Review: Rick and Morty, "Rickuiem Mort A Dream" | Season 9, Episode 8
They can't hurt you if you can't hear them
We over-value empathy a little, I think. It’s understandable; empathy is a basic building block of of any civilization, and the visible lack of empathy in so many of our current government officials makes us long for days when people at least pretended to care. But while being able to understand and sympathize with what a stranger is going through is important, it’s not the end point of being a good human being. Ideally we should be fostering a society where we respect and trust one another without needing to completely get where anyone else is coming from. Empathy can help us grasp why this would be important, but being decent shouldn’t be dependent on your ability for connect with someone. It should just be an assumed setting, a switch you have flipped to “on” until the person you’re dealing with gives you reason to behave otherwise.
“Rickuiem Mort A Dream” (dear god that title) might be about this. It definitely says the word “empathy” several times, and there seems to be some kind of correlation between Morty’s happiness and his ability to understand Rick. Or something. Honestly, this one seemed like kind of a mess to me. It’s not bad, and there’s a bit where Jerry manages to freak out a serial killer which is predictable but still quite funny, but it feels like we don’t get to the actual premise until the third act, and even then, it’s over too quickly to land. More than anything, this one has the hallmarks of an idea that the writer couldn’t quite get a handle on, and we ended up with the best they could manage.
