October 8-13, 2015
Hello blogosphere, it's Neil. The new Gravity Falls will air the evening before this post is due, so I'll wait until next week to review it. For now, I'd like to write about something that affected me in a way I never expected. I didn't initially want to talk about anything that is being majorly covered in my senior project because I want to make sure that I'm not always writing about the same thing, but there's nothing major that's media related that is really important to me right now besides this. It is the Rick and Morty Season 2 finale, "The Wedding Squanchers." I guess it's OK to talk about that show here because I'm not going to be able to go as in-depth as I would like in the senior project as much as I can here because of the need to focus on the "sadcom" element in the senior project and talk about it relatively briefly to make room for other shows. Here I can talk at length about any media thing on my mind with the freedom to go on as many tangents as possible as long as they are controlled and at least try to flow with the rest of the paper. Rick and Morty has gone from a creative show that lampoons sci-fi tropes, utilizes the multiverse as a plot element, and features the creator of the sitcom Community, Dan Harmon, as a showrunner, into possibly the best adult cartoon on TV. It was one of the first to prove that character depth and emotional storytelling could work alongside animated obscenity and surreality. Rick Sanchez, the sixty-four-year-old first of the title characters voiced by series co-creator Justin Roiland, is a sociopath, a psychopath, a narcissist, and many other things, who drags everyone he influences down with him, and Morty Smith, the second of the title characters and his fourteen-year-old grandson also voiced by Roiland, is an awkward, stammering, barely-pubescent mess who is put in constant danger by Rick, barely has the ability to save himself, is required by Rick to be used as a "cloaking device" to keep him from being discovered by intergalactic and interdimensional police that he has a history with, and is somehow still one of the only people Rick genuinely cares about. I believe that they were both meant to be somewhere on the autism spectrum because of many of the traits they have and Dan Harmon, the series' co-creator, being diagnosed with Asperger's Syndrome himself. Beth, Rick's daughter and Morty's mom voiced by Sarah Chalke, allows Rick to live with her family in spite of his extreme instability because of how her mother divorced Rick and she hadn't seen Rick for twenty years and is desperate to have at least one of her parents in her life, even if it's the worse of the two. Jerry, Morty's dad, Beth's husband and high-school sweetheart, and Rick's son-in-law voiced by Chris Parnell, is in a dead-end marriage with Beth that should probably end because of Jerry and Beth's constant arguing and incompatibility but won't because of the fact that they are codependent, made worse by how Jerry hates Rick for being a bad influence on Morty and an even worse human being, often wishing Rick were dead. Summer, Morty's seventeen-year-old sister, Jerry and Beth's initially-illegitimate daughter, and Rick's granddaughter voiced by Spencer Grammer, daughter of actor Kelsey Grammer, begins the series as a pretentious teenage girl that cares too much about popularity and getting attractive boys to like her, even ones that attempt to shank Morty, attempts to run away after learning that she was an unwanted pregnancy but is stopped by Morty after he convinces her not to dwell on what might have been and live in the here and now, has serious attention issues with Rick because of his favoritism of Morty (relatively speaking), and eventually becomes the most moral and pure of the entire Smith family in the show. She tries to convince assimilated members of a species to overcome their mind control, only to learn that nearly all of the members of that species were violent sociopaths once they're briefly freed from their assimilation, is the fastest member of the family to join a new religion "Headism", after giant heads from the outer reaches of the Milky Way Galaxy begin to surround Earth, and is reasonably scarred by the attempts by Rick's spaceship's AI to "keep Summer safe" while Rick and Morty goes into a microverse inside the spaceship's battery, because the ship brutally eliminates the entire police force in order to obey its functioning. Rick's sociopathy was hinted at even in the pilot episode's opening scene. In that scene, Rick comes into Morty's bedroom in the middle of the night, heavily drunk, and takes Morty onto his spaceship with him, saying that he intends on blowing up the world with a neutrino bomb and sparing only himself, Morty, and Jessica, Morty's high-school crush. He says he wants the world to start over and create a new Adam and Eve with the two of them. Morty gets control of the ship to stop Rick, and once they land, Rick tries to say that it was just a test to make Morty more assertive, even though it's clear that that's just an excuse. In spite of the humorous way this scene is played out, it's a lot more disturbing in hindsight. It shows that Rick believes Morty is the only human good enough to keep living and wishes everyone else were dead because of the direction humanity has taken. There are plenty of other surprisingly-serious things in the show. The B-plot of Season 1 Episode 5, "Meeseeks and Destroy", has Morty get attacked in a bathroom by a creepy old jellybean man in an alternate reality he and Rick are visiting for a mission that Morty is supposed to lead to win a bet with Rick, and seems to deal with it rather seriously for the genre, or at least doesn't deny how horrifying such a situation would be in real life. Season 1 Episode 6 , "Rick Potion #9" has Morty make Rick make a love potion for him to use to make Jessica become attracted to him in time for the Annual Flu Season Dance, which goes wrong after the potion's reaction with the flu virus going around causes everyone in school, then the country, and then everyone in the world outside the main Smith family, to be psychotically in love with Morty. Rick attempts to make a cure out of praying mantis DNA, but all this does is make everyone that is psychotically in love with Morty also want to eat his head, because mantis females usually eat their partner's head after laying their eggs. Rick makes one last cure, and while it does make everyone fall out of love with Morty, it also turns them into mutant monstrosities referred to as "Cronenbergs" due to their resemblance to monsters from David Cronenberg-directed body horror films of the 1980s. Morty and Rick argue over who is more to blame- Morty for asking Rick to make the potion or Rick being unable to make a stable cure. Once they agree that they are both at fault, Rick looks for an alternate universe in which they did manage to make a stable cure but also conveniently died after it was synthesized so that they can take the place of their dead selves in that universe. While Morty is usually traumatized by what happens to him on his and Rick's adventures, this time is much more serious than usual, with Morty doing a thousand-yard-stare while burying his own dead body and being forced to settle into a life in which his parents and sister are not actually his parents and sister (though for all intents and purposes in every episode after this one are) along with the implication that Rick has done this a few times before. Ironically, Cronenberg versions of Rick and Morty arrive in the universe that Rick and Morty left after turning everyone in their original universe populated by Cronenbergs into normal people. The next top moment in this section of the blog post is in Season 1 Episode 8, "Rixty Minutes." Rick gets an interdimensional hookup attached to the family's cable box allowing them to watch various bizarre TV shows from other dimensions, but Jerry, Beth, and Summer are more interested in a headset allowing them to look at their lives in other dimensions. In the universe Jerry and Beth are focused on, Jerry is the Tom Hanks of that universe and Beth is a successful surgeon for humans rather than horses as she is in the main reality. When Summer looks for alternate universes with herself in them, she's disappointed to find out that they're all just as mundane as her normal life in the main universe, and even more so to find out that her parent's more successful lives in that other universe is because Beth's pregnancy with her was aborted. Blaming herself for her parent's painfully-average lives, Summer attempts to run away to New Mexico. Morty tries to stop Summer by telling her that he and Rick are from another dimension that they ruined, that the Rick and Morty she knew are dead and buried in the yard, and that he learned something pretty important from abandoning his old universe and coming to this one. "Nobody exists on purpose, nobody belongs anywhere, everyone's going to die. Come watch TV?" Morty tells Summer, which, in this situation, means that bad things may happen in the world, and some people might be "accidents", but that doesn't mean you should dwell on what might have been and leave your family because you don't think that they were supposed to have you. Everyone's an accident, and therefore no one is. Her faith restored in her family, Summer returns to watch interdimensional TV with her grandpa and little brother, and after seeing their successful lives fall apart in the alternate universe they were watching, Jerry and Beth reconcile from the other argument they had after Summer threatened to run away and also decide not to dwell on what might have been and that watching other dimensions is more fun when you're not watching yourself. It's much more entertaining to watch Gazorpazorpfield, an angry alien version of Garfield from one of the parallel dimensions. Season 1 Episode 10, "Close Rick-counters of the Rick Kind", had a fairly dramatic revelation. While trying to escape the Interdimensional Council of Ricks, an organization made up of various alternate versions of Rick and their Morties that believed that Rick was killing other Ricks and kidnapping their Morties, Rick explains to Morty that Morties are meant as cloaking devices for Ricks to keep those who would want to capture and/or kill Ricks from finding them because the genius brainwave patterns in the air Rick creates are counteracted by Morty's "Morty-waves", making Rick unable to show up on most detector technology. Furious that he's little more than an invisibility cloak in the grand scheme of things, Morty attempts to abandon Rick, but when the two of them are captured by Evil Rick and Evil Morty, the versions of Rick and Morty that are responsible for the crimes against the Ricks, Morty decides to change his plans. Evil Rick's lair has a wall of Morties constantly being poked in the hips in front of it to make sure that Evil Rick can never be found by the Council, and the main Rick tells Morty that he doesn't even need as many as he has to avoid detection, which makes a certain fact that will be revealed shortly all the more ironic. He attempts to lead an uprising against the Ricks with the various captured Morties, who are all even more wimpy and cowardly than the main Morty and worship Morty as "the one true Morty", but his conscience gets to him, and he frees Rick before a machine he's strapped to can kill him, even though Morty tells Rick that he's lucky he's not a Rick while freeing him. Meanwhile, before the Morties began to fight Evil Rick and Evil Morty, the main Rick's memories are put up on a monitor, one of which is Rick playing with Morty as a baby, making Rick start to cry, though he denies it almost immediately. When Evil Rick is killed and Evil Morty escapes in disguise with the other freed Morties, the Council attempts to reward Rick with a coupon good for one free Morty in the event that he loses his Morty on an adventure, but Rick refuses to accept it when Morty is there because he wants Morty to at least think that he genuinely cares about him as a person and not just as a prop. Rick explains that a cocky Morty is never a good thing, but he won't tell Morty why until he's older. Rick also explains that he doesn't participate in the Council's activities because the "Rickest Rick", which he says is him, doesn't listen to any authority besides his own, and also reassures Morty of at least some of his worth by saying that the "Rickest Rick" would have the "Mortiest Morty". The Council learns that Evil Rick was just a robot, and it is then revealed that Evil Morty was controlling the robot through his eyepatch, which he takes off in order to blend in with the liberated Morties. Evil Morty is expected to return in Season 3 and become the show's main antagonist, and it may confirm the fan theory that this was Rick's original Morty before that Morty was abandoned at one point by Rick and Rick found the original universe with the show's main Morty. Evil Morty attempted to frame Rick for murdering other Ricks, and used the Morty-Wall to make the Council believe that this was the work of an Evil Rick and not an Evil Morty. Regardless, Evil Morty will be back with a major vengeance. The Season 1 finale, "Ricksy Business", while not very dramatic overall, has a pretty dark character revelation about Rick. Summer and Rick throw house parties while Jerry and Beth are away on a second honeymoon, with Summer's having high school students and Rick's having almost all aliens, including Rick's old friend Bird Person (the only major character voiced by Dan Harmon). Bird Person explains to Morty that Rick's seemingly-nonsense catchphrase, "Wubba-Lubba-Dub-Dub!" actually means "I am in great pain. Please help me." in the Bird People language. Ironically enough, in this episode, Rick decides to stop using that catchphrase, though that doesn't mean he's over the pain he's in as a person. He's far, far, far from over that. The Season 2 premiere, "A Rickle In Time", has Rick, Morty, and Summer attempt to restart time after freezing it to give themselves extra time to clean up after their parties, and then leave it frozen for six theoretical months (I say theoretical because obviously no time has passed, but that's how much time would've passed if they hadn't frozen time). Rick tells them not to hug Jerry or Beth or touch each other for a little while until time has stabilized, but when Morty and Summer get into an argument, followed by a shoving match, over who's the better grandkid, they accidentally separate the area of time and space around the house into two parallel pocket dimensions surrounded by Schrodinger's Cats that simultaneously do and do not exist. Attempts at fixing the problem only separate the two timelines into four, then eight, then sixteen, then thirty-two, then sixty-four. Various versions of Summer and Morty end up falling into the abyss of no time and space, and one of the sixty-four Ricks dives in after and sacrifices himself to save his Morty, even saying "Be good, Morty. Be better than me." while doing it, only for time and space to be restabilized just in time for all sixty-four of the alternate possible impossibilities to warp back into one. Season 2 Episode 3 had the second darkest ending of Season 2, behind the Season 2 finale. In this one, Rick reunites with an old flame, a hive mind named Unity that has assimilated an entire species to bring peace to it, at the cost of the free will of its members. While Rick begins to hang out and party with a handful of women and men of the alien species that Unity has assimilated, Summer tries to convince everyone to regain their individuality, only to learn that they're better off assimilated when Unity's partying causes it (being a genderless hive mind that assimilates males and females of many species, Unity is referred to as an "it") to lose control of some of the aliens it assimilated and they revert to their violent, sadistic selves that are in a race war between members of their species with flat belly buttons and members with pointy belly buttons. Now deciding that Rick is a worse influence on Unity than Unity on Rick, Morty and Summer try to make Rick come home with them, but Rick refuses to come home with them and simply sends them home themselves. Later, after Rick returns from a brief bathroom break, all of the aliens that Unity had assimilated are gone, leaving a string of notes saying that as fun as Rick is to hang out with, Unity cannot be with Rick because he brings out its worst tendencies and how, in a way, Rick is even better at doing what Unity does than Unity, meaning taking who you are out of your body and replacing it with something potentially destructive. Depressed and guilt-ridden when coming home, Rick doesn't even argue when Beth tells him to get rid of the prison-laboratory he built beneath the garage that she and Jerry learned about in the B-plot of this episode, and attempts suicide in the garage with a homemade laser meant to go around the head, but his head falls and he passes out right before the laser goes off, and he remains unconscious for what appears to be a few days. In Season 2 Episode 7, "Big Trouble In Little Sanchez", Rick puts his brain in the body of a teenage clone of himself to infiltrate Morty and Summer's high school and slay their vampire lunch lady upon learning that she's a vampire. Rick, however, doesn't seem to want to leave his clone body even after the vampire has been slain. "Tiny Rick" becomes popular at school, and his popularity and family connections to Morty and Summer help them get in the good graces of their respective crushes, Jessica in Morty's case, and a new character named Toby Matthews (voiced by close friend of Justin Roiland and Gravity Falls creator Alex Hirsch) in Summer's case. However, a song that Tiny Rick sings, a drawing that he makes, and a dance that he creates imply that the real Rick is trapped inside the Tiny Rick body and being "killed" by the younger Tiny Rick personality that wants to become dominant. After Tiny Rick is expelled from the high school for what he did to the vampire lunch lady, he blames Summer for getting him expelled and turns the student body against her. When Morty and Summer get home, they find Rick's adult body in a stasis vat in the garage, and get in a fight with Tiny Rick, who continually denies that he wants to be old again. Morty holds Tiny Rick down, and Summer puts earbuds in Tiny Rick's ears and plays a sad song about fear of growing older and drowning your sorrows in alcohol. This brings the real Rick's personality back to Tiny Rick, who returns to his old man body and admits that this was a failed attempt at becoming young again so he could live forever. Rick goes down to the lab underneath the garage and hacks up other gestating clones of himself at different ages with an axe. All of these sad moments interspersed with comedy has helped make Rick and Morty one of the most innovative shows on television. The duo seems to exhibit traits of Asperger's Syndrome as well, a condition series co-creator Dan Harmon was diagnosed with as an adult. Morty has the more innocent kind, involving awkwardness, high emotional sensitivity, and awkwardness with talking to girls, while Rick has the much darker kind, involving a lack of empathy for certain people even when they're not bad people, not being able to see outside his own narrow worldview, a desire to be alone or only with others very much like him (i.e. certain alternate universe versions of himself) because of finding most others inferior to him at what he does, a lack of a vocal-mental filter, and a disregard for social norms because of not seeing any practical use for them. The episode that this entire season has been building towards is what I really wanted to talk about- Season 2 Episode 10, "The Wedding Squanchers". The episode begins with the Smith family receiving an invitation to the wedding of Bird Person to Tammy, an old friend of Summer's that he met in "Ricksy Business". Rick initially refuses to go because of his belief that marriage is stupid (which largely stems from the fact that his first marriage failed), but a misunderstanding on the part of the robot that sent the invitation causes it to take Jerry to the planet that the wedding is on, giving the rest of the family no real choice. At the post-wedding dinner, Rick gives Bird Person a toast saying that while he thinks that marriage, kindness, and love are all beneath those who devote their lives to the pursuit of intelligence like himself, he is still proud of his friend for being a good person through the years. Tammy, while giving a bride's toast and seeming to begin to say how much she loves Bird Person and her family and friends for being there for her on the most important day of her life, reveals that she is an agent of the Galactic Federation that married Bird Person as part of an extended honeypot operation to find and arrest and/or kill the quasi-anarchists that attempted to overthrow them years before, who most of the alien wedding guests, Rick, Bird Person, and Rick's old friend Squanchy all are. Bird Person, Squanchy, and most of the Freedom Fighters at the wedding were motivated by justice against an oppressive and dystopian intergalactic government, while Rick was mainly motivated by his hatred of authority and wanting a good excuse to bust the heads of those in power. She kills Bird Person and most of the wedding guests in cold blood, and Squanchy uses a special serum in one of his teeth he ripped out and injected into one of his veins called "Squanch-roids" to turn into a Hulk-like version of himself and hold off the Galactic Federation forces attacking to give the Smith family time to escape. Rick explains that they can't return to Earth because the Federation will be looking for them, so Rick asks his ship's Syri-equivalent to seek out planets in the Milky Way Galaxy with a similar atmosphere to Earth that are outside of the Federation's jurisdiction, and three come up. One is extremely small, one has everything on a cob like corn-on-the-cob (strawberries-on-a-cob, flowers-on-a-cob, mountains-on-a-cob, and even molecules-on-a-cob, which prompts Rick to scream in horror and yell at everyone to get off the planet immediately, and whether it's because they'll mutate into people-on-cobs if they stayed on the planet any longer or if Rick just has an irrational fear of cobs is unknown), and one has a sun with a face that constantly lets out an obnoxious scream with daytime lasting for forty-two hours on that planet. The Smiths decide that the tiny planet is the best bet. It's small enough that its day and night cycles are only a few minutes at a time long and it takes even less time to walk around the entire planet. When Rick takes a walk to the planet's South Pole, he falls into a hole and ends up directly beneath the log cabin the family is staying in on the planet. The Smiths discuss what they should do about their current situation. Jerry wants to turn Rick in because of everything Rick has done to them in the past, but Morty and Summer refuse to do that because they know by now through everything that they've done with him the past two seasons that even though Rick has a weird way of showing it, he does care about them and wants the best for them. Beth refuses to turn Rick in as well because she doesn't want him to leave again like he did before the events of the series. Rick feels guilty for ruining his family's lives, so he prepares to leave. He tells Morty that he's going to go get ice cream, and Morty asks if he needs him to come along to be brainwave camouflage, but Rick says he'll be fine. Morty now knows that Rick intends on leaving and not coming back, and says that while he can handle Rick leaving, Beth couldn't, and Morty wouldn't forgive Rick for breaking his mom's heart, but Morty knows that he can't stop him regardless. With the Nine Inch Nails version of the song "Hurt" playing in the background, Rick flies away on the spaceship, call the Galactic Federation's Direct Hotline, and says that he's Jerry Smith, that Rick Sanchez kidnapped him and his family and left them on an island planet and that Rick was going to an off-planet bar, and also asks if his family can be allowed to return to Earth and have a normal life. This is Rick's way of turning himself in and making sure that his family can return to a normal life. The Galactic Federation finds the Smiths and takes them back to Earth, where they are given anti-depressants and are allowed to go to an employment office so that Jerry can have a new job after being unemployed for the entire season. Jerry is overjoyed to finally have his life back, but Morty, Summer, and Beth are all ill at ease from Rick being gone. Meanwhile, Rick looks at a picture of himself, Bird Person, and Squanchy in happier times before surrendering to the Federation as they surround the bar he has his last drink at, and spends the rest of the episode in bitter resolve as he's taken to Federation Prison to spend either a life sentence or a death sentence. When a fellow prisoner asks Rick the inaugural "what're you in for" question, he responds, with a mixture of defeat, self-loathing, and negative self-acceptance, "Everything." As the credits roll, Mr. Poopy Butthole, the happy-go-lucky joke character from Season 2 Episode 4, "Total Rickall", that is simultaneously a parody of really dumb characters with too many catchphrases, an always-happy attitude, and is inexplicably loved by the rest of the cast, and an actual one of those characters, is watching "Rick and Morty" on interdimensional cable, because thanks to the multiverse and interdimensional cable, the show "Rick and Morty" is a TV show within the Rick and Morty universe/multiverse/omniverse, just not in the universe of the main Rick and Morty. Mr. Poopy Butthole breaks the fourth wall and tells the audience that he thinks that was a pretty intense finale, then asks a pizza delivery guy that doesn't get anything he's talking about what he felt about the finale, and then asks the audience to watch the Rick and Morty Season 3 premiere in the next year and a half or longer to see how the cliffhanger is resolved. Adult Swim shows usually have very long gaps between seasons, and in the specific case of Rick and Morty, Justin Roiland and Dan Harmon once said in an interview that as ideal as "good, fast, and cheap" sounds, you only actually finish if you sacrifice one of those three, so they said that they had to sacrifice fast in favor of good and cheap. This episode of "Rick and Morty" got to me in ways shows don't really get to me. It must've been the effective combination of one of the most selfish characters in fiction doing the most selfless thing he could possibly do and sacrifice what little happiness he had left for the sake of his family, the use of the Nine Inch Nails song "Hurt", the similarities between myself and both Rick and Morty that I notice, and the fact that people in my family were talking about how they couldn't connect to the show and how it somehow hurt me to hear them say that all contributed to it. Rick is not a bad person. He certainly isn't a good person either, and he does do bad things with awareness of how bad what the things he does are and a lack of caring towards them, but he will do anything for his daughter and grandkids, and more than might be expected for his son-in-law. Guess that's what got to me- the idea that someone can do something like that for their family even when it's not in their immediate nature to do something like that for their family, and how I don't know how to truly connect with my family because of my own Asperger's-fueled personality that makes me want to do kind things for friends, peers, cousins, crushes, fellow fans of things I like, Let's Players I like that I don't even personally know, and even certain celebrities in things I like that I don't even personally know, but limits me from having the immediate drive to do good by my parents, sister, grandparents, uncles, and aunts. Good for them is something I can think about and talk about, but it's not something that feels good like it does when I do good things for the other above people. As crazy as it is to say, I can admire Rick for being a better man than me, and Justin Roiland and Dan Harmon for writing him to be that way. Rick and Morty has gone from a slightly more intellectual diversion from most Adult Swim shows to one of the best animated television series ever made, and I think that Season 3 will have been worth the wait when it premieres in April 2017. Thanks for reading all of this, and see you next time with the review of Gravity Falls Season 2 Episode 17, "Dipper And Mabel Vs. The Future".
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