Review: Rick and Morty, "Hot Rick" | Season 8, Episode 10

Better late than never, right? After nine episodes of basically fine but deeply uninspired slop, Rick And Morty ends its eighth season with a banger. “Hot Rick” is the good shit, with decent jokes, a solid emotional core, and a premise that digs down deep enough to be legitimately compelling. It’s possible I’m going to over-praise it here, but there are worse sins a reviewer can commit; honestly, I’m just so relieved to discover the show still has some juice left that I can’t help celebrating a little.

“Hot Rick” isn’t the first episode this season to dig around continuity leftovers looking for food, but it is the first that’s managed to make a meal out of the effort. Instead of bringing back a plotline no one cared about the first time around, we’re once again plumbing the depths of Rick’s trauma; the “Hot Rick” of the title is the memory fragment of a younger Rick first introduced in the fifth season episode “Rickternal Friendship of the Spotless Mort,” which was all about deep-diving into past memories to revive Birdperson. Young Rick also had a cameo in last season’s “The Jerrick Trap,” where we learned in the post-credits sequence that he was trapped in Jerry’s brain, unable to build an escape because Jerry believes all machines are made out of springs and gears.

I’d honestly forgotten that last gag, but the writers hadn’t. After some relationship sparring with BugAnne, Rick travels home to find that Jerry, for some reason, really likes him. Young Rick has been running around Jerry’s memories, convincing him that the real Rick was actually present for most of his and Beth’s marriage; the real Rick immediately realizes something is up, and pulls Young Rick out of Jerry’s head, trapping him in a brain computer thing where he can’t access the outside world. Real Rick also decides that in order to be a better boyfriend, he needs to remove the last memory he has of his dead wife, Diane, from his brain to make him more emotionally open.