry quite as much meta baggage as Rick and Morty.
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