4x03 One Crew Over the Crewcoo's Morty

[8.1/10] Leave it to the creator of Community and his colleagues to not only mercilessly make fun of a particular genre, but to transcend it and take it to its logical extreme at the same time. “One Crew Over the Crewcoo’s Morty” isn’t just a brilliant spoof of heist movies. It’s a brutal take down of them, a pitch perfect rendition of them, and a wild, endlessly fractaling, constantly topping itself version of them. The double-crosses upon double-crosses upon meta-double-crosses are both pointedly satirical and downright enjoyable in their own right. In short, this is the sort of high concept weirdness mixed with genre parodies that I love from Dan Harmon.

Harmon’s style of dialogue really sings in this one. Whether it’s Rick’s plain disgust for heist movies and everything in them, or his responses to the booing of the crowd, or his digs at David Lynch movies, almost every line out of the character’s mouth was a big laugh in this one. At the same time, the title characters’ conversations with Elon Tusk and Mr. Poopybutthole (a clause I never thought I’d write) have that awkward, regular speech pattern humor that the show can pivot to when it wants to take a break from its rapid-fire, rat-at-tat exchanges.

But really, I just like the escalation here. The way this episode goes from Rick being thwarted by a rival, to showing up that rival, to having to stop his own robo-creation, to being stopped by his own robot creation, and so forth and so on, is both a great take on the constantly twisty mysteries of heist movies while at the same time a set of really fun twists in and of itself. Of course, this being Rick and Morty, the show takes those twists to ludicrous extremes, like Rick’s various robots, or a recorded sky, or a random plot generator. It’s all delightfully out there.

That reaches its peak when Rick and his heist bot get into a twist-a-palooza that takes two hours, while everyone else is exhausted. It’s a great way to lean into the ludicrous of the constant “this was all part of the plan”-ism at the center of the genre. But my favorite part is the ultimate reveal, that this was all a scheme to make Morty lose interest in writing heist movies in a way that can’t be traced back to Rick, with Rick “heisting” Morty’s enthusiasm for his own project. It’s the perfect, meta twist to throw on top of this whole spoofing smorgasbord.

Throw in repeated amusing homages to Predator and creative character designs, and you have a fun, wildly inventive outing from R&M that both takes the stuffing out of a genre but also does a brilliant, over the top version of it at the same time.