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2:5 Get Schwifty
This episode is all about giant heads appearing and forcing the Earth to take part in an intergalactic singing contest. Perhaps the most bizarre thing about the show now is that it has a black President! The trailer for Ice T's new film after the credits sounds about on a par with Jupiter Ascending or the Thor series, and maybe seems more promising!

The best part of this episode is the way it shows what happens to people left out of the loop with regards to the actual plans to save the Earth as Beth, Jerry and Summer end up in a religion that worships the giant heads perhaps a bit too fervently! I especially like that it gets at the way that people might not actually 'believe', but stick with the religion because of all of the practical Earthly benefits that it can provide: keeping children in line and behaving better with a 'purpose' than they would if left to their own devices (literally in that this is the first time Summer is really off of her smartphone!), and promising Beth promotions that she could only dream about without being a member ("You will go from horse surgeon, straight over human surgeon, to 'Head' of medicine!")

2: 6 - The Ricks Must Be Crazy
"This just sounds like slavery, but with extra steps"

The World On A Wire episode, as Rick and Morty go inside their car battery to find out why it is not working. It turns out that Rick has created a small universe with a planet inside it full of people making energy that he can siphon off. But unfortunately some enterprising scientist has created a new form of labour saving energy within that universe, which is another, smaller universe. And so on...

Will Rick and Morty escape back up through the levels before their in universe rival gets there before them? A really great episode, particularly for Morty's exasperated sign off to the forest people for their backward behaviour and for the surprisingly devastating end of someone left having to keep a fake universe going to ensure their real existence continues. I suppose that is always the potential danger of meeting your Creator and fully unravelling the secrets of your universe.

This is all whilst Summer stays securely locked inside the car, where nothing bad happens to her at all.

2:7 - Big Trouble In Little Sanchez
The perils of aging, as Rick puts himself into a younger clone body to solve vampire mysteries at his grandchildren's high school, only to become intoxicated by youth, leading to a rather bloody conclusion! Very interesting ideas here of people potentially doing physical damage to themselves because they are more interested in having short term fun, along with Morty using Rick to get closer to Jennifer suggesting how easy it is to put any concerns for others aside when the side benefits are working in your favour.

Meanwhile Beth and Jerry go off world to deal with their marriage issues and end up destroying an entire psychiatric facility Jurassic Park-style by their projections of each other (one a giant malevolent insect; the other a rather wimpy worm) escaping and wreaking havoc! (Because humans are 'less evolved' than aliens and therefore instead of battling to the death their projections of each other become co-dependent!) Again the Beth and Jerry story is the much more interesting one, with the nice idea that Beth is so strong and powerful in Jerry's projection in either insect conqueror or light emitting goddess form! And that Beth can help to bulk out Jerry's view of himself a little too, at least as long as he does not say anything to ruin the moment!

In The Ricks Must Be Crazy, I love Morty trying to make light of Nathan Fielder's character thinking about his dad dying - "old lady science, huh?"

Get Schwifty is probably my go-to episode - "The Dream? You guys haven't heard of THE DREAM?". Keith David is awesome in this.

I feel like this show is really hit and miss, and probably only really like about one episode in four, but when it works it really works – weirdly (particularly after a mostly sub-par season), I thought the Season 3 finale (The Rickchurian Mortydate) was one of the best episodes of the entire series.

(And while not R&M per se, as an Australian I did find Bushworld Adventures strangely relatable...)

2:8 Interdimensional Cable 2: Tempting Fate
This is the 'watching TV' episode to match season 1's Rixty Minutes, and which seems to be the show's annual equivalent to the Treehouse of Horror (The Simpsons) or Anthology of Interest (Futurama) episodes for allowing the show to go off into freeform stream of consciousness bizarre gags. I have already mentioned the Jan-Michael Vincent film trailer (the all action equivalent of "Ball Fondlers" from season 1) in the passages thread which is amazing, but the obscure, abstractedly kinky(?) creation of the plumbus is also great! And the eyehole man creeps me out! Whilst all this is going on Jerry is struggling to hold on to his manhood, which allows for a great cameo from an alien voiced by Werner Herzog (!) providing a very Herzogian musing that "their entire culture is built around their penises"!

2:9 Look Who's Purging Now
Similar to episode 2 of this series, Mortynight Run, in the premise that Morty wants to intervene in an injustice that is occurring which only leads to death on a wider scale, this is the episode based on The Purge with Morty shifting his views on the rightness of such a thing from one extreme to the other! (It only takes being forced to listen to somebody's interminably bad screenplay to externalise those homicidal impulses!) Whilst Rick just murders when it is fun to do so, rather than to work out repressed rage! (It turns out you can murder someone with just a spoon if you have to!) I particularly like the twist ending that tries to assure us that Morty is back to normal (perhaps in response to all of the character swapping from earlier in the show?), only to immediately negate that suggestion that it was Morty being 'forced' to act out of character!

It also perhaps has the best teenager-parent interaction in the Summer and Jerry subplot (I'm on Summer's side in that exchange!)

2:10 The Wedding Squanchers
I'm glad that Tammy and Birdperson's squanch developed over the series to the point where they get squanched! They seem squanch for each other, and almost too good to be squanchy! Its also never a truly successful squanch unless squanching breaks out, so they should not beat themselves up over that! A shame it happened before they cut the squanch though.

Also the family shopping for a new home planet on the run from the Galactic Federation offers the choice between a number of unappealing habitats reminiscent of Interstellar's planets!

Spoiler

So with some of the comments previous in the thread about things going more internal to Rick's character and Rick giving himself up to the Federation at the end and getting placed in alien prison, I am preparing myself for a Minority Report-style twist in season 3!

Also since both season finales have revolved around get-togethers that Birdperson and Tammy have important supporting roles in, I am curious as to how season 3 will end now! Maybe it was just coincidence, as I cannot imagine either of them coming back in their original forms! In its sacrifice to return the remains of the family to an Earth that has just discovered its place in the universe and is beginning to integrate with alien life (mostly through tourism), this also seems to reinforce the comments on Total Rickall earlier in the thread:

It fits in with the previous episodes in the way that the brain parasite is creating happy, fake, too good to be true memories of relationships, which have to be systematically destroyed to get back to the imperfect real world where they are just left with actual real people that they kind of hate (or at least find annoying) to varying degrees, mostly because they each actually have an existence independent from each other that puts them in conflict. Lots of the alien beings in the series seem to be trying to impose some sort of unity on individuals, which removes conflict, grants desires and leads to a kind of bland form of peace and harmony, but which also removes the opportunity for individuals to have their own thoughts and feelings about a situation from them, even if it leads to them living unfulfilled or in pain. Maybe it is rather Schopenhauerian, though perhaps not to the extent of Neon Genesis Evangelion!

colinr0380 wrote: Thu Feb 28, 2019 8:56 amIn the wake of Rick and Morty appearing on mainstream UK television for the first time I have finally got around to watching my discs of the series. I do have one question though, which is probably going to be the most Simpsons nerd question ever and perhaps is only occurring to me because I have watched the episode a couple of times, but in Close Rick-Encounters of the Rick Kind we follow the Rick and Morty that we know into the multiplicity of other parallel universe Ricks and Mortys and they are brought before the "Council of Ricks" where we learn then name of his universe (C-137) and that this Rick has always been "the malcontent, the rogue".

Yet a few episodes earlier our Rick & Morty destroyed their universe by transforming everyone into Cronenbergian abominations and then bailed on their universe and took the place of a Rick & Morty who had actually solved the problem but then died immediately afterwards! So does that mean the Rick that is being told that he is the 'rogue' is actually not? Do the other Ricks know that this Rick is an 'impersonator' from another universe? And how many times can I say Rick in a sentence? Rick, Rick, Rick...

I am probably overthinking things wildly but it is the kind of series where it both makes sense to overthink and feels a bit silly to do so at one and the same time! I am really curious if this will come up again in the series, as an aside or even a major plot point.

I have currently just started season 2 and love the first episode which deals with the potentially universe shattering consequences of stopping time for six months between the two seasons! Poor Albert Einstein though, getting brutally beaten in an unfortunate case of mistaken identity!

tenia wrote: Thu Feb 28, 2019 9:52 amThe Pocket Mortys game plays quite a lot (IIRC) on this. Basically, it's all a Rick-centered world (or, rather, universe of universes), and Mortys are indeed pretty much a commodity. That's why I never really gave much thought to what you described, because the answer I spontaneously thought was "well, Rick probably travelled many universes already and the family we're shown isn't even his original one" !
From what the article gathers, it seems to be indeed the case.

I have been listening through the commentary tracks on season 2 and one comment from the season finale episode suggested that they were going to pick up on this thread, though eventually did not in order to keep the ending all about Rick:

Spoiler

When the family return to Earth after Rick's arrest, there is a brief scene of them being DNA-tested at the airport before being thrown out onto the street. While it plays just like a small gag about Homeland Security treatment of new arrivals in the episode, on the commentary track it was mentioned that at one point this test was going to reveal Morty as not being from the current universe and he was going to be detained to get returned to the Cronenberg-ed universe, to put him in a similarly awful series ending cliffhanger position to rival Rick in the Federation prison!

The third season amps things up quite considerably. Its much darker and violent. Summer is taking after Rick and Beth and is probably the most level headed character of the season (except when it comes to boys). Beth belatedly starts to question her entire sense of self after being the only member of the family not tampered with (as far as we know). Jerry somehow becomes so pathetic even the wind knows it. Morty seems to take after his father in the sense that he needs his pathetic side to reign him in and stop him from turning into a complete conscience-less unfeeling sociopath able to casually re-enact scenes from Boiler Room. We also keep getting shown 'decent Ricks', often at the point that they turn into the Rick we know (usually when he has nothing to live for. But they're all 'fake Ricks'). Everyone dies multiple times, and that is often the least horrible thing that happens to them. This is apparently made post Dan Harmon's divorce and that appears to have become the theme of the whole season, as Beth and Jerry decide to split up and everyone goes crazy and acts out about it in response.

It also has some of the very best episodes of the show:

3.1: The Rickshank Redemption
"What's going on?"
"It's hard to tell. He may have manifested some sort of butt."
"He can do that?"
"He is the smartest man in the universe"

Well that escalated quickly. With Rick in Galactic Federation space prison and Summer determined to save him, all of the dark secrets of the past get unearthed. It is like a more elaborate version of M. Night Shyam-Aliens from season 1. Rick loses his 'original' body through escalating body swapping shenanigans, and manages to completely destroy (by merging) both of the galactic authorities (i.e. parents) together to fight it out for him. Of course the only way to bring down a society is to destroy their economy.

Jerry yet again gets everything he wants in terms of respect under the Galactic Federation only for Rick to completely take it away ("Look I'm not proud to say this but the truth is that I just kept crawling and it kept working"), which leads to his one willful act that causes the break up that throws him out of the house for the rest of the season. I also like that Summer's bug theory pays off!

And it does a fantastic return to the Cronenberg-ed world, the bodies in the backyard and Rick's brilliantly disturbing rant at Morty to match the end of Season 1's first episode! (It is also a cautionary tale of why releasing limited edition versions of food and then removing them is a bad idea for people's mental health!)

(Glad to see that Tammi and Phoenix Person (née Bird Person) are out there somewhere, looking for vengeance!)

3.2: Rickmancing the Stone

"Rick didn't you say you needed my help on an adventure immediately - somewhere else, I don't care - even if it might kill us?"
"I did not, but if you are really that alienated I'm as willing to exploit it as the next guy, church, army or Olympic's gymnast instructor"

Why is language always the first thing to go childish after the bombs drop? The Mad Max/Fist of the North Star episode, in which both Morty and Summer get to release some of their frustrations about the divorce in a post-apocalyptic wasteland. I really like that Morty's muscle memoried arm is a homage to The Beast With Five Fingers/Body Parts, but instead of being upset by the arm taking him over to perform acts of wanton violence on the way to revenging its original owner's death, it turns into Morty finding a better if transient father figure! They would be able to communicate better if Morty knew sign language though!

Though the best part of the episode are the bland, accommodating robot versions of the family created to fool Beth that everything is going OK, with the inevitable horrible pay off!

3.3: Pickle Rick
"Does Grandpa turn himself into a pickle a lot?"
"What?! No! What kind of question is that?"
"The one that was not designed to attack or hurt you in any way"
"Oh, Jesus Christ, one of these..."

The infamous Pickle Rick episode, showing off Rick's inventing ingenuity (and how much he wants to get out of a family gathering) even when he has no limbs to speak of! I suppose a fantastical story about Rick being a predator invading other people's environments and getting inside their heads to make them do his bidding, taking parts of them for his own purposes before moving on relates to the family having to go through a family counselling session in some way, but its a little hard to see a direct connection! :-k (I pretty much agree with the post-credits scene that if you have a network of friends you probably don't need therapy!)

He certainly loves the Rube Goldberg contraptions too, but hey if it works most of the time, keep doing it!

3.4: Vindicators 3: The Return of Worldender
"You came here and defeated our arch nemesis whilst so drunk you don't remember doing it?"
"Look, I'm a little more complex than you guys and, no offence, but I have always suspected that a lot of what you do in a year could be knocked out in a couple of hours"

The satire on self-aggrandising superheroes. Let's just say that Rick is not that impressed by them and ends up drunkenly diverting the mission into a Saw-styled death game. Morty has to get over being left out of "Vindicators 2" as if he was one of the extended universe cast that just did not get picked for that franchise entry. Its all a bit blander in superhero world and not just because of less diversity in the casting after the second adventure whittled down the ensemble! There is also the cutting comment that all the superheroes are too focused on (and being destroyed by) relationship issues than anything more important!

I like the twist that whilst Morty is able to understand Rick enough to figure out all of his Saw-style games, the final test alienates him from Rick even more. Poor Rick though, he planned for Noob Noob to have been there all along, but his praise falls on deaf ears! I suppose it makes sense that Rick liked the one member of the Vindicators who got forced by the others to stay behind to clean up all of the mess he'd made! (And Noob Noob even missed out on partying with some sort of rapper named Logic!)

3.5: The Whirly Dirly Conspiracy
Rick takes Jerry on an adventure on a world with an immortality shield, where nothing bad happens to him at all. Summer gets all Attack of the 50ft Woman over a boy who was not interested in her and he ends up paying the price for it, with the help of Morty (this is where minor characters start individually paying the price for crossing the main characters). Its a rollercoaster ride of emotion.

The episode also has that time and consciousness merging sequence, but its effects are short lived!

3.6: Rest and Rixlactation
"Jacqueline, I wasn't who I said I was"
"You weren't a 14 year old boy from the Mid-West who ran away from his family and capitalised on his lack of conscience by becoming a stock broker?"
"Oh. I guess I was pretty up front about that, wasn't I?"

A post-traumatic trip to a day spa leads to Rick and Morty having all of their 'toxic' aspects cleansed from them. Whilst the toxic aspects are trapped in a disturbing gooey jar, Rick is left much more respectful and tolerable (but less driven by rage) whilst Morty loses all of his inhibiting neuroses and becomes a slick sociopath who might be more dangerous free of his fears. It is an interesting companion episode to Jerry and Beth on the counselling planet in season 2. Its also a fun riff on The Fly, not just having to get into a telepod to re-merge with their other sides but also in Morty doing a version of Seth Brundle's character arc from the film and acting disturbingly hyped up before blowing off the love of his life and dragging a new girl into the situation (Stacy, who just about manages to escape from the goo-world without their help of either of them in the post-credits scene!). It also shows just how much Morty is Jerry's son, as he's going through the same thing that Jerry does of getting everything he desires but then losing it all over again.

But it is also interesting that despite seeming mostly a better person after the detox that Rick's concern for Morty's wellbeing is part of his toxic side. And that there are also some consequences of 'toxic behaviour' that cannot be easily walked back after a sci-fi beam 'causing them' is shut off!

3.7: The Ricklantis Mixup
This episode is amazing, a Robert Altman-style interweaving ensemble narrative about life on the Citadel post destruction by Rick in episode 1 of the season. The Rick and Morty we know disappear off on an adventure to Atlantis and instead we see the Citadel through the eyes of different versions of the characters - a Rick who is hooked up to a memory repeating machine, a Rick working as a dissatisfied production line drone in a factory, a rookie cop Rick to a grizzled cynical and corrupt Morty (think Training Day), a bunch of orphan Mortys going off on an adventure that is equal parts Harry Potter, Stand By Me and I Wish, and a Morty running to be the first ever Morty President of the Citadel!

Its easy to see this all as a metaphor for race tensions, made even more absurd by every Rick and Morty being essentially exactly the same at a basic level and just sent down different paths by their indvidual experiences (I especially like the moment of the cynical Morty cop having to do "Aw, geez" patois to try and endear himself to the other 'street' Mortys!). I think we found out what happened to the 'evil Morty' too!

The episode also has a pretty devasating final shot of all of the bodies floating through space, though it must make it a real problem for ships to navigate to the space station! Maybe Ricks just portal gun there anyway? And maybe all the dead bodies work like the live Morty cloaking device from season 1?

3.8: Morty's Mind Blowers
This episode is fantastic as well, with Morty being (re)introduced by Rick to the room full of traumatising memories removed from him over their adventures. This even gets called out as being the equivalent of the Interdimensional Cable episode of this season and allows for free form quick snippets of adventures. I particularly like the squirrels memory, and the horror of Morty finding his true level! It is also amusing that they end up both wiping each other's memories at the half-way point of the episode, leaving Summer to nonchalantly pick up the pieces and put everything back together!

3.9: The ABCs of Beth
Beth has a crisis about her long lost childhood friend, who she might have abadoned in a fantasy land that Rick created for her. The friend has unfortunately been intimate with all of the fantasy creatures re-enacted in the most disturbing school play ever. Meanwhile Jerry is on the rebound with a new girlfriend, but she is a little too intense for him despite the three breasts.

3.10: The Rickchurian Mortydate
Keith David is back as the most petulant President ever, focused on settling scores and proving that he does not need anybody, like a spurned lover (but at least he has a sense of wordplay and panache about it, unlike some Presidents!), as he unfortunately tries to reign Rick in with the inevitable bloody consequences. If only he'd given Rick that selfie that he wanted Morty to have! Meanwhile Beth undergoes an identity crisis that ironically makes her get back together with Jerry. The ultimate terrifying ending to this season is Rick having to deal with the family unit re-forming around him, and having to apologise to the President so that things go back to normal! I wonder how long he will be able to keep the façade up for? It seems worse than being mind-probed in Galactic Federation prison!

___
This was a fantastic season, albeit cut short. Episodes 1, 7 and 8 were my favourites but every other episode had some interesting idea underpinning it, even at their random sci-fi shenanigan wackiest. I do hope that Tammi and Phoenix Person make a larger appearance in the future though! Though the reason why they do not do their traditional return for the final episode of the season might be that the season was cut to ten episodes from fourteen seemingly in the middle of production, causing episode ten to have to be turned into the climax instead (and according to the commentaries they were going to do another Intergalactic Cable episode as well as Morty's Mind Blowers but unfortunately had to substitute one for the other rather than being able to do both).

FIVE episodes ?

tenia wrote: Tue Oct 08, 2019 7:35 am FIVE episodes ?

I'd like to believe the team takes their time to make them because they want to make them perfect but I'm under the impression that the team just moves at it's own pace with myriad of creative disagreements.

Rick and Morty AND The Joker. What a time to be a lonely guy who hates women? Has Jordan B Peterson got a new book out?

*tongue in cheek....slightly*

Peterson's in rehab, actually

Big Ben wrote: Tue Oct 08, 2019 6:15 pm

tenia wrote: Tue Oct 08, 2019 7:35 am FIVE episodes ?

I'd like to believe the team takes their time to make them because they want to make them perfect but I'm under the impression that the team just moves at it's own pace with myriad of creative disagreements.

I feel like the charitable view of this is five weekly episodes goes to right before Christmas/New Years where Adult Swim probably doesn't want to be running new episodes since I'm sure viewership is down around then. If that is the case, then I'd expect the 2nd half of the season to start back up around February. Again, that is maybe giving them the benefit of the doubt...

4.1: Edge of Tomorty: Rick, Die, Repeat
"Shield me from the law!"; "Must..continue...moving...in...ways...that lead...to...dying....with you"; "I don't want any more anime stuff happening to my son, buster"

On a visit to collect Death Crystals Morty becomes obsessed with one certain death available to him, as an elderly man being comforted by Jessica. In his singleminded use of the crystal to guide him he ends up killing Rick. When instead of cloning Rick as his holographic double requests Morty instead decides to blindly follow the directions of the death crystal, Rick is instead re-routed to get cloned in alternate realities instead. Which whether they are shrimp or Sonic based somehow all end up being fascist planets!

Morty ends up going supervillain and then simply ends up becoming a mouthpiece for the crystal, as it goes as far as to dictate what syllables he will say next, turning into one of those faux psychics trying to channel a member of the audience's loved ones by feeling out different words. And then in being so desperate to fulfill his destiny of dying with Jessica he ends up completely ignoring her (and her impulsive post-trial invitations to go skinny dipping) in his pursuit of that final image. It all ends with everything 'going Akira' (though more precisely it goes "Tetsuo from Akira"!) until Rick manages (with the help of Wasp Rick and Holographic Rick) to make his way back to the current reality to resolve the situation.

And as always, Summer is the one to come in at the eleventh hour to lay down some truth bombs. And that was the best post credits wrap up of the series.

I also wonder if the "where's my Boglin?" moment is a reference to Jim Sterling and his obsession with them?

4.2: The Old Man and the Seat
"Where do you want to die?"
"Susan, is conference room three available?"

Rick goes on a quest to find out who pooped in his private toilet with a magnificent view, which involves fighting with somebody who specifically wants to use it despite being told not to. Toilet training issues truly do follow someone into adulthood. It makes sense that Rick has to Lethal Weapon 2 the situation.

Morty and Jerry end up developing an app when specifically told not to. Which involves fighting with a group of aliens wanting to distract humans through ever interchangable dating regimes whilst they siphon off the planet's water. Summer becomes obsessed with the app, as do everyone else on the entire planet (until it becomes ad monetised) running from partner to partner whilst Beth specifically tells her not to.

A nice ending to the episode as we learn that everyone ends up lonely in the ronedelay that is the Game of Thrones. And of course Jerry has to have the most bland possible kind of life to luxuriate in when he takes the dream-fulfilling potion in the coda (which I guess is a call back to the way that Interdimensional Cable 2 opens, where we learn that Jerry just consumes anything left lying around in the fridge and that he still has not learnt his lesson!)

4:3 One Crew Over The Crewcoo's Morty
"I challenge you to a heist off"
"That doesn't make you interesting, it makes you Ocean's Twelve, which is by far the worst one"

Rick reluctantly gets a crew together to heist Heistcon but unfortunately the android built to double cross everyone, Heistotron, double crosses Rick as well and threatens to absorb the universe in "an ever expanding assembly of a crew", in an episode which lampoons the Ocean's films and the showboating magic shows of the Now You See Me films (there were two of them? And why was the sequel not called "Now You See Me Too" instead of the bland "Now You See Me 2") as well as the group mentality of convention goers and a fun moment where someone gets ripped limb from limb Day of the Dead-style! Unfortunately Heistotron is rather unsubtle in going about their heist which might have led to disaster even before the reveal of another robot to counteract it, Randotron, with an algorhythm derived from the plots of three David Lynch movies. But which -o-tron turns out to be which? And does it really matter one way or the other? Everything will be revealed in a WarGames confrontation where the only successful heist turns out to be the one that is not...heisted?

I really like the meta-heist to disillusion Morty too, which suggests that Rick is back to his old tricks. And poor Mr Poopy Butthole just cannot catch a break.

I wonder if this episode is meant to contrast against that Vindicators episode, showing what Rick's idea of an actual team (of supercriminals rather than superheroes, naturally!) would be like. And this season seems to really be showing that Rick needs to stop delegating tasks out to created robots or interns who want to develop apps! Maybe a certain laziness and willingness to let other beings take over the menial tasks for him is Rick's true Achilles heel?

4:4 Claw and Hoarder: Special Ricktim's Morty
"Look, to be honest I'm kind of grossed out by the sexual nature of how everything unfolded. I just wanted to do some D&D stuff, you know"

Morty demands a dragon as a condition of going on another quest, whilst Rick is rather dismissive of dragons and magic as being for "people who don't want to admit they are Christians". Unfortunately the dragon gets tired of having to re-enact The Neverending Story flying scenes for a teenage boy wanting to treat him as an equal partner and instead he and Rick end up bonding over a shared love of hoarding precious objects. We get some telling comments about Rick being more dragon-like than he would want to admit (as in he will eventually have his precious objects coveted by others and will end up being enslaved himself) before a rather intensely natural (rather than forced by contract) erotic soul bonding that Morty unfortunately walks in on.

On the quest to save the dragon from being hung by a wizard angry that the property he sold 'cheated' on his client, Morty finds himself getting disillusioned by magic. Especially when it takes him a lot of time and effort to look up spells in a book whilst Rick just improvises magic on the fly (because none of it makes any sense) that works faster. Anyway everything climaxes (literally) in a ten soul bond dragon orgy that liberates everyone from their hang ups, at least until the intense feelings wear off.

In the meantime Jerry follows the orders of a cute talking cat (voiced by Matthew Broderick) who is harbouring some kind of horrific dark past too horrible to speak of and who seems particularly obsessed with partying down in Florida.

And here's the official podcast that accompanies this episode

4:5 Rattlestar Ricklactia
"Why are they attacking us? I helped them!"
You gave them proof that there was something bigger and scarier to unite against, you idiot"

Morty gets bitten by a space snake who turns out to have been the 'first snake into space' astronaut equivalent of a planet of snakes, and feels guilty about taking its hero away. So he replaces it with an Earth snake, which leads to an entire sci-fi sequence similar to Arrival as the snake planet tries to figure out its new intruder that 'replaced' its astronaut body snatchers-style, just all done in hissing. Whilst Morty and Summer get charmed by the new sounds of 'snake jazz' unfortunately the snake planet 'somehow' learns time travel from its replacement astronaut and starts transmitting robot snake assassins to take over Earth. Which leads to probably the best Terminator film released this year, as snake assassins multiply to ridiculous levels and in the attempts to head the time travel paradox off at the pass, everyone somehow travels to key historical points such as the assassination of Snake Lincoln or the giant gun battle over whether or not it would be ethical to save or assassinate Snake Hitler.

Anyway Rick decides that "We're removing ourselves from this sloppy story and letting snake time travel eat its own tail", which involves both travelling to Snake 1985 and ripping off Bill and Ted having to go back and fix all the convenient plot twists after the fact, including figuring out where Morty got that black eye from. (This also probably makes this episode a companion to the one where Summer just stayed put inside the car, with Morty showing all the horrible things that can happen as consequence if you leave it instead!)

Meanwhile Jerry gets a floating spell to stop him from falling off a ladder whilst putting up Christmas lights, along with heavy shoes. But of course immediately loses the shoes and goes off on a magical mystery tour across the American landscape. And somehow ends up re-enacting that moment in Mission: Impossible where Tom Cruise was hanging off the side of an aircraft.

Here's the companion podcast. That was a great episode to do a mid-season break with, since it is probably the most ambitious and the most quotable of the series so far. Even if most of the quotes are "Ssssss..."

4:6 Never Ricking Morty
"This train is a story device. Literally. Its a literal literary story device"

Rick and Morty have 'somehow' ended up on a Snowpiercer-style train going around in circles with cabins filled by characters all desperate to tell their Rick-related stories. It seems that it is all to do with the engine driver, known as the Story Lord, who wishes to use Rick and Morty as sources for story material. In their attempts to escape our intrepid duo end up smashing discreet stories into random chunks, which feels like the opportunity for this episode to do pointed satire on random cutaway gags in other animated shows, The Phantom of Liberty, and also to seemingly include fragments of the 'grand climatic battle' against the show uber-antagonists Tammy and Phoenix Person that had been expected but had been lost from the cruelly curtailed previous series!

And, wow, this episode does not pull any punches with shots at variously: the hideously stilted attempts at shoehorning in Bechdel test-style scenes into narratives without consideration for how they might organically arise (with the ultimate irony that its still all just being made up by Morty on the fly anyway, as ever rather unsure about how women speak and act!); people who decide to remain pure and virginal because of religion having their deepest fears realised only when they give into their desires; the total turn off of Christianity's broad appeal, no matter how chiseled Jesus's abs are; and even the holiest of holies: consumerism!

4:7 Promortyous
"Man it feels good when there's no guilt, huh?"
"Yeah, just like in Star Wars!"

"You're in a cape Summer, how bad could it be? No bad story ends with a cape"

Whilst Rick and Morty immediately stick their faces into alien eggs and end up facehugged by body snatching aliens, Summer instead helps the aliens to survive for longer than their thirty minute lifecycle and with her suggestion that there might be more to life than just giving birth becomes their Queen. When Rick and Morty lose their alien hosts (who have just admitted, and consumated, their mutual attraction for each other) with (almost) no help from Summer they eventually end up having to put down an entire society that has been allowed to become civilised, which might be worse than just killing brainless aliens. Or not, as the case may be.

(On reflection and although it only appears briefly I think that moment of the characters walking past the hospice centre-slash-birthing clinic where the hosts are 'helped' to die/give birth is probably the most disturbing moment of the entire episode! Does that just make the whole cycle feel even more brutal when surrounded by kindly fellow aliens holding your hand 'helping you along' and yet exactly the same thing happens anyway? I guess that makes this the 'currently topical' moment of the episode as well)

This episode is probably testing the notion of a woman doing a better job of creating a functioning society than men and controlling their own biological processes, only for the guys to blithely roll on by once they get a semblance of free will back and immediately unthinkingly mess things up! Probably best illustrated by the final scene in which Rick and Morty suddenly feel strange and think they are about to birth-burst, saying their final goodbyes in terror, only to drop their trousers and crap over everything in front of an unphased either way Beth!

This is also the second episode in a row which ends by teasing an Interdimensional Cable episode ("Do you suffer from Alzheimers?.... Do you suffer from Alzheimers?... Do you suffer from...") without actually showing any of it! And I never knew that "He's obviously beekeeping age" could be a conversational gambit signifying sexual interest!

4:8 The Vat of Acid Episode
"There's no such thing as a bad idea, Morty. It's about execution"

After Morty finds Rick's ploy of having a fake vat of acid to jump into to fool pursuers (including fake bones to release and a laser blaster to use "in case of ladle") to be rather contrived and silly, and bets that Rick could not come up with a device that could let him create a video game-like save state so that he can explore endless possibilities without consequences (both in the naughty way of doing rude or deadly things, but also in taking the chances he never would if he had to live with them), Rick creates such a device but with a horrible, vindictive twist...

The best sequence of this episode has to be the entire relationship begun, developed and persisted with even through an Alive-style plane crash which takes place in between a beat of an Eric Clapton song! Suggesting that living with your choices, going through the bad times and not immediately running them back to perform them perfectly can actually be what makes a relationship deeper and life worth living in general. Even if you might prefer to not have to go through exactly the same rollercoaster of events all over again if it became necessary to have to do so!

But of course even though Morty learns his lesson of not being superficial on his own (and of never leaving anything remote control-looking within Jerry's grasp), Rick just has to have been teaching him a lesson all of his own that involves not just time manipulation but Devs-style multiverses full of alternate Mortys suffering horribly every time the reset button got frivolously pressed. In the end, and with all those he casually wronged for the heck of it from different universes converging on his location, it is all to lead Morty back to Rick's vat of acid as his only escape route.

4:9 Childrick of Mort
"These kids might not be mine but you certainly are. Look at you, my little steampunk overlord"

I'm not sure that James Lovelock would approve of this episode's premise that involves anthropomorphising an entire planet! Rick gets a call from a planet named Gaia that he had sex with and is now about to give birth in the form of regular explosive geyser contractions of clay people. Whilst Rick and Beth work to channel the endless supply of clay people (initially via trampoline, later via a network of gates and sluices: "OK so if we divert the lawyer pipeline here they should avoid the ethics tube and come out spineless enough to do their job." "Wait, why are the athletes going through the introvert sector?" "Obviously so they can bully the mathematicians and give us astronomers"..."We got an over-supply of teachers putting a strain on the literary drive" "Activating playwright converter" ) into a formation of society to get them to the point of blasting off into space on their own feet of clay, Jerry unfortunately falls into the machine gets classed as an 'unproductive' and gets dumped into the wilderness with the rest of the rejected people where he gets the chance to build his own society. Meanwhile the abandoned Morty and Summer find that their working knowledge of video games and "Trish's bong" respectively bears surprising fruit in a wilderness survival context.

Unfortunately it turns out that the Gaia's children are not created by Rick and when the real Zeus-styled cloud father turns up both Rick and Jerry end up just as battling substitute father figures in a three-way standoff for control of the world, without asking her what she wants in this situation. Inevitably the real abandoned kids save the day, at least until their grandpa sells them out in a game of one-upmanship.

And I never knew that "I want you to split my pangea into distinct continents" could sound so filthy!

4:10 Star Mort Rickturn of the Jerri
"It's your hero phase. I had one too. You'll outrgrow it."
"Jerry, do you agree that the use of puppets makes you seem dumb and crazy?"
"OK girls, remember we are in a drought so make sure to shower in one big group"
"Summer try unlocking that door by scanning your high school friend's dead face"
"Did you just see a pants-less boy run by?"
"I never thought this was how I'd die. We're nowhere near Venice and you're not a dwarf in a raincoat"

And many other lines, as the season reaches its climax and we get the answers to whether Beth chose to stay or leave a clone of herself behind at the end of The ABCs of Beth. Which is that she may have done and went off on Guardians of the Galaxy-style intergalactic adventures, though they are "skew-ing towards the Star Wars". And the sci-fi rebel Beth does not like that the stay at home Beth has gotten back together with Jerry.

Plus there is a giant death-star like near impenetrable spaceship that is sponsored by Wrangler jeans (which turns out to be its Achilles heel) that starts to destroy the Earth and we get another series climaxing fight to the death with Tammy and Phoenix Person. Whilst everyone else gets their arc, I am not sure that this one has much life left in it!

And Rick gets an emotional scene that would ordinary dramatically reveal which daughter is real and which is a clone but nobody cares and luckily so since he made sure putting everything back together properly would be impossible. Which either means that he values them both equally, or considers them both dispensable so long as there is another one of her around. Can it be both?

I haven’t caught up with the last two eps, but I’ve felt like this season (or both half-seasons, however you want to break it up) was a sharp departure from the incredible first three. It’s unfortunate considering the massive shade thrown and cemented at the subculture of diehards, as I try to defend the show’s merits, but it’s become increasingly more difficult to do. The heist ep had moments of greatness even if they chose the wrong Ocean’s movie as the worst for a cheap joke!

It's been a step down in quality compared to previous seasons. I actually thought Solar Opposites was much better than the current season of Rick and Morty.

Not having caught up with the new season yet, this is disappointing to hear