Review: Rick and Morty “MortGully: The Last Rickforest”
OVERVIEW (SPOILERS)
Rick and Morty’s trip to a remote planet in search of tree sap gets them trapped in a circle of life, death, rebirth, and evolution.
OUR TAKE
Based on the title we got for this episode, I was bracing myself for another episode with a kinda shallow and pessimistic view of environmentalism, which we got awhile back in “A Rickonvenient Mort”, incidentally also named after a movie with environmentalist morals. Now, I do agree with those morals and have a great fondness for Ferngully, as most millennials do, but I wasn’t sure if THIS show had anything particularly interesting to say about the subject matter. Luckily, that isn’t what we got AT ALL, and instead we got an episode about our title characters going through constant cycles of biological evolution in a uniquely maddening prison that balances the scientific examination of evolution with a societal commentary, while also staying true to what makes Rick and Morty interesting as characters. At first, they’re in this together as single celled organisms and working their way up through the stages of life as waddling amphibious creatures, but it’s not long until Rick gets focused on his path forward and leaves Morty to fend for himself. And being his own person, Morty ends up going a totally different way than Rick ever could have thought of, as while Rick tries forming an army of animals to test the defenses of the sentient tree that imprisoned them in this cycle, Morty tries becoming a tree himself and gets the farthest out of all of them.
Of course, neither approach ends up working in the long term, leading the two to meeting back up and using a combination of their skills and strategies to combat the “Warden” tree. It turns out the warden is powered and nourished by all of these beings dying and being reborn, whether from dying from starvation or being killed by others for food. However, if they all stay alive and just feed off Morty, who has become a full sustaining ecosystem, they starve out the Warden and can eventually find a way out…which Rick and Morty leave them to find on their own, which luckily it seems like some do. But while it is ultimately everyone for themselves, what we get is probably one of the most fascinating, creative, and inventive episodes of the show in a long while, which reminds me further of why Rick and Morty has managed to endure these past few years instead of creatively burn out or stagnate. This could have simply been an episode about the two ending up in animal bodies and trying to navigate primitive social structures and that would be that; a fun bit but kinda tedious. Instead, the writers went above and beyond the extra mile and made a truly great episode, which gives me great faith that the rest of the season will make it a strong one. Very much looking forward to seeing what those remaining four episodes give us.
