One of my favorite TV shows to ever grace this earth, “Rick and Morty,” aired the first episode of their fourth season this past week and I couldn’t be more excited about this season. If you’re unfamiliar with the show, “Rick and Morty” is an animated TV show about a mad scientist and intergalactic genius, Rick, and his grandson Morty and their random and hilarious adventures across the galaxy. Rick is an alcoholic and constantly puts Morty in harm’s way because he’s bored with his life and wants to teach his dimly lit grandson a half-baked life lesson.
At the beginning of the shows release, there was a lot of talk on Twitter about the shows content written ‘exclusively for the intellectually superior’ due to its often meta and culturally abrasive humor. I can’t deny that the show requires your attention in order to follow the jokes and catty dialogue, but it’s nothing over your head. The closest the show gets to ‘intellectually superior’ is the total ridiculousness that leaves you incredibly confused, but it’s the kind of nonsense that still manages to make sense in the world of humor.
One of my favorite scenes in the show depicts this madness perfectly. Rick’s mind is under the control of alien bugs searching through his memories for the exact time in which he discovered interdimensional travel. While the aliens search through Rick’s brain, he takes them on a detour to McDonald’s, where he explains to his captor his obsession with the Szechuan dipping sauce that was part of a promotion for the new “Mulan” movie and the two split an order of nuggets. Meanwhile, the longer Rick takes to show his captor the memories they’re looking for, the more his brain slowly melts under the pressure of mind control. But apparently to Rick, the Szechuan dipping sauce from McDonald’s is more important than saving his melting brain.
The show itself is incredible and I don’t doubt that the fourth season will be nothing less, but I was mildly disappointed with the premier episode. I felt that the writers tried to cram in as much craziness as they could into one episode, knowing that the anticipation and expectations for the new season were high and they needed to impress. The episode failed, in my opinion, to support competing plot lines with both Rick and Morty. The two normally share a plot line while secondary characters take care of the second plot, but to pin both main characters against each other for the attention of the episode and of the audience was too much.
The previous season of the show came out about a year and a half ago and fans have been impatiently waiting for the renewal of the show. Once word of a fourth season surfaced, the Twitterverse exploded with information that “Rick and Morty” had received a huge renewal deal for 70 new episodes or 9 more seasons of the show. The premier of the first episode of the fourth season ended with Rick and Morty also celebrating the renewal, as they had a breaking the fourth wall sentimental moment together about all the future adventures that they’ll have together.
