Review: Rick and Morty, "Summer of All Fears" | Season 8, Episode 1

Welcome back to Episodic Medium’s coverage of Rick and Morty, which returns for its eighth season. As always, this first review is free, but to follow along with the rest of Zack’s reviews this summer, become a paid subscriber for just $5 a month. We’ll have our full summer schedule up this week.

Cards on the table: despite still being a Rick and Morty fan, I had no idea the season eight premiere was airing last night until Myles reminded me. I have yet to see a single person mention last night’s episode on Blue Sky, and while Blue Sky doesn’t have the reach or scope Twitter once did, it’s still curious to me that a series that used to be so important to the online zeitgeist barely comes up in conversation anymore. But then, we’re eight seasons in. “Shocking” has its limits when it comes to sticking power. When’s the last time you heard someone talking seriously about South Park?1

None of which is exactly relevant when it comes to reviewing “Summer of All Fears;” the job is to critique the content, not get hung up on the context. But while “Fears” is a perfectly cromulent twenty-two minutes of television, it isn’t a surprise that this premiere didn’t raise many waves. There isn’t a single concept in this episode the show hasn’t done before, and while that’s not a death sentence for a TV series, it is mildly disappointing for one whose bread and butter has been hitting its audience from unexpected angles. There are clever gags throughout, and the characters behave consistently, but a certain spark is missing—in its place is a kind of comfortable familiarity. Ah, this kind of episode. I like these.

“Fears” starts in media res, a trick the show has used before; the initial disorientation (why is Summer girl-bossing with a new haircut? Why is Morty tall?) creates a sense of mystery that helps to cover for the story’s eventual predictability. We eventually learn that Rick, in order to teach Morty and Summer a lesson about taking his phone charger, has placed both kids in a virtual reality world where everyone is obsessed with phone chargers. Rick fell asleep, leaving the kids stuck in VR for what, to them, felt like 17 years. When Summer manages to build a machine that lets them escape, Rick wants to memory wipe them. But Beth stops him after the kids object, and so we get to spend the next fifteen minutes or so experiencing why Rick was right, despite being, y’know, a monster.

The best gag in all of this is the VR world’s commitment to phone charger fixation. Characters with “charge” in their name, a holy war kicked off by a false flag video of a “terrorist” cutting a charger cord–and, the dumbest and best, “Osama Been Chargin.” It’s the kind of stupid-clever that I’ve come to love about the series, a commitment to an incredibly silly bit that keeps going further and deeper than I’m expecting it will. The fact that it also works to undermine Morty and Summer’s mental agonies (Morty’s in particular) even as they play those agonies extremely straight is a routine that suffers the most from repetition, if only because I no longer fall for the trick. I’ve seen Morty and Summer go through many different hells by now, there’s not much friction left between their sincere misery and the absurdities they suffer through.

Beth’s presence here is pretty rote as well. She defends Summer and Morty’s rights to keep their memories, then briefly bonds with her “adult” daughter before Summer’s bullshit becomes annoying. There are lot of jokes about girl-bossing and spiritual vibes and what-not, but it’s the same shtick Beth has been through several times before, connecting with someone before that connection makes her feel insecure and resentful. Still, it’s in keeping with both their characters, and I appreciate the specificity of their growing antagonism, even if individual gags didn’t always land for me.

Morty, meanwhile, has other plans. While Summer was taking over the world, he got caught in the shit, first going to prison, then becoming a firefighter, and finally enlisting in the army where he discovered that he couldn’t be killed. Again, the episode struggles to find something new to say about Morty’s PTSD. We’ve already seen him find true love and lose it thanks to one of Rick’s devices. Having him go insane because he lost his best friend in a war his sister created to exploit him is technically a new concept, and, again, the commitment to the bit is fun, but it doesn’t help the episode rise above the hard to shake sense that this is just a remix of a bunch of stuff that used to be astonishing, but now more or less registers as “huh, neat.”

One of the dangers of television criticism is being too harsh on something that’s perfectly acceptable, because “perfectly acceptable” isn’t really a take you can spend multiple paragraphs explaining. I had fun watching “Summer,” even if I could never quite shake the feeling that I’d seen it before. There are a couple of bits that didn’t land (namely Rick getting trapped in the VR machine and then just… escaping it. Without any twist whatsoever), but all of it goes down easily enough, and I don’t begrudge a show losing its edge eight seasons in. This is absolutely fine, and if the whole season turns out like this, well, I may struggle with a few of the reviews but I’ll still enjoy myself. I can hope for more unexpected plots down the road, but Rick And Morty stopped needing to prove itself years ago.

Stray observations

• That scientist guy saying “You shouldn’t steal your grandfather’s equipment” was a stretch. How did he even know Morty and Summer had a grandfather. Was he eavesdropping inside the tank?
• I appreciate the pettiness of “borrowing a phone charger,” it has a certain lived-in family vibe to it.