Reddit AMA Recap: Dan Harmon on “Rick and Morty”
No, we are not in the camp of the show coming back this year, we think it’s probably a 2017 start.
Recently, Rick and Morty executive producer Dan Harmon took part in a Reddit AMA promoting the expanded version of Harmonquest currently streaming on Seeso. Don’t expect to learn a whole bunch about the upcoming season of Rick and Morty, but Dan still had some anecdotes and feedback about the show’s run thus far:
On what is in Rick’s trademark flask:
I tend to assume vodka and I know it seems unlikely that Rick wouldn’t use sci-fi tech to somehow augment whatever he drinks but I think in rick’s mind part of the “addiction” to the flask of good old fashioned booze is that it anchors his identity, and I think he knows that if he augmented the booze or the flask, then why not just whip up a very rudimentary nanobiotic alcohol dispenser in his body or inject himself with a plasma component that just amounts to always having a certain blood alcohol level, and I think the reason he doesn’t do that is because he’s a little afraid he’ll lose sight of who he is
I think it’s that Community and Rick and Morty don’t punish obsession. I remember Megan Ganz coming to work on Community and she seemed kind of bummed out and told us that her therapist, having listened to all of her frustrations about working on Community, finally said, “but isn’t it just a show?” And the reason Ganz was bummed out by that was because she knew right then and there that she now had to go and find another therapist. Nobody that worked on Community or that works on Rick and Morty has the capacity to regard the show as unimportant – people that feel that way quit – and I think you can feel through the screen that if you were to approach someone working on Rick and Morty with a costume or a tattoo or a question that indicated that Rick and Morty was YOUR LIFE, you wouldn’t risk that person going “ew, you got a Rick and Morty tattoo?” The shows I like and the shows i like to think I make are shows whose wildest dream is to be studied, loved, analyzed, etc.
There will be some Rick back story in season 3 but it won’t be quite what you’d expect when I say that and unfortunately that’s all i can say.
A lot of times it’s like a crazy person running up to a whiteboard in the writer’s room and drawing a turd monster with breasts for testicles. And that crazy person’s name is Justin Roiland, or, as I call him, Li’l Goldmine!
I don’t know if this counts as a “fan theory” but there was a guy that totally predicted the Council of Ricks as soon as we started messing around with alternate timelines. They even referenced the Fantastic Four’s “Council of Reeds” or whatever it was called, which we hadn’t even known about, I don’t think, but which we were sort of ripping off. I mean, the guy saw that we were doing alternate timelines and was immediately like “oh, this means they could do a council of ricks if they wanted,” and we were pretty stymied by that because it’s exactly what we were writing when he posted that. That doesn’t happen a lot. But you’re more asking about stuff like “I think Rick is actually Goldenfold in disguise” or “all of Rick and Morty’s episodes are a simulation” or “when Rick falls asleep in episode 2, the rest of the series until episode 8 is a dream, then he wakes up for two episodes and then season 2 is all the label of a milk carton in his fridge, which he drinks out of, and then season 3 is a dream again.” I don’t really have favorites of those, they all strike me as fun, I want people to enjoy the show with 100% of their giant brains, but a big part of me, when I hear about that stuff, always thinks, “wait, are you saying that if we were big enough dicks to screw around with you that much, you’d like the show?” But I don’t think those folks are thinking about it from that angle, I think they’re just blissfully analytical and love decoding stuff and I salute them but I haven’t seen a “theory” that I truly love.
"There are also other characters that come and go (also owned by the Warner Bros. Discovery conglomerate media company)."
Huh. Is that just referring to other characters from the show itself, or is this implying that the new season is going to have cameos from other WBD IPs