How Rick and Morty Saved Season 4

[Applause] [Music] this video is brought to you by skill share so this will be my third video the tackles Rick and Morty's fourth season and it's been a weird journey my first video covered how the first half of this year felt like the worst Rick and Morty has ever been I was impressed with the episode it came back with though and now I'm here to say that in my opinion at least the back half of season 4 was the strongest the show has been since season 2 it staged a midseason comeback that you don't see much in TV especially in this age of shorter seasons and while the first half makes me unable to put this one on the same level as the first two years when taking as a whole this week I want to focus on that second half and the big course corrections that I think it made to keep the show going at the top of its game I've already talked about how much I enjoyed the very weird and meta train episode but the week after that was primordius which I wouldn't put up there with the very best the show has to offer but it was definitely a solid episode unlike some of the earlier episodes this year I think it actually really explored its sci-fi premise well I loved the concept of this facehugger species that doesn't just become monsters in fact they use their hosts to build a pretty normal advanced society that added some moral depth to them that they didn't appear to have at first and that ending with summer Rick and Morty really having to sit with what they had done was pretty great I think the show does well when it walks that very fine line of being goofy and fourth wall breaking about its premises while also taking the consequences they create and the effect that that has in our characters actually kind of seriously it wasn't a perfect episode like I think it was probably a bit longer than his fairly simple premise could support but it was exactly the kind of story of the show excels that and I think a lot of the facehugger jokes worked really well but it kind of pales in comparison to the next one which has the extremely straightforward title the vat of acid episode after watching this one through a couple times I'm perfectly happy just saying it this is top tier Rick and Morty probably in the top five episodes they've ever made it's funny it's got a great sci-fi hook and most exciting of all for this season I think it really reflects where all the characters are at this specific moment you couldn't just slop vat of acid episode into season one or two I don't think it would work the morning we get here is far more confident and isn't nervous at all about telling Rick that his ideas suck in a way that he never would have been able to early on one of the most fun aspects of this show is seen just how far they'll take their premises and I think the idea of a device that saved your spot in real life just like in a video game was used pretty expertly here I loved Marty meeting the love of his life and surviving this horrific plane crash with their relationship intact only for it to all disappear when Jerry uses the wrong remote rick and morty is really good at creating these small surprisingly emotional moments and then just torching them and the actual acid vats were pretty amazing to this fake acid that you hide in with compartments for bones to just float to the surface it's so stupid and low-tech but you can tell Rick just loves the idea and dejenne Yuen Lee hurt when Morty doesn't like it too I also loved that Rick took a couple swipes at that awful dragon episode it made me think that the writers know that was one of their weaker scripts when they revealed that Morty has been killing a version of himself every single time he uses the button is the kind of disturbing sci-fi that the show nails without even really having to linger on it and as far as laughs go your mileage may vary but for me this was the most funny the show was this year the episode after children of Mort isn't quite at the same level but it's not a huge drop in quality either it also sets the stage well for Beth's arc in the finale the premise is really simple Rick slept with a living planet who now one's help raising what we assumed to be their kids what the episode really becomes about though is Beth and Rick working together to build this entire civilization meanwhile Jerry wanders off after being humiliated by summer and ends up becoming the leader of all the rock kids that rick has determined they don't need pretty Zuse like God is involved and you have a solid episode it's rare that a Jerri subplot is my favorite part of any given episode but I really liked it here for one thing I think he's actually kind of the more sympathetic one in the battle at the end his rock men have been completely tossed aside and dumped out of society by Rick and Beth which is actually pretty messed up if you think about it for more than like five seconds the Zeus fight is also pretty fun especially how it's resolved by Morty and summer flying a spaceship into his head Rick's anger at the end that Morty thought the ship would just control like a video game controller it was probably the biggest laugh of the episode for me but really this one was just setting the stage for the focus on Beth in the season finale nice adventure we finally get to see what happened to the original Beth or possibly clone Beth when she makes her return here along with Tammy and birdperson now reborn as Phoenix person and honestly I'm a little more torn on this finale than I am with the rest of the back half of the season well I do think Beth's Ark and the family's rejection of Rick at the end worked really well a lot of the actual story and even some of the jokes felt pretty played out and I feel like even within the episode they were trying pretty hard to lampshade that with Rick groaning over how Star Wars the whole setup was and Morty and some are constantly complimenting their own very basic character arcs I think the lack of meaningful Morty scenes also kind of hurt this one I mean this was two episodes in a row that he was kind of sidelined in the SI plot along with summer so even though it's the finale it didn't feel quite as meaningful to our two title characters as something like the vat of acid episode did still I don't think it's a bad one either the return of birdperson was more funny than I had expected and the Beth stuff did work great I especially loved the end scene where Rick actually watches what he did and is unable to run from the fact that yeah he's been a pretty terrible father this whole time and his family shunning him is probably justified it doesn't feel as huge as some of the past finales and I think a big part of that could be the show knowing that it still has 60 episodes it needs to produce but as a standalone I think it works overall Rick and Morty season four started out on extremely shaky ground feeling like a show that might be aging past its relevancy but managed to regroup in this back half with some shockingly good episodes I was really worried about the state of the show during like December of last year but something feels like it changed in the writers room or maybe the extra time just helped bring these episodes more in line with the quality of seasons 1 & 2 I don't know when we'll see the show again hopefully sooner than like 20 22 or something but when it does return I'll be much more excited to get back into it then I was when I came back from its half season break it went from a great but fading show to reclaiming its spot as a top-tier TV comedy it's kind of hard to believe that Rick and Morty started in 2013 those four seasons have taken a while and a lot has changed in that time especially online and if you're anything like me and want to try to hack it by making a living on the Internet you have to keep up with a weird and shifting online landscape for that I highly recommend going freelance building and branding your own success this is a really popular 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Channel: captainmidnight

Views: 478,869

Rating: 4.7892685 out of 5

Keywords: Rick and Morty, Season 4, Captain Midnight, captainmidnight, the vat of acid episode, episode 6, episode 7, episode 8, episode 9, episode 10, finale, Dan Harmon, Beth Smith, Rick & Morty, phoenix person, bird person, pringles, Film Theory, The Slow Downfall of Rick and Morty

Id: dkmM4zM8Np4

Length: 8min 52sec (532 seconds)

Published: Fri Jun 12 2020