Image via Adult Swim
Rick and Morty built up a passionate fanbase over the years, who haven’t been afraid to voice their love of the series or their opinions on certain episodes. That’s continued with Season 8, which has seen fans essentially asking, “What happened to the glory days?” The biggest complaint is about the lore, as Season 8 has mostly consisted of standalone episodes like the Season 8 premiere “Summer of All Fears” (which is a great riff on The Matrix) and the Easter horror romp “The Last Temptation of Jerry”. Rick and Morty co-creator Dan Harmon and showrunner Scott Marder addressed this during an interview with Polygon, and Marder gave the best answer when it came to the show’s lore:
“You might be surprised that we never start off a season with ‘What’s the canon we owe?’ That’s the heavy lifting, and not necessarily how we want to start a season off…We don’t try to have any rules or any setup. Sometimes there are seasons where we owe something from the previous season. In Season 8, we didn’t, and that was luxurious.”
Marder is absolutely right: the reason Rick and Morty works is because it’s meant to poke fun at the conventions of science fiction stories. It wasn’t meant to have a labyrinthine plot like Lost or Babylon 5. It’s just a story about a sociopathic scientist and his nephew wreaking havoc across the universe, and Rick and Morty’s actually proven it works best when it’s not focusing on lore.
The Best Episodes of ‘Rick and Morty’ Are Standalone
Rick and Morty’s best episodes are often one and done, chronicling the wild adventures that Rick (Ian Cardoni) goes on, and that Morty (Harry Belden) usually gets swept up into. A great example concerns the first two episodes, “Pilot” and “Lawnmower Dog”: both tell seperate stories about how Rick forces Morty to smuggle “Mega Seeds” from another planet, while “Lawnmower Dog” sees Rick increasing the intelligence of Morty’s dog Snuffles. Both of these episodes aren’t connected to each other, but they showcase what to expect from the show: a cutting edge sci-fi plot that’s undercut by crude humor, and usually spills out into the lives of Morty’s family, including his parents Beth (Sarah Chalke) and Jerry (Chris Parnell) as well as his sister Summer (Spencer Grammar). Having a standalone format for most of its episodes means that Rick and Morty can experiment with its format, keeping things unexpected. Season 1’s “Something Ricked This Way Comes” is a great example of this; Summer winds up getting a job from none other than the Devil (Alfred Molina), causing Rick to use science to screw over the Lord of Darkness. Not only is this perfectly in character for Rick, but it’s the first time that Rick and Morty delves into the supernatural, shaking up what fans had come to expect from the series. “Something Ricked This Way Comes” also continues the offbeat humor that Rick and Morty’s best known for, as the Devil winds up double-crossing Summer after modernizing his store — or in her terms, “Zuckerberging” her.
While ‘Rick and Morty’ Does Build on the Events of Past Episodes, It Isn’t Beholden To Them
Rick and Morty has actually seeded plot threads throughout its run that it’s returned to, particularly the “Council of Ricks” which is composed of alternate versions of Rick. But it doesn’t do so in a serialized form. Instead, Rick and Morty often introduces concepts into one episode that it’ll return to. This benefits longtime viewers who’ve been watching Rick and Morty from the beginning, but it also mean that newcomers to the series won’t be lost since these plots are revisited in a way that means they don’t have to catch up on whole seasons. Take Season 1’s “Rick Potion #9”, where Morty asks Rick for a way to woo his crush Jessica. Rick ends up forming a potion that transforms the world’s population into Cronenbergian-esque monsters, forcing him and Morty to travel to an alternate universe where they died. It was the first glimpse at the multiverse concept the series would utilize in future episodes, and it’s only brought up once during a highly emotional scene in Season 1’s “Rixty Minutes”. The biggest overarching mystery in Rick and Morty has already been addressed. Throughout the show, it was hinted that there was more to Rick than meets the eye, and Season 5’s “Rickmurai Jack” reveals that Rick Prime — aka the original Rick Sanchez — killed Rick’s wife Diane. Season 7 dedicates its first half to the hunt for Rick Prime and resolves it fairly quickly, with the episode “Unmortricken” finally seeing Rick kill Rick Prime. This essentially wraps up the biggest overarching storyline of Rick and Morty to date, but Season 8 shows that you can still draw comedic elements out of the show by returning to a non-serialized format.
Related
The 25 Best ‘Rick and Morty’ Episodes, Ranked According to IMDb
‘Rick and Morty’s high points have earned plenty of fan praise on IMDb, making these episodes the best.
‘Rick and Morty’ Has Poked Fun at Its Fanbase’s Obsession With Lore
Image via Adult Swim
A large part of the reason why Rick and Morty’s endured for a decade is that it’s willing to take shots at itself, as well as its audience. Multiple episodes have poked fun at the fanbase’s obsession with the show’s lore, particularly Season 4’s “Never Ricking Morty” and Season 6’s “Full Metal Jackrick”. Both deal with the Story Train, a literal vehicle for storytelling — or more specifically, a way to poke fun at Dan Harmon’s “Story Circle” concept. Season 3’s premiere “The Rickshank Redemption” takes its own unique approach to the idea of lore; while it’s technically the first episode to hint at the existence of Prime Rick, it also features a moment at the end where Rick delves into a rant about how his true goal in life is to get McDonald’s to bring back the Szechuan Sauce that was used as a promotion for Mulan. While “The Rickshank Redemption” is best known for convincing McDonald’s to bring back said sauce (and the chaos that followed), it also showed that lore doesn’t matter in the long run when it comes to Rick and Morty. Rick and Morty is available to stream on Max.
Rick and Morty
Release Date
December 2, 2013
Network
Adult Swim
Showrunner
Dan Harmon
Directors
Bryan Newton, Dominic Polcino, Anthony Chun, John Rice, Stephen Sandoval, Jeff Myers
Writers
Tom Kauffman, Wade Randolph, Eric Acosta, David Phillips, Erica Rosbe, Sarah Carbiener, Matt Roller, Michael Waldron, Caitie Delaney
Justin Roiland
Rick Sanchez / Morty Smith
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