Why Does Rick and Morty Feel Different?

so rick and morty a great show that's had some less than great recent seasons what's uh what's going on there almost every episode in the first three seasons is a classic they're sharp funny have interesting ideas at their core and are very unpredictable it's some of the most rewatchable tv i've ever seen like i can throw on total recall at any time watch it all the way through and still laugh but i found most of seasons 4 and 5 to be a little lackluster there are some winning episodes in the bunch and only a couple that are actually painful to revisit but most of the episodes have been just pleasing passable nothing terribly wrong about them but they're just not quite as tight or impactful as what came before at least that was my initial impression of the seasons some good episodes some bad episodes but after thinking about it i've come to believe that the problems go a little deeper than episodic issues the real problems affect even the good episodes here's what i mean [Music] the core dynamic of the show is between rick who seems to know everything and is deeply cynical about life and morty who seems to know nothing but is naively optimistic nobody exists on purpose nobody belongs anywhere everybody's gonna die come watch tv the dramatic question all of the episodes engage with is this is existence meaningless that question is posed as a result of rick inventing a way to travel the multiverse with his portal gun because he can do that he's concluded that nothing matters like literally everything you think has meaning has no meaning at all nothing matters so we may as well pull out our dicks and rub them on fate's glaring teeth like we're brushing fate's teeth but we're using your gross dirty dick must be nice he can do whatever he wants because if he screws up he can just move to a dimension where he didn't screw up there's an infinite number of realities morty and in a few dozen of those i got lucky and turned everything back to normal i just had to find one of those realities in which we also happen to both die around this time now we can just slip into the place of our dead selfs in this reality and everything will be fine as a result he believes having emotional attachments is irrational because if one of his family members die he can just go and get an alternate version of them with little hassle something he repeatedly reminds those around him as a way to prove that he does not actually care about them what what's this supposed to accomplish we have infinite grandkids you're trying to use disney bucks at a caesar's palace here or family means nothing in which case don't play that card my access to infinite timelines precludes the necessity of attachment rick can we not leave without my sister oh you have infinite sisters morty i mean not that i want to spend the rest of my day looking for another one even his connection with morty is given a logical not an emotional explanation he keeps morty around because you're a camouflage camouflage what are you talking about rick rick's have a very distinctive and traceable brainwave due to our genius the best way to hide from an enemy's radar is to stand near someone with complimentary brain waves that make ours invisible see when a rick is with a morty the genius waves get canceled out by the uh morty waves this mindset frees rick from any responsibility or accountability he is free to live a hedonistic lifestyle to do and say whatever he pleases to act on every impulse and to be abusive towards everyone else who behaves differently this is the heart of the conflict on the show in almost every episode one member of the smith family is obsessed with something whether that's being a good father getting the girl being popular at school or having an impressive career they're caught up with the day-to-day of average american life then in walks rick to tell them how dumb it all is and that drives the dramatic conflict of the episode who is right does family mean nothing or is it the only thing that matters does being popular matter or going your own way now it's no secret that rick and morty is heavily influenced by the ideas of h.p lovecraft an american author who along with being extremely racist is also the writer of dozens of horror stories which collectively invented the cosmic horror subgenre in cosmic core the horrors the characters encounter are so alien enormous or strange that it makes the characters question the meaning of their own existence as in what purpose could my life possibly have if something as big as cthulhu is out there if i'm just an insect in a universe so vast that i could never have a meaningful impact on it like what am i doing going to work every day and watching baseball games when my entire planet could be stepped on by an alien god on its way to the bathroom or entered into a reality tv show music competition rick and morty takes a comedic approach to all of these ideas the cosmic horror is the vast scale of the universe as well as the very concept of the multiverse itself when rick challenges the smith's family's preoccupations and calls them frivolous he is pointing at the inherent cosmic horror of the world they live in to prove his points and this is one of the key elements that gives so much of the show such energy especially in the earlier seasons because in those seasons the smith family could still reasonably push back against rick's ideology there was a lot of tension there seeing whether the characters would hold on to their values or slip into rick's way of thinking in the last few seasons though there's been a subtle shift in the way rick's ideology is handled in that it's both been quietly sidelined while also being tacitly accepted so the third season of the show is largely about rick exerting his dominance over his family he returns from prison overthrows the galactic government and causes beth and jerry's divorce in the premiere episode as he puts it no more dad morty he threatened to turn me into the government so i made him and the government go away oh [ __ ] i've replaced them both as the de facto patriarch of your family and your universe the rest of the season has him abusing this newfound power until beth and jerry get back together and rick is forced to accept a more diminished and subordinate role in the family as a result in the following seasons he is not nearly as tyrannical he doesn't have the power to force his ideology down everyone else's throats quite as much but at the same time the rest of the family has come to acclimate themselves to rick's universe morty has long ago dropped the childish innocence that defined his earlier character and now simply deals with whatever problem rick causes in his life as if he's doing chores summer regularly adopts the hedonistic lifestyle of her grandfather and beth who rick clones at the end of season 3 gets to live both the life of a space hero and the mundane life of a suburban mom she gets to live both the life she thinks her father approves of and the one she wants to think matters the only moral counterpoint is jerry who wants to live a life without rick real talk buddy where you at go to hell rick but all of them are at least now aware of the lovecraftian scale of the world they live in and are fine with it and that has a lot of consequences on where the show can go and it's where the last couple seasons have struggled i think once the characters themselves have accepted the cosmic horror of the universe and then still go back to living their regular lives accepting that what really matters are the moments that you're living right now it's hard to challenge them anymore in season one when flesh-eating grasshopper monsters attacked the smith house it's terrifying for summer but in season four a bunch of time traveling terminator snakes can show up on their doorstep and it's just another day for the smith family these kinds of stories aren't threatening to the characters or to the audience because we've seen it plenty of times before and so have they that the characters are so often unfazed by the story that they just experienced leaves many of the episodes feeling pleasant enough to watch exciting as it's happening but they're not really impactful the thing is though i think the show is totally aware of that i think the relative frivolity and expendability of the later seasons is something the show is intentional about is it possible that the show is purposefully making episodes that feel kind of frivolous and expendable [Music] okay so one of the things rick says constantly especially in seasons four and five is something along the lines of let's stop doing these over serious continuity driven episodes let's just go on light self-contained adventures classic rick and morty adventures you know just an easy episode that's a parody of a movie that wraps up and we never think about again from now on rick and morty doing a little of this and a little of that yeah sometimes we'll do classic stuff you know other times we'll do whatever sometimes we won't even do anything rick and morty not doing anything morty the idea was to get back to simple adventures the citadel runs on canon these kinds of asides are everywhere and they strike at a difference between what the creators of the show want to make and what their audience wants them to make let's uh let's back up a second season 2 aired in 2015 and ends on a big cliffhanger rick's friend bird person got shot by his fiancee tammy and rick turns himself into the galactic government the fact that it's a cliffhanger contributes to the fanbase's intense anticipation for the next season then season 3 drops in 2017 and this is where the popularity of the show hits its peak and where the fan base starts to go insane it's when you get headlines of people harassing poor mcdonald's employees for szechuan sauce it's when everyone starts screaming pickle rick at each other and it's when the you need a high iq to understand rick and morty meme proliferates it's at this time that the hardcore rick and morty fan base earns a reputation for being extremely confrontational now one of season 3's best episodes feature the return of evil morty who takes over the citadel of ricks setting up a big confrontation with the main rick and morty in a future episode and another one trolls the audience by offering them a plausible backstory for rick but then telling them that it's all fake so by the time season 3 is finished what the fanbase wanted was clear continuations of all their favorite plot lines what's going on with phoenix person and tammy what's gonna happen with evil morty and what's rick's backstory i think the creators of the show really felt this pressure to deliver on these stories but also felt an extreme reluctance to go back to any of them something they directly tell the audience in several different episodes so in the story train episode they make fun of the idea of finishing the tammy bird person and evil morty story lines as burning the show out on marketability and broad appeal yeah you're right morty we got all that meta cannon [ __ ] out of the way and now we can just be ourselves in all of the big continuity driven episodes of seasons four and five the writers through rick make fun of the very idea of continuity and serialization she died the way she lived over serialized brick often breaks the fourth wall but in the past he usually did it to make fun of whatever genre the episode was perioding oh oh i'm sorry oh you're right oh real serious gotta take it real serious huh the reason those are fun is because they play on the audience's knowledge of that genre or movie to work so the audience feels in on the joke but whenever the show makes fun of the very idea of continuity the target of the joke is the audience the show is making fun of you for wanting these kinds of episodes rather than the classic standalone episodes but it's sort of hard to get invested in a story when that story is explicitly self-conscious it feels like the writers are regularly trying to lampshade their own frustrations with their work by pointing out its shortcomings which just makes me a little more distanced from the episodes themselves i mean am i not supposed to like this am i not in on the joke if i like this we're removing ourselves from this sloppy [ __ ] up story and letting snake time travel eat its own tail i was kind of funny sometimes mostly burping come on kids we have to go do a [ __ ] piece of [ __ ] star wars but at the same time the fourth wall breaking critiques of continuity aren't just thesis statements by the writers but what kind of storytelling they prefer they are also another way to express rick's ideology as in since he believes nothing matters nothing from the past should affect the future continuity implies that their actions have consequences when rick wants to live in a fantasy of doing whatever he wants without reprisals when characters from previous episodes come back to haunt rick it messes with his philosophy and this is exactly what evil morty's criticism of rick is at the end of season 5. in that episode it's revealed that the central finite curve which has been talked about since the first season is actually a section of the multiverse that rick has separated from the rest of it so that in every universe within the curve he's the smartest person alive and the only one with access to multiversal travel it basically allows them to never truly be challenged within this section of the multiverse every version of us has spent every version of all of our lives in one infinite crib built around an infinite [ __ ] baby the infinite crib is both the central finite curve and the concept of the standalone episode in both rick always wins his mistakes never come back to haunt him he can do whatever he wants so i think the show constantly harping on about this idea fits pretty nicely with all of the ideas the show is already about at the same time it means that for most of season 4 and 5 it really feels like we're living in that infinite crib where the stories don't have much of an impact on the audience or the characters and i think that's where my general sense of malaise comes from in watching them but at the end of season 5 eva morty tears down the central finite curve and travels to a place where rick never existed this seems to promise that the show will go in a new direction that rick's obsession with classic episodic adventures have to be shelved so that he can actually grow i hope the show can deliver on that and find a way to overcome the challenges it's faced in the past because like rick it can't keep doing the same things and achieving the same results it has to discover new stories to tell one part of rick and morty that i've always liked is its unique sci-fi world and a part of writing that i've often struggled with is world building or rather keeping all of my world building ideas sorted in a way that helps me add new ideas or combine them in an interesting way as someone who both writes fantasy and also home brews worlds for dungeons and dragons campaigns it can be a challenge to keep it all straight if you're a writer or a tabletop player and you've had trouble with that in the past then i recommend checking out world anvil the sponsor of this video world anvil is an award-winning world building tool set that helps you create organize and store all of the info you have on your fictional universe it lets you create timelines track family trees and create interactive maps if you want to give world anvil a try then go to worldanville.com just right and use the promo code just right to get 40 off of any annual membership at checkout thanks for watching everyone and a big thank you to my patrons for supporting me on patreon keep writing everyone

Channel: Just Write

Views: 825,303

Keywords: Writing

Id: A4_2PsW5S-8

Length: 14min 38sec (878 seconds)

Published: Fri Nov 26 2021