That's Rickdiculous!

Since “Rick and Morty” wrapped up their fantastic first season  last Monday, all I can do is spend my new “Rick and Morty”-less Monday nights thinking way too much about previous episodes of “Rick and Morty.” If you aren’t familiar with “Rick and Morty”, like Gearhead, I envy you. When it premiered I thought it the show was just going to be a one season affair, squeezing mild amusement from riffing on the legitimately strange dynamic of Doc and Marty from "Back to the Future." Eleven episodes later it's become my new favorite thing; it's dark, twisted, hilarious, at times sneakily profound, and hands down the most purely creative half hour on television.

That being said, I recalled a slight issue I had with a scene from the season’s eighth episode “Rixty Minutes.” In the scene Rick and Morty are watching TV vis a vis a cable box Rick modified to receive television broadcasts from every known reality. The show they're watching, is an alien version of “Garfield” called “Gazorpazorpfield,” which as Morty mentions appears to be from the Planet Gazorpazorp which they encountered in the previous episode (I also wanted to mention I have had that exact conversation in the past about Lorenzo Music and Bill Murray voicing each other’s characters; seeing that conversation make it on to an actual episode of a TV show made me fall in love with this show all the more). Now it appears “Gazorpazorpfield” differs from our earth’s Garfield in a few subtle areas: the extra appendages, different days of the week, love of enchiladas instead of lasagna, and a propensity towards hurling relentless verbal abuse at Jon (also I guess he can directly communicate with him, which I don't think Garfield actually does). In this episode he concludes his harsh, improvisational cussing out of Jon by calling him a “piece of human garbage”.

The insult is a bit incongruous since it’s been established that they are aliens from the Planet Gazorpazorp. Shouldn't Jon be referred to as a piece of Gazorpazorp-ian garbage or its equivalent? Now if the show was originating from another dimension with alternate earth based humans like the commercial by “Ants In My Eyes Johnson” or the alternate dimension SNL, the use of human would be more acceptable. Boy, I really hope somebody got fired for that blunder.

Of course this little bit of silliness is nothing when you realize that the episode is literally half improvised. It’s kind of crazy watching a show’s two leads spending the A plot doing nothing but sitting on the couch watching what appears to be animated versions of the voice actors just making up TV shows and commercials. Rick and Morty even make a meta comment on the whole thing by stating how alternate reality TV has a “looser feel” and “an almost improvisational tone.” As crazy as it all sounds the really amazing thing is that all this randomness works and comes through by the end of the episode as Morty helps his sister Summer deal with the existential angst she suffers after viewing how much happier her alternate realty parents would have been if she wasn’t born by explaining how he lives every day with the knowledge of his own corpse buried in the backyard (see episode 6 “Rick Potion #9”) reflecting "Nobody exists on purpose. Nobody belongs anywhere. Everybody's going to die. Come watch TV?"

I’m telling ya, get on it (and I didn't even really mention the great Meeseeks episode).

RICK AND MORTY FOREVER AND FOREVER A HUNDRED YEARS Rick and Morty..