Review: Rick and Morty ‘That’s Amorte’

Rick’s been treating the family to a weekly spaghetti night, and it seems to be bringing the family closer together than ever! His bolognese sauce is so good that it even makes Jerry forget about being Jerry, if only for a few minutes every week. Just when it seems like it’s going to be one of those totally chill R&M episodes, Morty’s canonical inability to let well enough alone gets in the way. Finding out how the pasta gets made creates fissures throughout the family, and the Smith-Sanchez spaghetti night itself is imperilled. Rick and Morty travel to the spaghetti’s source to try and make things better, which makes things considerably worse, for everybody.

With ‘That’s Amorte’, season 7 of R&M continues its trend of snappy stand-alone episodes. This episode is narratively strong, is equal parts visually appealing and disturbing,(there’s even an extra warning at the beginning about the episode’s suicide heavy content) and blends classic R&M structure with its nouveau vibes to create the best episode of the season so far.

Adult Swim often posts the cold open for episodes of Rick and Morty on YouTube a few days before the episode airs, and it can be hard to decide to watch it or not. On the one hand, it can be a tantalizing glimpse into future funnies, but there are other times when seeing a story’s opening act twice can potentially diminish it’s impact – sometimes the element of surprise can be crucial to setting up the energy of the story that follows, or sometimes it’s just a bunch of super random stuff that works better on first viewing.

The cold open for ‘That’s Amorte’ falls squarely in the first category. Watching Rick serving up so, so much spaghetti bolognese to a family that’s way, way too excited to eat it creates so many questions, (like, what’s up with all this spaghetti?) and the innocuous nature of the scene is made ominous purely due to its innocence. To watch this cold open is to need to know what is going on with the spaghetti, and the earlier you get a taste of this mystery, the more satisfying the answer is. Rick is so enthused about the spaghetti, everybody is slurping it down, and there’s no reason not to trust what’s happening – which is exactly why we can’t trust it.

When Morty follows Rick to the garage to ask him what his spaghetti secret is, he seems to do so with no suspicion, only curiosity – yet another testament to how tasty the spaghetti must be. After all the misadventures and mayhem that have transpired between grandfather and grandson, Morty doesn’t even consider the possibility that something so tasty could be harbouring such a dark secret – he loves the spaghetti so much that the part of his brain that raises red flags has, temporarily, turned itself off. All that changes when he sees Rick scooping those out those saucy strands from their source. Once he sees where their dinner comes from, he can’t un-see it. He also can’t help himself from telling the rest of the family. He also can’t help himself from getting deeply entrenched in the spaghetti planet’s global economy – a move that ends up basically destroying an entire civilization.

Rick basically tags along the whole time, doing things Morty’s way as he attempts to find a more sustainable, ethical way to harvest the spaghetti. Giving up the spaghetti is the worst case scenario throughout the episode, even as the obvious costs really start building up. ‘That’s Amorte’ returns to the most classic of R&M formats -man and boy travel to distant worlds in their spaceship, dark times go down. It feels really nice to get back to the show’s core, and the familiar structure is a strong base that builds into a great episode.

There’s almost a parable-like quality to this episode – just replace ‘spaghetti’ with any one of the morally questionable things you love the most, and the story becomes the kind of much less zany, much more sad, human story that we all live every day. The ‘spaghetti’ is your cell phone, your fast food, your favourite cartoon, your chocolate bar. Once you learn the real life cost of the thing that makes you happy, shit gets complicated, fast. The family is visibly annoyed that Morty has brought up the spaghetti source, because life was happier, better, and more flavourful before they knew. It’s a timeless tale of truth, joy, and noodles, and it is exceptionally well-wrought.

It’s also important to note that the spaghetti looks really, really delicious – I don’t think this episode would work as well if it didn’t look so good – the moral struggle hinges on the quality of the spaghetti. Watching Rick harvest spaghetti is as terrible as it is enjoyable, and that’s because he’s harvesting something I want to eat, even though I can see where it comes from. And if you’re asking if this is a story about right and wrong, I don’t care.