‘Rick and Morty’ Is Back and Doesn’t Miss Justin Roiland One Bit

Alan Sepinwall
·5 min read
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RAM_704b69 - Credit: Adult Swim
RAM_704b69 - Credit: Adult Swim

In March of 2014, I met Dan Harmon at Burbank’s venerable Smoke House for a long interview. We were there to talk about his unexpected return to Community, the NBC comedy he created and ran for three seasons, before being forced out for a year. But this was only a few months into the run of Harmon’s other TV project, the Adult Swim sci-fi comedy Rick and Morty, which Harmon created with Justin Roiland, who also provided the voices of the title characters. (“Rixty Minutes,” one of my favorite episodes, would debut the week after this conversation.) Throughout the meal, Harmon would punctuate various answers by slipping into an impression of mad scientist Rick. It was such a note-perfect recreation of the tone and cadence of Rick’s voice that I began to wonder if Justin Roiland existed at all, or if he was just a fictional alter ego Harmon created while he had a lot of time on his hands during his Community absence.

Justin Roiland is, unfortunately, very real, and has been accused of domestic abuse and sexual assault over the past year. The allegations were enough to get Roiland dropped from any active involvement on both his Hulu series Solar Opposites and Rick and Morty itself. Solar Opposites returned in August with actor Dan Stevens replacing Roiland as the voice of its lead alien, Korvo. And Rick and Morty enters its own post-Roiland era this weekend with the launch of it seventh season.

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Adult Swim is keeping the identity of the new voice actor (or voice actors) a secret until Sunday’s premiere. But here’s the thing I didn’t yet realize on that night in the Smoke House: almost anyone can do at least a passable impression of Rick and/or Morty if they put their minds to it.

In every pop culture generation, there’s at least one actor or character whom a certain type of guy(*) loves to imitate: William Shatner, Sean Connery, Beavis and/or Butt-Head, Austin Powers, Matthew McConaughey, Borat, etc. Some lend themselves to just quoting familiar lines like “My wife!” or “Oh, behave!” Others prove versatile enough to be used for improvised monologues. Rick, Morty, and the rest of Roiland’s characters belong to the latter group. Find a bro under the age of 30, maybe even 35, and odds are high that he can credibly riff as Rick.

(*) And I have very much been this type of guy, I must admit.

The new season opens with a scene at the Smith family dinner table where Beth (Sarah Chalke), Jerry (Chris Parnell), and Summer (Spencer Grammer) do most of the talking. It’s almost as if Harmon and the creative team want to reassure fans that the rest of the voice cast is still in place, and that all will be well. If so, it’s ultimately unnecessary. Within minutes, we’ve heard a lot from Morty, Rick, and Smith family friend Mr. Poopybutthole, and they sound more or less exactly as they always have. It’s possible that true obsessives might notice very slight differences in intonation on certain words or phrases. But all the former Roiland characters ring much closer to his performances than, say, the Simpson family does in modern episodes where Dan Castellaneta and Julie Kavner are in their 60s and 70s. So there’s no need at all to worry on that front.

Adult Swim gave critics the first two episodes of Season Seven. Neither represents the series at its best. But that owes less to Roiland’s absence on the creative side and more to the sheer ambition of Ricky and Morty making it fundamentally uneven. At times, it can be as audacious, thoughtful, and/or as funny as anything television has produced in recent memory. At others, its reach can exceed its grasp, or it can disappear up its own poopybutthole.

The season premiere, “How Poopy Got His Poop Back,” brings together a number of recurring characters, including Bird Person (Harmon) and Squanchy (Tom Kenny), but it’s mostly a collection of pop culture gags and spoofs. The show can do these incredibly well (again, see “Rixty Minutes,” which involves Rick building a TV that allows him to watch programming from parallel realities). These just happen to feel more familiar than the series’ better jokes in that vein, though it’s amusing to see the convergence of a few iconic cinematic figures I’m embargoed from naming here.

The second episode, “The Jerrick Trap,” feels much closer in spirit to what’s specifically a Rick and Morty story. It focuses on the mutual hatred between Rick and Jerry. It shows Rick once again finding the most convoluted solution possible to a simple conflict — in this case, Jerry’s suspicion that next door neighbor Gene (Tom Kenny again) has stolen his rake — while insisting that his approach is the only one that makes sense at all. And it involves travel to alien worlds, graphic violence, and the notion of Rick as the most feared man across every galaxy and timeline. (When a young alien mobster seems to not know who Rick is, his annoyed boss explains, “Underworld legend? Chaotic neutral sci-fi guy?”) It’s not the funniest episode, but it’s very much in the tradition of what it does that no other show can do.

At one point in that episode, the other members of the Sanchez family find a note Rick and Jerry have left for them. Summer wonders, “Should we read it in Rick’s voice, or Dad’s?” Whatever character voice is necessary, Rick and Morty still has it, even if its comedic voice isn’t on its strongest possible display at the start of the new season.

Season Seven of Rick and Morty debuts October 15 on Adult Swim, with episodes releasing weekly. I’ve seen the first two.

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