3x07 The Ricklantis Mixup

[9.5/10] At some point, I am going to stop being surprised by Rick and Morty’s brilliance and just expect it, but the show is still at that point where I suspect it’ll be good every week, but it still manages to blow me away each new turn it takes.

I take “The Ricklantis Mixup” to be Season 3’s answer to the improv episodes from the prior two seasons -- a change of pace that allows Dan Harmon and Justin Roiland to play around in their amazing sandbox of a universe for a bit without feeling the need to develop or advance their main character. In that, they give us an episode that doesn’t have Rick or Morty or any of the other main characters, and yet has all the Ricks and Morties, in glorious, The Wire-esque splendor.

And The Wire really has to be the touchstone for an episode like this. Where else are you going to find something that addresses the challenges of cops and criminals, the rise of an charismatic and unexpected leader, the frustrations of blue collar working who feels like the system is holding him down, and the difficulties of four schoolchildren to make their way in that world. Hell, throw in a Hamsterdam, and you have all five seasons of that superlative show, filtered through Harman and Roiland’s dueling deranged perspectives and deposited into one twenty-two minute chunk. That’s an amazing achievement, the sort of praise I feel like I’m throwing out all too often for this show, but it keeps earning it.

The episode can roughly be broken up into those four stories, but what makes the episode more than just the sum of its parts (and what earns its Wire comparisons) is how interconnected those stories are, both literally, since they’re connected by the Citadel are all affected by the ecosystem that’s developed after our Rick destroyed the place, but also thematically, in the way each protagonist of each story looks at a bad situation and wants change, and gets it, but gets something unsatisfying or unpleasant or worse than they bargained for out of the process, with plenty of dead bodies floating among the garbage and blasted out the airlock.

That’s clearest for Candidate Morty, trying to win the presidency of The Citadel on behalf of The Morty Party. There’s something aspirational, almost West Wing-esque about Candidate Morty, as he gives soaring, Obama-esque speeches about dissolving the lines of division between Ricks and Morties and make The Citadel something better for all. That makes it seem particularly terrible when his former campaign manager, another Morty, tries to assassinate him. The move turns out to be all for naught since Candidate Morty survives and becomes President, in something that seems like a chance to turn around this mixed up place.

Instead, it’s revealed that Candidate Morty is the evil, eye patch-wearing Morty we met back in Season 1. It’s the perfect, knife-turning twist for the episode -- a reveal that the Carcetti-esque beacon of hope for a city in turmoil is a guy running on unifying rhetoric to pursue his own Carcetti-esque ambitions (well, maybe a touch more intergalactically evil than Carcetti’s). All of that hope, all of the communal joining together and believing that things can change just puts a tyrant into power, and holy hell is that one of the darkest things an already dark show has put forward.
Then there’s Factory Worker Rick, who seems older and more haried even by Rick standards, gazing out of subway cars, seeing wealthier and cooler Ricks succeed ahead of him, and sighing. He works at a factory that makes wafers out of the satisfaction an old fashioned “Simple Rick” enjoys when reliving the experience of spending time with his daughter (a subtly revealing bit in and of itself).

Things hit the fan when he goes postal, killing his boss and co-workers, and getting into a hostage standoff with the police. There too, the show capture a certain backbreaking ennui to this place, that even (and maybe especially) a locale populated by geniuses leads to this sort of dissatisfaction, disaffection, and anomie. And this story has just as cynical an ending, with Factory Worker Rick believing he’s won, only for the Wonka-esque Rick who runs the factory to capture him and use that feeling of freedom and satisfaction to fuel his new deluxe wafers. I mean, my god, if that is not the peak of devastating, existential irony on this show, I don’t know what is.

There’s also Rookie Cop Rick, who’s paired with Grizzled Cop Morty. More than the other stories, this one feels like it’s riffing on a sea of tropes ripped right out of the Training Day playbook. There’s plenty of political and social commentary baked in through how even Grizzled Cop Morty looks down on his fellow Morties as “animals” or how Rookie Cop Rick tries to give himself up to his brethren for the difficult choices he’s made and gets let off the hook. But it has less impact since it feels like more of those tropes played straight (or at least, as straight as can be possible given the insane circumstances) than something truly new and subversive.

Still, this is the part of the episode where the show gains strength from the crazy details of the world it’s constructed at The Citadel. The entire concept of a wild Morty club where Morty’s dress up in costumes, dance for one another, and use bad math, or of a series of news anchors from the same hierarchy of subuniverses, each of whom has it worst than the next, or just the concept of Morties who’ve been turned into lizards and Ricks adopting rural affections is bizarre and hilarious and head-scratching in the best ways.

That comes through in the episode’s final story, which sees a quartet of young Morties, soon to be assigned to a new quartet of Ricks, go out in search of a fabled “wish portal” that could change their lives. The sorriest among them is Cool Morty, who has an experimental drama chip that allows him to make things “sad and a little boring,” and who’s been through Rick after Rick. Here too, there is that sense of existential dread, of things never changing, the permeates the proceedings. Cool Morty’s suicide is unexpected and lives up to the sadness his experimental chip portends, but it’s made worse that the supposed change his dive into this sci-fi wishing well effected is the hollow one President Morty offered.

That’s the rub of this one. Even in this fantastical world of brilliant scientists and their boy sidekicks, there is a kaleidoscope of pain and false promises that stretch through everything. All the geniuses, all the good-natured moppets in the world can’t change that when thrown together into their own dysfunctional society. That Rick and Morty has the chutzpah to explore that society for an episode, and to deliver that message, just speaks to the boldness and off-kilter storytelling we’ve come to expect, and to make it all as funny as it is quietly devastating, is a near-miracle. Rick and Morty keeps delivering them on a regular basis.