Review: Rick and Morty “A Ricker Runs Through It”
OVERVIEW (SPOILERS)
Morty finds out Reese, a cool guy that appears whenever he and Rick have a fight to cool them down, is actually a tool made by Rick to remember his password to his equipment, leading Morty to try and give Reese his own true life, with expectedly disastrous results.
OUR TAKE
See, THERE ya go, last week may have been a less substantive plot that was more about its gag and genre send ups than much else, but we’re back again with an episode that shows that the second week’s episode wasn’t just some fluke for this season. And this week zooms right into the exposed nerve that is close to, if not at the heart of the dysfunction in Rick and Morty’s power dynamic. Despite all they’ve been through together, the threats both multiversal and personal, Rick’s problems still envelop everyone occasionally, including himself. Such as here where he makes his own drunken forgetfulness Morty’s problem, leading to a bit of subtle manipulation with a constructed figure named Reese, played by Owen Wilson, who apparently uses Morty by relaxing him enough to let out a password that Rick needs when he locks himself out of his security system. And all this because, in Rick’s defensive own admission, he does need Morty because of their unique bond across the whole multiverse, but he hates that he has to rely on it. And once he learns that Reese and all of his folksy wisdom was not real, Morty instead opts to give him a place to be real that Rick can’t find him…which unfortunately leads to further chaos.
As much as this might seem a bit by the manual for our title characters by this point, this feels like a more stark examination of their dynamic that doesn’t shy away from the more ugly parts of it. Longtime viewers may know that what helped get the series over the finish line in production was former Executive Producer Mike Lazzo suggesting that Morty be more of the moral compass of the duo, which then helped fill out how Rick’s detached cynicism would bounce off Morty’s desperate attempts to maintain his humanity despite the horrors he would see (while also making boyish mistakes from time to time). I’m not saying that this is some nuanced ting to remind us of how their dynamic works, but it would be so easy for the show to simply fall back on JUST the comedic aspect of that, which it does plenty, and it’s refreshing to see them aware of the compelling conflict that can happen through that. And since I don’t really know how to fit it in, the bit with Jerry being possessed by a cloud alien was also pretty funny. Next time, the halfway point of the season!
