Comic Review: Rick and Morty – FOREVER #0
OVERVIEW (SPOILERS)
In the aftermath of saving themselves by merging the universes, Rick must atone by becoming an “Observer”, with no ability to affect anything around him…but Rick Sanchez always has a plan.
OUR TAKE
With how long Rick and Morty as a series has existed, and how much longer it’s planned to go as of this writing, I’ve never really thought about what a potential final episode could be. I’m sure Dan Harmon has probably thought about it here or there over the past decade (when he’s not thinking about what to write for that Community movie), but it’s felt like such a constant presence in the media landscape and remained almost entirely episodic that the end point just never seemed like a thing, even when covering the previous six issues of a comic miniseries titled “The End”. Well, the end of The End is finally here, and it feels like such a great idea for that final episode that I’d be surprised if Harmon didn’t consider something like this. I mean, the fact that it’s coming out AS this comic likely means the real final episode is something almost entirely different, but this wouldn’t be a bad choice either! Following up from the surprise appearance of Universe C-137, we see Rick has been sentenced to a fate worse than death: being a Watcher. Er, I mean “Observer”, meaning he can only observe and record the events of the universe happening around him, being unable to have any interaction or impact on any of it.
But with someone as infinitely genius as Rick, you know that he finds a way out of anything. Case in point, he makes use of the real life scientific idea of the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle, wherein even observing something changes the outcome, even slightly. And when he sees Morty killed not long after he’s taken away, he observes trillions upon trillions of that moment to eventually help Morty avoid that death. But that’s not the end of the story, as Morty does eventually grow up, but into a bitter old man like his grandfather, and when another of Rick’s contingencies pulls him and his granddaughter Mortilda in, an enraged elder Morty gets a chance to take all of his resentment out on the man who tormented him for so many years. So, in his last act of…I guess you could call it “love”, Rick breaks the cycle and uses his observational powers to try and stop himself from coming back to the Smiths all those years ago, and actually ends up confirming that he was welcomed and loved the whole time, erasing the entirety of the timeline and leaving a hopefully happier one to come.
Obviously, as much as this comic acts like it’s within the canon timeline, we know that none of this is going to impact the show and its remaining three and a half seasons (or that movie they just announced), but as a take on what a FINAL Rick and Morty story could be, this is pretty damn good. Technically the best since no others exist currently! Like the previous two miniseries leading up to this, it gets to the heart of the bond and the conflict between the two title characters, Rick’s true internal issues and the impact and scars they’ve left on Morty. The end of THE END showed what Rick and Morty fused would be like, but now we see what Morty would be like if he truly became Rick, and how much more pain would be caused by this. But at the end, despite all the hurtful words and trauma and laser blasts, it reveals the love felt between them and the whole Smith family, which this franchise literally would not exist without. That’s all for our Rick and Morty comic coverage for the time being, but we’ll of course still be talking about the show until it’s over, and whatever final episode they do have planned will have some big shoes to fill whenever it gets there. Until then, wubba-lubba-dub-dub my friends.
