“The Rickchurian Mortydate” Recap – Rick and Morty
By: Dylan Hysen
Dylan Hysen, Delaney Stovall, and Michelle Anderer recap the Season 3 finale of Rick and Morty, “The Rickchurian Mortydate”.
Podcast: Play in new window | Download
Subscribe: Spotify | TuneIn | RSS
Dylan Hysen
Dylan is a software developer from the DC area who hosts the Overly Animated podcast discussing everything animation.
I really liked the conclusion of this season (minus the stinger), and the direction it indicates for the show going forward. I think we interpret the word “reset” rather differently; I certainly don’t see it as a rejection of continuity, character development, and series-wide plot arcs. The characters are reverting to earlier states, but it’s not because their experiences and decisions of the past season have been erased – it’s because they reject them, with the exception of Rick, and Rick is outvoted, and he apparently has become sentimental enough that he doesn’t want to use some Crazy Sci-Fi Whatsit to force everyone to submit to him. This is good character development for Rick, and he’s going to need a lot more of it if “siding with Rick over Jerry” is ever going to make logical sense.
I do hear some of your complaints about it, though, particularly concerning the rushed feeling of Beth and Jerry’s relationship. I kind of saw this coming from the beginning of the season, because Beth and Jerry are the exact kind of unhealthy couple that continually breaks up and makes up, and “the season starts with Beth and Jerry getting divorced and ends with them getting remarried” felt like a very natural structure for a season-long Beth and Jerry subplot. The way this reconciliation was presented in this episode left something to be desired. I suppose that that’s a natural consequence of trying to mash an awesome standalone A-plot and an unpleasant-but-necessary B-plot into the same season finale episode. Larger season-wide context also hurts the impact of this development – we have Jerry’s most heroic episode midway through the season, while his least heroic episode is literally the one preceding this. Maybe the audience would be more amenable to the development if the penultimate episode of the season were a “Jerry can actually be pretty awesome sometimes” episode (Rick Potion #9, Big Trouble In Little Sanchez, The Whirly Dirly Conspiracy) instead of a “Jerry is a sniveling loser who always consistently fucks everything up” episode (Anatomy Park, Interdimensional Cable II, The ABCs Of Beth).
How would you feel if S04E01 confirms that this is Clone Beth, but has Real Beth refuse Rick’s call to come back, leaving us with a new status quo where Clone Beth and Real Beth are two distinct characters, and the former has much more presence in the show? I really like this idea; it wouldn’t go back on the things I love about the ending of season 3 (Rick losing control of the family and becoming officially subordinate to Jerry, Jerry getting his wishes infuriatingly fulfilled, the family committing to a superficially traditional nuclear front) while introducing all kinds of interesting new possibilities going forward (Real Beth as a Chekhov’s Gun that could potentially be used multiple times, Jerry’s life being a lie, Rick becoming more self-isolated and dangerous).
Potential future episode titles:
Orphan Beth
The Beths From Brazil
The Bethstige
I’d love if we had Clone Beth and Real Beth both going at once in S4, I think there’s a lot of potential interesting narrative there. This is a good take from you, that resetting the family structure wouldn’t have to reset these character arcs. I really hope so.
Thank you very much. 🙂 I tend to approach my favorite media as a writer, analyzing what directions things can go in and how things can be made better, which on the one hand can be very frustrating – my favorite stuff is often also the stuff where I see the most room for improvement, looking at you, Gravity Falls – but also makes me extremely resistant to being totally blindsided by creative choices or feeling that shows have written themselves into a corner.
I’m trying to get away from fanfic and towards original writing, but I always felt that there’s a really underdeveloped niche for fanfiction that puts serious thought into imitating the source material. It’s a crappy thing I made as a teenager, but I have a script for a Rick And Morty episode I wrote as a teenager, and several of the ideas in it were coincidentally used in season three. I might try my hand at that again some time before season four comes out. 🙂
Out of curiosity, how much do you think the episode would be improved by a better stinger? I’m imagining a viewing party with Jaguar, Noob Noob, a mermaid, and Kiara, and an argument breaks out about whether Beth’s a clone. (A tech support guy and the Presidentress are there too, but they’re just making out in the background.) The mermaid cuts in to break the fourth wall and tell us not to waste our lives obsessively waiting for season four, and a “Gott Damn” from Noob Noob closes out the season.
Yeah, better stinger would help a lot although I think the reset problems would still really remain. Stinger was more just another thing on top of the core problem.
To me it seemed like the 10th episode of a 14 episode series – i.e. where you’d put one of the weaker ones.
I think the ending is a mislead – Rick does not look happy, and Rick’s not of a stoic disposition.
Yeah I’m interested to see if more people think the ending is a mislead.. but if it is what’s the point?
I kinda get what they’re going for with the ending. This whole season has been about deconstructing Rick’s toxic personality, so having the season end on him losing, especially to someone as “beneath him” as Jerry, kinda goes with that character development, as karmic punishment for Rick’s dickishness. The problem comes from the fact that Jerry’s “victory” over Rick feels undeserved. While he has made some small attempts at improving himself, there aren’t really any signs that Jerry’s much better of a person than the whiny, self-centered, “woe is me” jackass we’ve all come to love hating, so his arc this season ending on such a high note feels really out of place.
This is one of the major reasons I think Beth being a clone would be a good development in the next season, because it would retroactively undercut this victory of Jerry’s and make it into an only moderately less pathetic version of his plot in M. Night Shaymaliens.
Yeah Clone Beth would really help here. Don’t see the big toxic Rick arc from this season, but I did like subverting him at the end. Probably the best part of the ending.