A Trip Through the Mortyverse

I have to admit that at this point maybe I’m expecting too much from Rick and Morty. I know over the last couple of seasons, especially season eight, I groused about the fact that it didn’t feel like the series was really going anywhere. This is largely because the earlier seasons of the series seemed to have some kind of mission, a long story about how Rick lost his wife, an evil Rick that was dominating the Multiverse, the Citadel of Ricks that didn’t seem to care about any of it, and an Evil Morty that was working to overthrow the whole system. But season by season each of those plotlines eventually ended, and at a certain point the show didn’t really have anywhere else to go with everything it had set up.

From that point forward the series got by on the idea that it needed to explore Rick now that he’d accomplished everything he set out to do. He didn’t much like himself, that much was plain, so he sank into a kind of existential dread about life itself, and looked for any kind of way to distract himself and find some semblance of happiness in his life. The show is still milking that idea, mind you, with a few different episodes in this ninth season that see Rick still exploring avenues to escape himself and his life, but there doesn’t really seem to be an end goal in mind now for the series.

In fact, I could argue that at this point Rick and Morty has abandoned all semblance of serialized storytelling. Adventures spring up, the characters try to figure out ways out of their problems, and sometimes the best solution seems to be something they accomplished in a previous episode or a previous season, but the characters never reference it at all. Rick and Morty has seemingly become just this weird, animated sitcom about a mad scientist and his equally made family in an increasingly mad universe that has no rails, no control, and no reason to exist except for the fact that the show is still a ratings juggernaut so it has to keep going. And whether you like the season, and the series, or not at this point is really contingent on if you expect more from the show or not.

The two best episodes, as far as Rick’s malaise storytelling is concerned, are the second and the last episodes of the season. The second episode, "Ricks Days, Seven Nights", sees Rick removing his own memories so he can go to a distant planet that’s Earth-like and live for a week as Ed. During that time Ed, who thinks he spends his days as a salesman, goes bowling and fishing with the locals and has the time of his life, worry free. But when Ed realizes that he’s just a construct and that his life isn’t real, he does everything he can to stop Morty and Summer from reclaiming him and putting him back into his real life as Rick.

Meanwhile, the last episode of the season, "Field of Dreams", finds Morty venturing into universes where other Mortys have died, effectively being a funeral tourist. He eventually finds a version of his family that loves him for him, and he contemplates staying there permanently. But when that universe’s Jerry goes off the rails and breaks Morty’s travel gun, Morty realizes this life isn’t all it’s cracked up to be. So he finds that universe’s Rick, who just teaches physics, and convinces him to help build portal tech so Morty can go home.

What’s really interesting about “Field of Dreams” is that it shows us a Rick that never could get his inventions to work so he gave up on that kind of life. He stopped drinking, he got remarried, and by all accounts he was having a great, peaceful life until Morty showed up. Then, getting caught up in the science, that Rick reverts to being the usual Rick, drinking and being an asshole, and his wife leaves him. It shows that Rick is happiest when Rick isn’t Rick, and that really illuminates the show’s whole perspective on the characters.

What it doesn’t work for me, though, is because the series doesn’t really seem to commit to the story as a real throughline. We already know Rick is depressed, and we already understand that he’s a driven mad scientist that has seen too much of the world and pushes everyone away. Seeing another Rick go through the same cycle further fleshes out that idea, yes, but I wouldn’t really call it a new idea. It just adds more details to it. It’s not a bad idea, but the season (and the series, really) need to do more with it.

Meanwhile, it feels like while Rick gets two standout episodes this season (one of which isn’t even for the mainline Rick but one of his alternate versions), the rest of the family has almost no point in existing now. Morty and Summer have basically become little Ricks at this point, with technological enhancements and their own callous disregard for the rest of humanity. Is this supposed to be a statement on how Rick is a bad influence on the rest of the family? If so, the show has already made that point plenty of times before, but at least in past seasons Beth and Jerry seemed to care more about what Rick was doing to their family.

Here, Beth and Jerry have almost nothing to do this season. Their big episode is “Salute Your Morts”, where Morty and Summer get sent off to Summer Camp for being bad kids, and while they’re gone Beth and Jerry get into Summer’s drugs and go on a really wild trip. Bear in mind this is a fantastic episode on its own, one of the funniest this season, but it has almost no bearing on the rest of the season, story wise. Morty and Summer get expelled from school and have to go to Summer Camp, but that whole storyline is never mentioned again afterwards. It’s an episode absolutely packed with gags, so it works on its own, but there are no consequences for the characters afterwards.

And I think that’s a big part of my issue with the season: consequences don’t seem to matter because continuity barely matters anymore. We get one episode that actually cares about any continuity at all, "Jer Bud", where Morty ventures to the planet where his dog, Snowball, set up a dog society for intelligent dogs. What he discovers is that Snowball and his ilk have trained and bred the local humanoid population into weird, misshapen, dog-like creatures to keep as pets, and Morty is horrified. He brings the system down but, after, the whole story is never mentioned again. You honestly don’t care if Morty ever goes back, or if anything bad happens to Snowball afterwards. It’s just an episode referencing a previous episode, without any consequences whatsoever. Rick and Morty has given up worrying about the long term plan.

It does lead to great episodes, like “Salute Your Morts”, like “Field of Dreams”, and like "MortGully: The Last Rickforest" (where Rick leads Morty to a planet with an intelligent tree guarding scientific ingredients, only to get captured and imprisoned in a Hollow Earth world and they have to explore evolution to escape). These are fantastic adventures on their own, but there’s no connective tissue between them. Rick and Morty used to be great about following up on that connective tissue, on carrying plot threads from episode to episode, with characters referencing past adventures and reusing things they learned along the way. None of that occurs anymore, and the show feels weaker for it.

I like Rick and Morty still, I really do, but I have to admit that I don’t care about the show the way I used to. I was hooked on the show at one point, trying to figure out the greater mysteries (like is Morty actually just Rick but on a different timeline?), but now I don’t have any deep thoughts about it at all. As a piece of comedic, disposable material Rick and Morty still works, but the days of my thinking the show had something more to say about its own story are gone. It’s just a weird, animated sitcom now, and I think we have to accept that going forward.