4x06 Never Ricking Morty

[8.1/10] So I love The Simpsons, probably more than is healthy for a normal individual to enjoy and appreciate a TV show. I also love the series’s “Treehouse of Horror” episodes, a way for the show to deploy familiar characters and settings in a non-canon environment which allows the show to veer off in directions and utilize ideas that might otherwise break the show as a whole.

But there’s a catch to that, which is that the “Treehouse” segments have become staid and predictable over the years. Sure, there’s a few standouts from the show, even in the post-classic years. Nevertheless, the show’s diversion from its usual rules has become expected and, by extension, kind of boring, despite the nominal ability for such installments to break the usual rules of the show.

That’s what I really admire about “Never Ricking Morty”. It self-consciously follows in the footsteps of “Interdimensional Cable” and similar anthology episodes that allow the show to break its format and deliver some more free form content. But rather than just repeating that same approach with a sightly different flavor, it goes in a completely weird direction, that ups the ante in terms of Rick and Morty’s meta-ness and weirdness.

That’s another way of saying that I have no idea how to review this episode. Normally it’s easier for me to talk about how a show’s story functions (or doesn’t), or whether its humor lands. But “Never Ricking Morty” pretty much defies that approach.

Instead, it is meta on top of meta on top of meta. It riffs on the way that anthology episodes work. It features a cameo from series co-creator Dan Harmon himself. It plays on Harmon’s famed story circle as a story-telling method. It both devolves into fan-service and completely subverts that expectation and, ultimately, pokes fun at why the show exists (to sell ads and merchandise).

But what I really admire about the outing is not its satire, or the way it pokes fun at its own fan-pleasing expectations and/or its self-referential to the point of absurdity sense of humor and/or its existence as an object of capitalist triumph despite its own satirization of that. I just like the weirdness and audacity of it.

This is an episode that plays so fast and loose with the idea of what is a story, what is an abstraction, and what is a joke that it’s almost transcendent. I think you’d be hard-pressed to make actual sense of the “story train” conceit of this episode, but that’s almost the glory of it. It contains so many layers and stories and tangents and recursive shtick that it’s almost an achievement how up its own ass this episode is. In the best Rick and Morty tradition, it both plays the reciprocal, self-reflective meta-humor straight and deconstructs it at the same time, resulting in a freeform, semi-improvisational take on the show’s own storytelling rhythms that results in a comic ouroboros.

I laughed the most at the Bechdel Test segment. Morty’s deliberately terrible story works both as a satirization of the shallow attempts at “go girl feminism” that exist at the mainstream, while also poking fun at the show’s own failed attempts to do justice to its female characters. Bits like the scorpions (reused from Morty’s prior story) having bows, or Beth and Summer having stilted exchanges about their “special time” do a great job at poking fun at the superficiality of mainstream stories about women, while also poking fun at the show’s own failure to do justice to those sorts of stories.

At the same time, I love how the show balances the real life pressure on Dan Harmon and Justin Roiland to give the show’s audience the type fan service they want, with the elements that the show’s hardcore fans would abhor. Something about the continuity circus of an army of Ricks, led by Evil Morty, replete with a dark Mr. Poopybutthole, a horde of Meseeks, and a crowd of Morty’s sons, seems like exactly what a certain segment of the audience would love. (And that’s after cameos from Bird Person and Tammy, each representing culminations of stories fans want to see.)

And yet, despite those teases, the bit ends with Story-Lord being thwarted by Rick and Morty calling to Jesus and off-brand versions of the Veggie Tales characters, the exact opposite of what Rick and Morty fans traditionally like. It’s such a fun subversion, the sort of earnest anathema to edgelords everywhere that shows Harmon and Roiland know exactly whom they’re dealing with.

Granted, sometimes this episode loses track of itself. The meta-ness spins out into the unfollowable at times. But that’s also the charm of “Never Ricking Morty,” an episode that toys with “it’s all a dream” and “Normal Again”-style mind-screws, and subversions of audience expectations to the point that it’s fair to question how much even the show’s key creatives understand what’s going on in this one.

That’s a feature, not a bug though. With “Never Ricking Morty”, the show finds a way to do the aimless, but telling riffs that have driven the show’s more random, out there episodes, without just repeating itself. The Simpsons has, after thirty years, sadly been unable to thread that needle. This series has a long way to go if the seventy episode order iis any indication, but still. It’s heartening that after such a long renewal, the show is still ready, willing, and able to go this bonkers, this self-referential, and this weird when trying to break the format of an already out there series.