Better late than never, right? After nine episodes of basically fine but deeply uninspired slop, Rick And Morty ends its eighth season with a banger. “Hot Rick” is the good shit, with decent jokes, a solid emotional core, and a premise that digs down deep enough to be legitimately compelling. It’s possible I’m going to over-praise it here, but there are worse sins a reviewer can commit; honestly, I’m just so relieved to discover the show still has some juice left that I can’t help celebrating a little.

“Hot Rick” isn’t the first episode this season to dig around continuity leftovers looking for food, but it is the first that’s managed to make a meal out of the effort. Instead of bringing back a plotline no one cared about the first time around, we’re once again plumbing the depths of Rick’s trauma; the “Hot Rick” of the title is the memory fragment of a younger Rick first introduced in the fifth season episode “Rickternal Friendship of the Spotless Mort,” which was all about deep-diving into past memories to revive Birdperson. Young Rick also had a cameo in last season’s “The Jerrick Trap,” where we learned in the post-credits sequence that he was trapped in Jerry’s brain, unable to build an escape because Jerry believes all machines are made out of springs and gears.

I’d honestly forgotten that last gag, but the writers hadn’t. After some relationship sparring with BugAnne, Rick travels home to find that Jerry, for some reason, really likes him. Young Rick has been running around Jerry’s memories, convincing him that the real Rick was actually present for most of his and Beth’s marriage; the real Rick immediately realizes something is up, and pulls Young Rick out of Jerry’s head, trapping him in a brain computer thing where he can’t access the outside world. Real Rick also decides that in order to be a better boyfriend, he needs to remove the last memory he has of his dead wife, Diane, from his brain to make him more emotionally open.

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Here’s a damning comparison for you: this season of Rick and Morty is reminding me of the revival seasons of Futurama (the first revival, not the second one, which I haven’t watched any episodes of). Same reliance on sort of clever, sort of obvious premises, lots of movie nods, the occasional funny joke, characters I like who are just going through the motions. What’s especially painful, though, is that Futurama could at least fall back on an effective emotional beat to win me over. Rick and Morty still tries for that sort of thing, but the deep cynicism that powered its earlier heights has given way to a kind of shrugging “whatever” nihilism, with character drama falling into the same trap. It’s not dark so much as indifferent, and that means any attempts at sincerity just ring hollow.

“Morty Daddy” isn’t a low-point, or a high-point. I had some hope, at least at first, that it might be onto something by bringing back Morty’s “son” from the first season episode “Raising Gazo…

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We finally get a halfway decent episode this season, and surprise surprise, it’s all about the Jerrys. Although I’m not sure that really counts as a surprise; Jerry has been a reliable comic foil since the first season, and as the rest of his family discovered surprising depths of competence and varying levels of sociopathy, Jerry’s Jerry-ness has remained consistent throughout. Jerry is the part of being human that characters like Rick spend their lives working (and failing) to forget. He’s pathetic, needy, and self-pitying, a loser who’s just self-aware enough to realize he’s a loser but without the skills needed to be anything else. The best he can hope for is self-acceptance—which, oddly enough, he seems to have achieved better than anyone else on the series.

“Nomortland” isn’t a classic; it’s missing a final push, some deeper insight or narrative twist to really put it over the top. It escalates nicely in the first act, at least, but once our two Jerrys reach Grand Centr…

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I wonder who was the first person to say “[Accursed media property reboot] ruined my childhood!” It has to be someone, right? By now, the line is so overused that it doesn’t even work as a joke; Morty says it in “Ricker Than Fiction,” and while the follow-up (“and my childhood isn’t over yet!”) was cute, I was mostly just annoyed. But it did make me wonder: was there a time when any sane person took that idea seriously? I’ve seen most of the pop culture I loved as a kid get regurgitated ad nauseum in my adult life, but while I’m bored with all the remakes and unnecessary sequels, I don’t think I’ve ever felt personally affected by them.

It’s a ridiculous idea, and if I had to guess, I’d say the complaint—if it ever was meant sincerely—was intentionally hyperbolic; given how the internet works, it rarely feels enough to say something is just “shitty and bad,” so we have to extrapolate to the point of absurdity before the statement even registers. This is also how comedy often …

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There’s been a strong “When are we going to get to the fireworks factory?” feeling to the season thus far, and while there’s still time left before the end, it’s looking less and less likely that said factory will be forthcoming. “The CuRicksous Case of Bethjamin Button” is a disappointing episode, and while I’m not sure it’s that much worse than previous episodes this season, I felt more active irritation watching it than I have before. Despite occasional moments of creativity and a few decent jokes (plus an A+ guest star), the whole thing feels like it’s on auto-pilot from start to finish. Worse, I can’t even really blame the execution; the concepts driving the episode are stale to begin with.

The storyline with the most conceptual promise is the nominal B-plot, with Rick taking Jerry, Summer, and Morty to visit an amusement park built by an alien who loves Earth but doesn’t know anything about our planet or theme parks. (I’m not sure if this even is the “B-plot…

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I started watching Mickey 17 a couple nights ago. It’s not bad—Pattinson is terrific, and I appreciate the weirdness, although the story is too shambling and chaotic to really grab me. (It’s the same problem I had with Okja; for whatever reason, Bong Joon Ho’s caricatures of wealthy cruelty don’t work for me when they’re played by actors speaking English.) “Cryo Mort a Rickver” (dear god) reminded me of the movie; the set-up is different, but much of the satire about a wealthy elitist class exploiting the poor to live lives of unquestioned privilege and safety feels similar. For a few minutes, I even wondered if the references to Bong’s work were intentional. There was a dude who looked like a lunky Pattison in a bit part, and the vault that Rick is so desperate to rob reminded me of the final train car in Snowpiercer.

This is all very likely a coincidence, especially given that “Rickver” isn’t anywhere near as angry about capitalism as Mickey 17 was. But it still managed to …

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[Editor’s note: Zack submitted this on time. Myles has just been swamped. Apologies.]

What was the first Rick and Morty holiday episode? I’m trying to remember without looking it up, and I’m not sure. There was the Thanksgiving episode where Rick and the President faced off about… something, and I know that one was super goofy and not particularly funny. But I feel like there was at least one before–oh, right. Duh. The Jurassic Park spoof from season one, with the giant dead homeless person dressed up like Santa Claus. Most of the focus of that episode was on Morty’s struggles to stay alive inside the aforementioned dead man (with bonus guest star John Oliver), but there was a B-plot of Jerry wanting to celebrate Christmas and getting freaked out by his parents’ new sex friend.

Jerry has always been the punchline whenever the writers want to make fun of some banal tradition, and the American version of Easter is about as banal as they come. “The Last Temptation of Jerry” is th…

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The last we saw of the Citadel of Ricks, it no longer existed. Evil Morty (or Eye-Patch Morty, or Ultimate Morty) destroyed the place, killing nearly everyone on it, in order to escape into a universe where Rick wasn’t the ultimate genius. That was a good episode, hitting the sweet spot of “We know this is ridiculous, and we’re laughing at how ridiculous it is, but isn’t it also kinda cool?” that the show tends to aim for when it dips its toes into serialization. It wasn’t the end of other Ricks and other Mortys, obviously; the joke of taking parallel-universe theory to its extreme endpoint is just too good to pass up. “The Rick, The Mort & The Ugly” may be the first episode since that season finale to explicitly reference the Citadel again, though, and while the emotional charge of the concept has faded, it’s still a fun trip: a riff on classic Western revenge stories and movies like John Wick, this one’s an excuse for a lot of violence, a lot of one-off sight gags, and jus…

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You review enough television, you eventually develop tricks to come up with good opening paragraphs. I used to start with some kind of personal detail relevant (ish) to the content at hand; but when readers made jokes about how you could just skip the first few sentences of anything I wrote, I stopped. (There are people who can do autobiographical content in their work, I’m just not one of them.) These days, I try to avoid gimmicks, but “Valkyrick,” this week’s episode of Rick And Morty, gave me a chance to trot one out, just for old time sake: highlighting the arc of a specific gag as a way of demonstrating a larger shift in the show’s philosophy and tone.

The gag is, there’s a bug army, and the bug army is extremely willing to sacrifice low level units for science. We see several bug grunts die in rapid succession as Rick works on a cure for a mutation disease invented by an evil bug doctor. When the cure finally works, the bug grunt lives; the twist is, he’s upset he survived because the on-death payment was going to fund his kid’s college plans. Later, in the middle of the episode’s climactic bug-on-bug fight, the soldier finally gets his chance to die in the line of duty. He’s thrilled, he’s wearing a college hat, and after his death, Rick says, “Let’s all make a point of checking in on his kid in school later.”

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Welcome back to Episodic Medium’s coverage of Rick and Morty, which returns for its eighth season. As always, this first review is free, but to follow along with the rest of Zack’s reviews this summer, become a paid subscriber for just $5 a month. We’ll have our full summer schedule up this week.

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Cards on the table: despite still being a Rick and Morty fan, I had no idea the season eight premiere was airing last night until Myles reminded me. I have yet to see a single person mention last night’s episode on Blue Sky, and while Blue Sky doesn’t have the reach or scope Twitter once did, it’s still curious to me that a series that used to be so important to the online zeitgeist barely comes up in conversation anymore. But then, we’re eight seasons in. “Shocking” has its limits when it comes to sticking power. When’s the last time you heard someone talking seriously about South Park?1

None of which is exactly relevant when it comes to reviewing “Summer of All Fears;” the job is to critique the content, not get hung up on the context. But while “Fears” is a perfectly cromulent twenty-two minutes of television, it isn’t a surprise that this premiere didn’t raise many waves. There isn’t a single concept in this episode the show hasn’t done before, and while that’s not a death sentence for a TV series, it is mildly disappointing for one whose bread and butter has been hitting its audience from unexpected angles. There are clever gags throughout, and the characters behave consistently, but a certain spark is missing—in its place is a kind of comfortable familiarity. Ah, this kind of episode. I like these.

“Fears” starts in media res, a trick the show has used before; the initial disorientation (why is Summer girl-bossing with a new haircut? Why is Morty tall?) creates a sense of mystery that helps to cover for the story’s eventual predictability. We eventually learn that Rick, in order to teach Morty and Summer a lesson about taking his phone charger, has placed both kids in a virtual reality world where everyone is obsessed with phone chargers. Rick fell asleep, leaving the kids stuck in VR for what, to them, felt like 17 years. When Summer manages to build a machine that lets them escape, Rick wants to memory wipe them. But Beth stops him after the kids object, and so we get to spend the next fifteen minutes or so experiencing why Rick was right, despite being, y’know, a monster.

The best gag in all of this is the VR world’s commitment to phone charger fixation. Characters with “charge” in their name, a holy war kicked off by a false flag video of a “terrorist” cutting a charger cord–and, the dumbest and best, “Osama Been Chargin.” It’s the kind of stupid-clever that I’ve come to love about the series, a commitment to an incredibly silly bit that keeps going further and deeper than I’m expecting it will. The fact that it also works to undermine Morty and Summer’s mental agonies (Morty’s in particular) even as they play those agonies extremely straight is a routine that suffers the most from repetition, if only because I no longer fall for the trick. I’ve seen Morty and Summer go through many different hells by now, there’s not much friction left between their sincere misery and the absurdities they suffer through.

Beth’s presence here is pretty rote as well. She defends Summer and Morty’s rights to keep their memories, then briefly bonds with her “adult” daughter before Summer’s bullshit becomes annoying. There are lot of jokes about girl-bossing and spiritual vibes and what-not, but it’s the same shtick Beth has been through several times before, connecting with someone before that connection makes her feel insecure and resentful. Still, it’s in keeping with both their characters, and I appreciate the specificity of their growing antagonism, even if individual gags didn’t always land for me.

Morty, meanwhile, has other plans. While Summer was taking over the world, he got caught in the shit, first going to prison, then becoming a firefighter, and finally enlisting in the army where he discovered that he couldn’t be killed. Again, the episode struggles to find something new to say about Morty’s PTSD. We’ve already seen him find true love and lose it thanks to one of Rick’s devices. Having him go insane because he lost his best friend in a war his sister created to exploit him is technically a new concept, and, again, the commitment to the bit is fun, but it doesn’t help the episode rise above the hard to shake sense that this is just a remix of a bunch of stuff that used to be astonishing, but now more or less registers as “huh, neat.”

One of the dangers of television criticism is being too harsh on something that’s perfectly acceptable, because “perfectly acceptable” isn’t really a take you can spend multiple paragraphs explaining. I had fun watching “Summer,” even if I could never quite shake the feeling that I’d seen it before. There are a couple of bits that didn’t land (namely Rick getting trapped in the VR machine and then just… escaping it. Without any twist whatsoever), but all of it goes down easily enough, and I don’t begrudge a show losing its edge eight seasons in. This is absolutely fine, and if the whole season turns out like this, well, I may struggle with a few of the reviews but I’ll still enjoy myself. I can hope for more unexpected plots down the road, but Rick And Morty stopped needing to prove itself years ago.

Stray observations

• That scientist guy saying “You shouldn’t steal your grandfather’s equipment” was a stretch. How did he even know Morty and Summer had a grandfather. Was he eavesdropping inside the tank?

• I appreciate the pettiness of “borrowing a phone charger,” it has a certain lived-in family vibe to it.

I think I know what my greatest fear is. Like, not a hundred percent sure or anything, but I think, if you gave me a few minutes (and let me put my thoughts in writing), I’d be able to get there. It wouldn’t be a particularly interesting journey for anyone but myself, so I won’t bore you all with the details. It’s more the sort of thing you talk about in therapy, anyway, or something you deal with when you decide to jump into a hole in a Denny’s. 

That’s part of the pleasure of an episode like “Fear No Mort,” obviously. Fiction is great for that sort of thing. You set up a situation in which some external force is able to look into your mind and tell you the answer to a question that you (unlike me) might not even know yourself. We’ve been trained as audiences to accept this as possible without questioning it too much. Just give us a hint of eldritch power, a system with enough genre trappings to let us ignore the wire frame “drunk conversation at two in the morning” aspect, and we’re in for the ride. The tension of what follows is less about wondering if we’ll get a coherent explanation for what we’re seeing, but finding out if the show is capable of offering some kind of unexpected truth. 

The level of difficulty varies from series to series. A Twilight Zone episode about some sucker struggling with his worst nightmare is supposed to be a little corny; the anthology format makes it easier to swallow didactic morality tales, and as long as it’s just a little cleverer than we’re anticipating, it works.

With Rick And Morty, things get… tricky. The “creepy guy offers you a chance to see your greatest fear” story hook is so ancient that it’s a joke in its own right, and the self-aware commentary from Rick and Morty about the clichéd nature of it all is, at this point, its own kind of cliche. When our heroes meet a Rod Serling-esque stranger (voiced by Liev Schrieber, always a treat) and he makes his offer, the question is clear: is this going to be another undermining genre spoof ala “Something Ricked This Way Comes,” where Rick uses his genre awareness and scientific genius to turn a familiar horror scenario into a joke; or is it going to be actually sincere. Is the Stranger going to be revealed as an easily defeated putz, or are we gonna get a villain who’s actually more powerful than the boys?

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Has Rick And Morty ever done an afterlife episode before? They haven’t really needed to, I guess; every time someone dies on the show, they just find a spare in a different dimension. Rick’s disdain for religion is too inevitable to ever even need to be brought up—he is, after all, the Atheist’s Atheist, a man whose contempt for the universe is so complete that he rearranged dimensions to make himself a god. (Oh right, there was that story where he got cucked by a Zeus, or something. Look, the episodes blur together after a while.) Still, no matter how powerful he is, Rick still has to operate within the confines of the laws of physics; he can bend shit as much as he wants, and sometimes even break things, but the laws remain in place. Gods don’t necessarily operate under the same rules—which is where “Mort: Ragnarick” comes in.

Rick wants to tap into the unlimited energy potential of the afterlife. He’s killed Jerry enough times to know it’s possible (the very funny o…

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Once upon a time, there was a television show called South Park. There still is a television show called South Park, but for the purposes of this bit, let’s just focus on the past. Back in the halcyon days of the late ‘90s, South Park was wildly popular for its transgressive humor, its willingness to take on “any” target, and, occasionally, its storytelling. It was a show that mocked you for caring about it, but still somehow managed to earn its audience’s investment. 

Which is what made its second season premiere (on April Fool’s Day, no less) all the meaner. “Not Without My Anus” came after a South Park rarity, a cliffhanger that promised to reveal the identity of Cartman’s father. This somehow mattered to us at the time (the late ‘90s were weird), which made it all the more bizarre when the show decided to open with a half hour episode that had nothing to do with anything, a full thirty minutes devoted to what had been, up until that point, just a running gag: an in…

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Rick and Morty’s seventh season has been surprisingly solid, given the show’s history and the behind-the-scenes turmoil. If I hadn’t know anything about Justin Roiland’s departure, I don’t think I would’ve noticed any substantial change—sure, there was a second or two to adjust to the voices, but they’re so well cast (and are doing such a good job) that it isn’t really a concern at all. The writing has been clever, and if some of the stories have felt a little familiar, that familiarity has been easily wrapped into the comfort of watching a long-running series. After all, you don’t stick with something for seven years and change because you wish it was something else. 

Still, we’ve been missing a Summer-focused episode. We’ve had Jerry times, we’ve had Morty times, and of course we’ve had a lot of Rick times. But Summer has been sidelined for a bit, and the season wouldn’t really feel complete if she didn’t get her chance in the spotlight, which is where “Wet Kuat Amor…

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The is the second “clip show that’s not a real clip show” episode I’ve reviewed this season, so I think we might be seeing the trend beginning to peak. “Caves” from Lower Decks didn’t get as meta as “Rickfending Your Mort” ultimately does, but both start from the same premise: using the format of the clip show as a structure for a collection of short gags and sketches, letting the writers play around with one-off ideas without having to worry about them needing to support an entire story. If you’re my age, or if you’ve watched as much pre-’00’s TV as I have, you know what an actual clip show looks like: an awkward, forced framing story and a bunch of vignettes taken from episodes we’ve already seen. The idea was to save the creative team time and money by reusing old material—and back before DVDs and streaming, it was a not completely awful way for fans to catch bits and pieces of already aired episodes.

Things are different now, so different that you probably didn’t n…

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You ever think about our culture’s weird feelings on revenge? I do, because I’m like that. Ever since I was a kid, I’ve been reading and watching stories about how bad revenge is for you: how it will never take away your grief; how it only leads to more chaos and destruction; how, at best, even if you succeed, you’ll be more or less back where you started. But also ever since I was a kid, I’ve been reading and watching various heroes lose various loved ones and swear vengeance, and I gotta tell you, I’ve always been into it. You show me a grim, doomed sonofabitch diving into the proverbial meat grinder because he or she (though usually it’s a he) can’t bear to live with loss? I am absolutely there. 

So which is it, then? Revenge is bad, or revenge is good? Or is it another one of those annoying situations where both are kind of true, where scratching the itch that gave you pain can provide some satisfaction, even as it largely serves to make the world worse. “Unmortricken” doesn’t exac…

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Oh hey, Morty’s back! And boy is he ever. “That’s Amorte” is what we in the reviewing business call “old school,” a trip back to a classic Rick And Morty archetype: Morty learns too much, tries to be a good person, and makes things so much worse that Rick has to step in and fix them. This has been a key dynamic since the beginning of the show, and there’s something almost nostalgic about seeing it pop up again here; the second Morty finds out that the spaghetti Rick has been serving the family is actually corpse meat, you more or less know what you’re in for. Which can be good and bad, especially if, like me, you’ve watched every episode of this show and have grown more than a little tired of “Wow, isn’t it stupid to try and be a good person?”

Obviously I’m being reductive here, but at its worst, R&M can fall into the South Park “nothing matters” trap, offering supposedly complex moral problems whose solution is just “eh, who gives a fuck, if you try you make it worse.” I don’t need ai…

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Is Rick really worth it? That’s the question I kept asking myself during “Air Force Wong,” in part because the episode didn’t really require me to ask much else. Unity, the alien who assimilates entire civilizations, is back, and the President has the hots for Dr. Wong, Rick’s psychiatrist. Much silliness follows, a lot of it pretty funny, but the emotional core of the episode is Unity’s concern for Rick, a concern that drove her to take over the entire state commonwealth1 of Virginia when he won’t answer her voice mails. Again, Rick grudgingly recognizes that people care about him, and again, he realizes it too late for it to matter much, although Unity does leave Earth in peace.

There’s also the bit about the President and Dr. Wong, but before we get to that, I ask again: is Rick really worth any of this? It’s a question the show seems to believe we’ll take on faith. The story needed a reason for Unity to be around, it’s more interesting if she’s non-threatening (as she largely was in…

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Jerry has always been Rick and Morty’s secret weapon. It’s impossible to respect him, which is, of course, the point. If Rick Sanchez is the nerd dream of godhood, the caustic genius whose will and brilliance let him dominate every situation he finds himself in, Jerry is his karmic opposite, a cowardly putz whose fundamental passivity inspires contempt or pity in everyone who meets him. Jerry is the kind of person every male I know was taught to live in mortal terror of becoming, a nightmare vision of excessive emotional vulnerability and neediness. He is definitively pathetic, in a way he can never shake off no matter how hard he tries to be cool or fun or badass. The fundamental Jerry-ness of Jerry will always get in the way.

The trick is that Jerry’s Jerry-ness is also a strange kind of strength, one that Rick himself can never grasp. The two are mirror opposites, but the thing about mirrors is they’re casting a reflection, and both men have more in common than either would like to admit. They’re both petulant, likely to be hung up on grudges, desperate to please Beth—hell, Jerry even has a slight edge, because Jerry’s at least willing to admit he needs people in his life. Rick devotes a lot of his time to making sure everyone knows he doesn’t need them, which is—if you think about it—just as pathetic as anything Jerry might whine. Jerry is afraid of everything, but Rick is most terrified of anyone realizing that deep down he’s not that different from Jerry at all: a soft, mewling blob of need, desperate to be loved.

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Welcome back to Episodic Medium’s coverage of Adult Swim’s Rick and Morty, which enters its seventh season. As always, this first review is free to all, but additional reviews will be exclusive to paid subscribers. To learn more about what $5 a month gets you this fall, check out our fall schedule and our About Page.

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In retrospect, it was odd that Adult Swim played close to the vest about the new voices taking over for Justin Roiland, the Rick and Morty co-creator who was fired before the season began for, well, google it if you don’t already know. The actors (Ian Cardoni as Rick and Harry Belden as Morty) do a perfectly acceptable job—the season seven premiere is light on Morty content, but Belden’s take on the character is so close I don’t know if I would’ve noticed a difference if I wasn’t listening for it, and Cardoni is almost as exact. But neither of them are names that would have likely been known to the R&M audience, and it wasn’t like anyone was expecting Roiland’s replacements to be substantial changes from the original. Maybe the studio decided to make it into a mystery to distract from other potential PR issues from Roiland’s firing? Or maybe it’s just standard operating procedure and I’m foolish to question it.

Regardless, the new cast (and absence of Roiland) is both the biggest question going into “How Poopy Got His Poop Back” and the least interesting part of the half hour. Because, at least for now, there’s no real difference to the stories Rick and Morty is telling. I’m curious to see how the season plays out, but if this premiere is any indication, the rumors that Roiland had been more or less creatively absent on the show in recent years seem to have been true. At worst, you could say “Poopy” tries a little too hard to make sure we all get this is Rick And Morty, with plenty of references to previous episodes and lots of the kind of goofy pop culture shit we’ve come to expect. But then, the show has pretty much always been like this. The wheels haven’t come off, and that’s a reason (if you’re a fan, and I guess I am) to care.

As for the quality of the episode itself, outside of its real world context: it’s good. This isn’t an instant classic, and while it has some weirdly affecting emotional beats, it doesn’t dig down all that deep into the classic R&M self-loathing and sarcasm well. However, it does dig a little, and there’s something comforting about being reassured that whatever’s going on outside the show, the core remains intact. Do we have ridiculous characters and high concepts put into the mundane world of adult relationships and the struggle for emotional growth? Absolutely. Do we sort of learn a lesson that’s undercut by meta commentary and dark humor, but still manages to feel kind of meaningful almost in spite of itself? Yeah, I think so. I don’t know if anyone’s going to make a t-shirt out of Wayne Poopybutthole coming to grips with the wreckage he’s made of his life, but it wasn’t completely silly. That’s how R&M works after all: using actual pain to make the jokes land harder.

Mr. Poopybutthole is in a bad spot. After Beth shot him, he lost his job and his marriage, and now he’s crashing at the Smith house so he can drink himself to death. It’s a classic Dan Harmon set-up, something that recognizes continuity while also presenting a new status quo to adjust to, one that will be discarded for the old routine by the episode’s end. As ever, Harmon (or the writers working for him; the script is credited to Nick Rutherford) embrace serialization only as much as its useful for whatever particular story is in play. This means that when Rick pulls some friends together for a non-intervention intervention, we see the supposedly dead Squanch is still alive, and Birdman is willing to join up, mostly because he’s having a hard time raising an extremely rebellious Birddaughter. I’m pretty sure Gearhead got killed at some point too, but he’s back, and it doesn’t really matter much. 

The wild card for the non-intervention intervention (which goes off the rails almost immediately when Mr. Poopybutthole lies and tells everyone it’s his birthday) is guest voice Hugh Jackman, clearly having a hell of a time. Jackman is an extreme partier, ultimately pushing things so far that even Rick gets cold feet: Mr. Poopybutthole wants his ex-wife back, and Jackman, who wrote “Caribbean Queen,” thinks it’s important to believe in yourself, even if said believing involves making extremely dangerous choices about trying to force your way back into the life of someone who doesn’t want you around. Rick demures, then ends up along for the ride anyway, and then a Predator shows up.

It makes sense in context—actually, pretty much all of this makes sense, at least in terms of this show. Involving the Predator is a cute bit (Mr. Poopybutthole hired him to stalk his ex, but the Predator and Amy fell in love, or something), although if I’m being uncharitable I might say it’s a little obvious of a pop culture pull, especially when the Predator becomes directly involved with the episode’s climax. But is that being fair? Or am I viewing this with overly critical eyes for other reasons? Maybe I’m just digging for something to write about that isn’t just “this was fine.” 

It is fine, though. Nothing in “Poopy” is outright astonishing, but seven seasons in, I don’t need the show to amaze me for me to enjoy it. The jokes here, right down to the post-credits bit where a riding lawnmower ends the life of a good and extremely superstitious man, are variations on bits we’ve seen before—hell, even the universe jumping feels old—but they’re still funny. When it first aired, Rick and Morty made headlines for finding a new way to appeal to a particularly jaded audience, an appeal that broke through Adult Swim’s usual niche to achieve widespread popularity. Seven seasons in, it’s not surprising that there aren’t real surprises anymore; however, great television doesn’t need to be endlessly surprising. It just needs to be great.

I don’t know if this season will produce any more stone cold classics, but I will say this premiere does just as much as it needs to, and no more. My reviews of this show may sometimes seem borderline antagonistic, but that’s only because I really do think the creative team is capable of amazing stuff. I don’t know if I could say I’m “excited” to see what comes next, if only because it takes a lot for Rick and Morty to excite me after so many years. But all told, “Poopy” gave me plenty of reason to look forward to the season, exciting or not.

Stray observations

• No quotes this week; due to personal reasons (a crazy busy weekend, mostly), I wasn’t able to watch the episode until this morning, and had to do it in circumstances that made note-taking difficult. Future reviews may be more thorough, as Adult Swim has been kind enough to grant us access to screeners (for the time being, at least). 

• I like Hugh Jackman. He makes a much better guest star than certain others that shall rename nameless.

• My favorite joke was either the riding lawnmower going on a killing spree or Rick making a robot ghost by building a robot and then killing it before it could finish downloading “business.”