Rick and Morty Season 6 Offers a Multiverse of Meta Humor: Review
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The post Rick and Morty Season 6 Offers a Multiverse of Meta Humor: Review appeared first on Consequence.
The Pitch: When Season 5 of the Adult Swim hit Rick and Morty left off a year ago, Rick Sanchez (co-creator Justin Roiland) and his grandson Morty Smith (also Roiland) had been betrayed by an Evil Morty from a parallel universe, who’d become president of the Citadel in order to break the Central Finite Curve and escape to a Rick-free section of the multiverse.
Picking the story back up with Season 6, Rick and Morty have been left stranded in space, slowly starving to death in a broken saucer, with no more fluid left in Rick’s portal gun. And either you’ve been watching the show faithfully for the last five seasons, or the above paragraph makes absolutely no sense to you.
Rick and Morty has always been a relentlessly self-aware show, with the brilliant but misanthropic scientist Rick frequently breaking the fourth wall to point out a narrative cliché or acknowledge that any given story is, in fact, taking place within an episode within a season of television. But the show’s push-and-pull struggle between a continuity-heavy story arc and a static series of one-off adventures explicitly became one of the show’s central conflicts by the end of Season 5: Rick Sanchez hates serialized drama and word prefer to “keep it episodic” with simple adventures, and thinks they’ll “jump the shark” if Morty makes him dig too deep into his sad backstory.
The first two episodes of Season 6 that have been screened for critics continue to split the difference between these differing philosophies. The first episode, “Solaricks,” continues to ponder some big questions about how this brazenly silly but relentlessly creative show actually functions.
And the second episode, “Rick: A Mort Well Lived,” is a fast and wildly entertaining standalone adventure. One thing both episodes have in common: callbacks to the Season 2 episode “Mortynight Run,” which introduced the Jerryboree (a daycare for multiverse variants of Morty’s father Jerry), and Roy: A Life Well Lived, an arcade game in which you speed run through a simulation of an ordinary man’s entire life.
Suffering From Success: Rick and Morty co-creator Dan Harmon was previously best known for Community, a network sitcom that garnered a passionate cult following but was perpetually “on the bubble” at NBC, eventually struggling to fulfill the first half of its inside joke-turned-promise to fans for “six seasons and a movie.”
So the more immediate success of Rick and Morty has always felt like vindication for Harmon. And in 2018, after Rick and Morty’s third season garnered the best ratings in Adult Swim history, the show’s creators emerged from negotiations with Cartoon Network with an unusual announcement: They’d been renewed for seven seasons at once, keeping the show in business for many years to come.
Having now seen nearly half the episodes from that seven-season order, I would venture that Cartoon Network’s big investment in Rick and Morty has paid off. Creatively, Roiland and Harmon are still making tightly written half hours that mix goofy pop culture references, grisly violence and puerile bathroom humor with bewitchingly clever storytelling and surprisingly affecting moments of pathos. And with long-term plans to keep the show on the air until at least 2026, there’s a sense that they can think bigger, with multiverse storylines so insanely complex they make the last few MCU movies seem easy to follow.
Rick and Morty (Adult Swim)
But overexposure can be poisonous in comedy, removing the element of surprising and making a once-fresh comic voice unpleasantly familiar. Rick and Morty is everywhere these days, partnering with State Farm and Wendy’s for recent promotional campaigns, and launching a forthcoming spinoff series, Rick and Morty: The Anime.
The show’s creators also have their hands on a lot of other projects, mostly more animated series that retain a similar sensibility. Roiland’s Solar Opposites is in its third season on Hulu. The Dan Harmon-produced Little Demon just debuted, and another show he created, Krapopolis, is premiering later this year. (Roiland’s name trended on Twitter last weekend after clips of his upcoming XBOX game High On Life were released, but the reaction was overwhelmingly negative and centered on its similarity to his other work.)
Family Matters: In recent seasons, Rick and Morty has increasingly become a bizarre gallery of parallel universe Ricks and Mortys that can be exhausting to encounter. At one point in the new season, we meet we meet a whole new set of characters, of all ages and races, who all stutter and say “ah jeez” in that familiar whiny Morty voice. But thankfully, not every single character in this show is some kind of variation on Rick or Morty, and the other members of the Smith family can reliably liven up a scene.
Morty’s pathetic father Jerry remains hilarious thanks largely to the stellar voice work of Saturday Night Live vet Chris Parnell. And in “Solaricks,” we meet a parallel universe Jerry who’s surviving in a grim apocalyptic wasteland, a total badass with long glowing hair and a beard. It’s fun to hear Parnell give us a new kind of Jerry, who’s a bit smarter, tougher, and more self-aware than any iteration of the character we’ve seen before.
“Rick: A Mort Well Lived” is an entertaining vehicle for Morty’s sister Summer (Spencer Grammer), who Rick asks to “do a Die Hard” on a group of alien terrorists who have hijacked over their favorite video arcade, Blips and Chitz. The only problem is that Summer hasn’t actually seen Die Hard. But she still manages to pull a few John McClane-style one-liners while outsmarting an alien voiced by Peter Dinklage, perfectly cast as a Jeremy Irons-style Die Hard villain.
The Verdict: Rick and Morty is deep into a groove now, and by now you either love it or hate it. There are subtle new wrinkles in the story, and even some signs of maturity (the show doesn’t rely as much as it once did on Rick burping and vomiting for easy comic relief). But there’s nothing in the new episodes that will turn off fans of Season 5, or win back someone who lost interest after Season 2. If a backlash to the show feels inevitable now, it won’t be triggered by these first two episodes, which are up to the same standard of the show’s recent output.
Season 6 so far is full of references to earlier episodes that will land better if you’re the kind of obsessive fan that’s watched all the previous seasons multiple times (to say nothing of references to Raiders of the Lost Ark, or The Usual Suspects). But there are also some entertaining new riffs that may well enter the annals of the show’s most popular bits.
Mr. Frundles, an adorably volatile creature who turns up at the end of “Solaricks,” feels the kind of instantly memorable one-off gag that could turn into a recurring character like Birdperson or Mr. Poopy Butthole. And “Rick: A Mort Well Lived” concludes with a nod to Die Hard with A Vengeance that indicates that the Die Hard-themed episode may someday get a sequel of its own.
Where To Watch: Season 6 of Rick and Morty will air on Cartoon Network’s Adult Swim block beginning September 4, and will stream on HBO Max.
Trailer:
Rick and Morty Season 6 Offers a Multiverse of Meta Humor: Review
Al Shipley
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