Review: Rick and Morty “Morty Daddy”

OVERVIEW (SPOILERS)

Morty gets a sudden call from his ailing half-alien son, Morty Jr, while Rick and Summer go to a restaurant run by people who can predict your order.

OUR TAKE

We’re down to the penultimate episode of the season and holy deep cuts, Batman! We’re actually checking back in with Morty’s rapidly aging half-Gazorpazorp son Morty Jr from the seventh episode of the first season, “Raising Gazorpazorp”! If you don’t recall, Morty jacked it in an alien sex doll that turned out to be harvesting breeding material for a planet where the men were discarded as barbarians and the women were running the place and yadda yadda yadda. The point is that Morty basically had to raise a son, only for that son to grow up extremely fast and Morty needing to set him free to smash things and write spiteful autobiographies about how much Morty sucked as a dad. Incidentally that episode also had a Rick and Summer B-Plot like this one does, though I feel like that’s probably a coincidence. And their plot is honestly the weaker part of the episode, focusing on a gag about Minority Report pre-cogs that feels like it was just on the writer’s dart board forever and finally got picked. So honestly, the less said about it, the better, though it’s not like there’s a whole lot more good to say about the A-Plot.

I don’t mind pulling old characters like this out and dusting them off from time to time, so I don’t really have any issue with doing that here with Morty Jr. I guess my issue is that I don’t really see much that’s interesting or fun to do with him. The point of that episode plot was to show Morty see how fast his life could go out of control when he was forced to grow up too soon, and it did. It’s funny, and in-character, that he doesn’t really hold any resentment towards his son for being distant and talking dirty about him for money. Morty probably understands that he’s just doing what he can to survive, and who knows how much of that is just his Gazorpazorp genes. This leads to a mostly fun trip through Rick’s interdimensional trash where a whole society has formed, including a neat cameo by Charlie Day, but it all feels thematically very muddled. Like…a pile of thrown away things that are just mixed together in a big pit where nothing really goes together. Eh. Anyway, one more episode in this season, so let’s hope it can go out on a strong one.