Review: Rick and Morty, "Rick Days, Seven Nights" | Season 9, Episode 2

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Okay, so we’re going to get extremely heady here for a minute, but bear with me: the challenge of any long running genre series is to keep finding new enemies that create a legitimate sense of danger. On a basic level, this is obvious enough to barely be worth mentioning–stories need conflict, and if it’s too obvious from the start that said conflict is a hollow one, then the whole thing falls apart. 

Where it gets interesting is when you have a hero who’s been around so long that they’ve faced, and beaten, just about every threat you can imagine. Everyone knows about “raising the stakes,” but eventually, you get to a point where there’s no real room left to raise them. A hero saves a person’s life; then they save a town; a country; a world; a galaxy; a whole universe–and at that point, you’re dealing with a couple of problems. You need to figure out some new, interesting threat that isn’t just an obvious iteration on the ones you’ve already done, and, even worse, you need to find a way to convince your audience that there’s some possibility your protagonist could fail, despite them having succeeded at every other challenge they’ve faced.

It gets especially weird when you remember that your audience aren’t idiots. We know how stories work, and we know that, odds are, the heroes are going to win in the end. There are unhappy endings, to be sure, but you don’t just throw one of those out at random to spice things up. Instead, storytellers and audiences engage in a kind of meta-level suspension of disbelief; it’s not just about agreeing to believe that the story we’re engaging with is “real,” it’s agreeing to be tricked into being worried about things we know aren’t going to happen. Folks who experience tension watching a Doctor Who episode aren’t fools who’ve forgotten that the Doctor has saved the day a billion times already–they’re allowing themselves to be fooled, even as they know it’s happening.

This is all neat, and I could go on ranting about it for days, but the reason it’s relevant today is that Rick and Morty has struggled with this problem for a while, and “Rick Days, Seven Nights” offers a great solution: just make your hero his own worst enemy. It’s a variation on something we’ve seen before, but there’s enough that’s new in here to make the whole thing feel fresh; and the central conflict, Rick vs. Rick (or Rick vs. Ted, if you must), is a neat way around the whole “Rick can do anything” problem. Yes, Rick continues to be a super genius who can science his way out of nearly any challenge, but he’s also still himself deep down, and that’s not really an issue that ever goes away.