Review: Rick and Morty “Rick Fu Hustle”
OVERVIEW (SPOILERS)
A fender bender with a Kung Fu master escalates as Rick and Morty are hit with a Five Finger Death Punch and try to avoid walking forwards. Also, Jerry gets intimate with the pool cleaning robot.
OUR TAKE
After last week showed us why Rick and Morty still has some great stories to tell after over a decade on air, this week feels like a script they couldn’t find room for back in Season 2 and dug up now to get a break. Kinda like the Easter episode from last season, actually. Now, clearly this is just meant to be one of those wacky genre send ups they do every now and then, like the one about the Voltron ferrets or the Thanksgiving White House Down mash up (huh, another holiday one), so it’s not like they’re doing anything more than just messing around with tropes and having fun. In this case, Rick has a fender bender with a master of Kung Fu named Liu Sin who resorts to giving Rick a parody of the Five Point Palm Exploding Heart Technique from Kill Bill and Rick then seeing if the rules of “once you’re hit with it you die after taking five steps” can be bent or worked around. And since Rick is the ultimate rule bender, that involves a lot of walking backwards, and even creating numerous simulated clones to see how this could kill him. This then leads to them talking to Liu’s master for a solution to the technique (after resolving the master’s issues with his daughter’s polycule, naturally).
This further escalates to a massive battle of made up punch techniques that utterly wreck the city and even summon the mascot of Hawaiian Punch. Basically it just turns into a big mess of a story that is at least fun to watch but with very little to talk about, and I enjoyed them messing around with the five step stuff, so I’ll give it that at least. Meanwhile, Jerry has the more lucid of the plotlines of just trying to keep his new pool (which I guess will be a main stay now) clean but being too stubborn to employ the handsome local pool guy, leading to him downloading some bad software for his pool cleaning robot that turns it into an obsessed girlfriend. Kinda like that hot tub episode of American Dad but worse. If I were more pessimistic about the show’s quality, this is what I would point to as an indication that it’s running out of steam, but I’m not ready to go there just yet. Here’s hoping this was just a low point and things get better from here.
