Review: Rick and Morty, "How Poopy Got His Poop Back" | Season 7, Episode 1
Some of the voices may be new, but the song remains the same
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.
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.”
My guess for why they withheld the replacement actors was out of concern that the more toxic elements of the fanbase might try to dox the new actors so they kept it close to the vest until the first episode actually aired and they could at least go “see it isn’t really that different.” But this was a fun premiere. Even knowing they were going for sound-alikes I was still surprised by how similar the voices sounded. Storywise, I have gotten a bit tired by the Mr. Poopy Butthole check-ins at the end of each season but it was nice to see them try to turn it all into an actual story and try to advance the character beyond “his life keeps getting worse” even if it feels inevitable we’ll check back in on him again to find him still suffering from the fade away pills or having relapsed or whatever. I appreciate that they at least waited a few seasons to bring back Squanchy even if he didn’t do much. Jackman was the highlight and it was very funny that they went the extra step of having him record a cover of Caribbean Queen. I also laughed a lot at how long and overly thought out the fade away pills explanation bit was, which felt like a good showcase for Cardoni to show that he can ramble as well as Roiland can.
It was difficult for me, even in the context of Harmon’s spate of telling “tell-all” interviews, not to see the episode as a metaphor for the whole Roiland thing, with Mr PBH as Roiland & Rick as, we all know, Harmon.