As the third season of Dan Harmon and Justin Roiland's animated sci-fi comedy Rick and Morty screeches to a triumphant close, it's exploded from one of those in-the-know nerd-fan affairs to a full-blown cult phenomenon.
US cable channel Adult Swim has revealed its viewership's up 81% on the second season, making it the year's most popular TV comedy among American 18-34-year-olds, and its finale last Sunday drew a bigger audience than the latest Fear the Walking Dead.
The conversation has moved on from winkingly repeating the show's seemingly meaningless catchphrases ("Wub a lub a dub dub!", "Get schwifty!") to sharing astonished reactions to the next-level plotting, daring existentialist theme-wrangling and rip-the-envelope dark comedy.
Charting the adventures of a querulous 14-year-old boy (Morty Smith) and his alcoholic, über-genius scientist grandfather (Rick Sanchez) – both voiced by co-creator Roiland – the show has spiralled into a complex interplanetary, interdimensional epic which revels in the sheer limitlessness of its genre while never losing its emotional grip on the central characters – or forgetting to be truly, properly hysterically funny.
Whether you're an early adopter trying to hold it close or an evangelical recent binger, you'll agree it's as hilarious as peak-era Simpsons, as edgy as South Park and as wittily, cosmically mind-blowing as The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. It's earned a devoted following and transcended to premium-grade small-screen entertainment.
There are just too many Easter eggs and references to even attempt listing them here, so we'll satisfy ourselves with analysing in far too much detail just what makes Rick and Morty great…
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1. THE SCI-FI CRAZINESS
The warp engine that powers Rick and Morty's plotting is its central concept of infinite universes, through which Rick is able to travel at will with his portal gun and encounter parallel versions of himself (and poor, suffering Morty). Unsurprisingly, Harmon and Roiland have cited Doctor Who as a big inspiration, though this inter-dimensional traveller has far fewer scruples and is much more cynical than the Doctor.
However, there's far more to the show than its multiversal misadventures. It has also dealt with memory, virtual reality, time travel, dream travel, cloning, micro-dimensions and far more, all with such wit and ingenuity that it puts many full-on sci-fi blockbusters to shame.
It's unafraid to raise some Big Questions, too. After all, what does it say about the value of life and personal identity if you know for a fact that you and everyone you love inhabit an infinite spectrum of existence in an infinite number of forms?
Essential episode: Total Rickall (S2:E4)
2. THE BIG ARC
While Rick and Morty is parcelled up into stand-alone, 22-minute adventures, it has a definite continuity — albeit one that's pretzel-twisted — that demands it be watched in sequence. Roiland and Harmon serve it up complete with call-backs, foreshadowing, repeat characters and extended story strands.
The inexorable disintegration of Morty's parents' marriage propels the domestic half of the show, while its galactic side is dominated by the Citadel of Ricks: an entire cosmic metropolis of alternate-universe Ricks and Mortys who have formed their own society and police the behaviour of 'rogue' Ricks and Mortys across the multiverse — including the 'hero' pairing, from Dimension C-137.
(Though that's not where Rick and Morty now live, having relocated to a nearby parallel reality in which they recently killed themselves during a botched experiment, after – bear with us – Rick accidentally turned Earth C-137's human race into rampaging, mindless mutants).
Essential episode: The Rickshank Rickdemption (S3:E1)
3. THE DEEP-CUT REFERENCES
Given the show began life as a short Back to the Future parody (or "pornographic vandalisation", as Harmon put it), it's hardly surprising it's stuffed with pop-culture references. Movies as diverse as Titanic, Zardoz, The Purge, Jurassic Park, Inception, Footloose, Mad Max and Guardians of the Galaxy are overtly sent up, while Rick accidentally "Cronenbergs" his entire planet during the first season (see above).
Many further references are more Easter eggishly buried: Rick's old house looks exactly the same as Walter White's in Breaking Bad, as 'The Rickshank Rickdemption' reveals, while Neil Gaiman's beloved comic-book creation the Sandman briefly appears in 'Morty's Mind Blowers'.
And in a brilliant bit of cross-TV show join-uppery with Disney XE's Gravity Falls, the pen, mug and notebook that Stan Pines loses through an interdimensional gateway in the 'Society of the Blind Eye' episode are seen re-emerging from one of Rick's green, glowy portals during a trans-reality chase sequence in the first season's 10th episode. (Gravity Falls creator Alex Hirsch is good friends with Roiland, you see – and there's many other super-obscure references to his show that Falls fans have spotted in Rick and Morty).
Essential episode: Ricksky Business (S1:E11)
4. THE GUEST APPEARANCES
OK, so Rick And Morty is hardly the first show to impress us with its voice cameos — and nothing will ever beat The Simpsons' hit rate on that front — but the quality of its scripts certainly attracts a damn fine set of guest stars.
'Pickle Rick' (the instant-fan-favourite episode where Rick turns himself into a pickle) co-stars Susan Sarandon and Danny 'Machete' Trejo, while elsewhere in season 3 we've heard Silicon Valley's Thomas Middleditch, The Tick's Peter Serafinowicz and Community's Joel McHale (the latter admittedly less surprising, given Harmon used to show-run Community).
Elsewhere, Alfred Molina's played the Devil (aka "Mr. Needful"), Christina Hendricks has popped up as a hive-mind alien named Unity, and Flight of the Conchords' Jemaine Clement voiced a godlike gas-entity named Fart.
But best of them all is German director Werner Herzog's appearance as extra-terrestrial civil rights activist Shrimply Pibbles in the season 2 episode 'Interdimensional Cable 2: Tempting Fate'. During which he delivers a monologue about penises. Genius.
Essential episode: Interdimensional Cable 2: Tempting Fate (S2:E8)
5. THE FOURTH-WALL BREAKING
Roiland and Harmon are smart enough to realise that if you wink at the audience or have your characters turn to camera too much, it quickly gets dull. So their fourth-wall breaking is well judged and precision targeted, from Rick's end-of-episode attempts to land his lame catchphrases, to a curtain-pulling reference in the clip-show-tastic 'Rixty Minutes' to the fact that most of it was actually improvised.
Best of all was the recent 'Morty's Mind Blowers', in which Rick reveals memories he's removed from Morty's mind to stop him losing it. Here, he not only tells the audience "we'll be doing this instead of Interdimensional Cable" (i.e. the previous two seasons' clip-show-formatted episodes), but directly references The Simpsons' Halloween Specials – which 'Morty's Mind Blowers' shamelessly and brilliantly rips off. Oh, then there's this sweet little exchange:
Morty: "How come I was able to see those other people's memories? I wouldn't have been around for that."
Rick: "Yeah, sometimes I have to do a little editing, Morty. You know, it helps the Mind Blowers play a little better on revisiting."
Essential episode: Morty's Mind Blowers (S3:E8)
6. THE SATIRE
Both Roiland and Harmon have insisted there's no overt or deliberate politics in Rick and Morty, but during the last season it did feel like it became significantly more satirical. In season 3's first episode we hear Rick refer to 9/11 as "an excuse to strip away our freedom", while its seventh is devoted entirely to showing life on the Citadel of Ricks, where a Morty is running for President for the first time.
The segregation of the Citadel's society (between Ricks and Mortys) offers a surprisingly affecting prism for the divisions in Trump-led America's own – though it does point out that some Ricks can suffer as much as some Mortys can be cynical. In a strange way, it almost feels like all five seasons of The Wire rolled into one crazy cartoon.
Essential episode: The Ricklantis Mixup (S3:E7)
7. THE DARKNESS
"Welcome to the darkest year of our adventures," announces Rick towards the end of the season 3 opener. And he's not wrong. Morty's parents, Jerry (Chris Parnell) and Beth (Sarah Chalke), are finally divorcing, with Jerry retiring to a filthy, stained grief-hole of an apartment. Morty's sister Summer (Spencer Grammer), meanwhile, has turned almost psychotically embittered, preferring life in a post-apocalyptic wasteland reality to her own.
The show's nihilistic streak has broadened, too, with Rick's see-all-perspectives philosophy seemingly calculating everything as having a sum total of zero. "When you know nothing matters, the universe is yours," he tells Beth at one point.
Plus, the violence has intensified ('Pickle Rick' is insanely gory; 'Vindicators 3: The Return of Worldender' puts a superhero group through a Saw-like torture maze), the sexual references have become shield-your-ears stiletto-sharpened (one episode features "Muppet rape") and the actions of the aforementioned Evil Morty have turned even more abhorrent.
Essential episode: Pickle Rick (S3:E3)
8. THE HEART
Yet somehow, despite all the profligate bloodletting and Rick's colossal cynicism, its main characters remain sympathetic and likeable, and you get a real sense that the members of the Smith family really do love each other – in the same imperfect, messy and sometimes hurtful way that all families love each other
If we didn't care, or we suspected that Rick, Morty, Beth, Summer and Jerry didn't care, then the show wouldn't work. It would just be a brutal, scatological, shock-delivering, pan-dimensional comedy free-for-all in which we'd all lose interest.
For all the laughs and whacked-out concepts, the characters are the reason we keep coming back, and keep encouraging others to come with us. Even Rick From Dimension C-137 has a heart, though he may try to bury it under manifold layers of cold, hard intellect and his claims that nothing means more to him than a discontinued Chicken McNugget dipping sauce. Rick remains, somehow, our hero.
Essential episode: The Wedding Squanchers (S2:E10)
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