Review: Rick and Morty, "There's Something About Morty" | Season 9, Episode 1

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So here’s a surprise: Rick and Morty, season 9! It is, in fact, such a surprise that neither I nor my editor had any idea the show was coming back. Myles sent me an email Sunday night after I’d already gone to bed (what, I’m old), and when it came time for me to watch the episode on Monday, I didn’t have enough money in my bank account to spend 3 bucks to buy it on streaming (what, I’m broke). Thankfully I worked something out, and can report back on another, even more welcome surprise: as premieres go, “There’s Something About Morty” is pretty damn good.

When we last left our heroes… Hold on a sec, I just need to reread my review of “Hot Rick,” the finale of season 8. Let’s see, overly indulgent opening paragraph, a lot of theorizing on how the show “works,” complaining about the general cruddiness of season 8… Ah, here we go. When we last left our heroes, everything was basically normal. Rick had removed his last memory of his wife, sending it off to live with a memory of his younger self (look, it all makes sense if you watch the episode), and had settled in to what he and the rest of the family do best: hanging out, having adventures, and getting angsty over inter-personal relationships.

“There’s Something About Morty” offers up a doozy in the last category: Evil Morty is back. Our Morty discovers that Rick and Evil Morty have been texting and going on adventures without him (our Morty), much to our Morty’s chagrin. Rick’s excuse is that Evil Morty has built his own Omega Device, threatening to wipe Summer, Jerry, and Beth out of existence if Rick doesn’t do his bidding. Instead of accepting this at face value, Morty gets jealous, so Evil Morty lets him tagalong for their latest adventure. Wackiness, as ever, ensues.

What makes “Morty” impressive is its confidence. Last season was plagued by a kind of muddled indifference; episodes would have clever ideas at their core, but those ideas were never explored to the kind of absurd lengths necessary to make them distinct, and characters were too often reduced to their archetypes. Not so here. While the central dynamic–jealousy, insecurity, the endless recursion of who’s conning who–isn’t new to the show, there’s enough specificity and life to it that it’s as fun to watch as it is familiar. 

The script even finds a (slightly) new angle on it all, with the ultimate reveal that Evil Morty is, in his way, just as needy as Rick and our Morty are. The core of the series has always been the insane lengths that someone like RIck will go to in order to avoid the very basic emotional maintenance required to be a functioning human being, and we get a good dose of that here. The degree to which Rick and Evil Morty loathe each other suggests there’s more to their connection then simple protagonist and antagonist bickering, and as embarrassing as Morty often his, his honesty about the situation is far more convincing then their banter.

Of course, it is a little uncomfortable how much this is framed as a “romantic” situation, but that’s a subversion that the show has made a constant for most of its run. It’s more compelling to look at how Rick and Evil Morty parallel each other, with Rick’s only real advantage being his age and experience. They’re a closer match than Rick and our Morty, but in a way that could never be sustainable; both Rick and Evil Morty are so eager to destroy each other that there’s no way to imagine their “partnership” lasting much longer than it does in this episode.

All of that psychological nattering aside, did this episode look substantially better than usual? I’d have to go back to last season to compare, but “Morty” has multiple, extremely fluid action setpieces, all of which are just a delight to watch. The show’s best joke has always been the contrast between the epic sci-fi conflict and the more mundane emotional drama, but rarely has the former been executed quite so impressively. I don’t know if this is the result of a new animation team, a concentrated effort at spicing up the visuals, or some combination of the two, but whatever the reasons behind it, it’s a joy to watch. I’m curious if the rest of the season will keep up this level of action, or if it will be just a one off for the premiere.

That, by the way, is the best thing I can say about “Morty:” I’m curious as to what happens next. A couple exceptions aside, season eight was a slog; while I hadn’t completely given up on the series, it was getting more and more difficult for me to be optimistic when it seemed like the creative team was settling into a late-in-the-run “eh, whatever” rut. It’s too early to tell if season 9 will reverse direction–Evil Morty isn’t a card you can play every week without it losing its magic, and at some point, the writers will have to come up with new ideas instead of just revisiting old ones.

But that’s for next week. For right now, I’m just going to appreciate the fact that season 9 is here, and that, so far at least, it does not suck. We are living in an age of wonders, my friends.

Stray observations

• Apologies again for the lateness of this review! I’ll be better prepared next week.
• Not a ton of Jerry content this week, but it was good–the best gag was probably the implication that he’d somehow found a worse racist thing to say than either Summer or Beth. 
• No Space Beth this week; Rick casually dismisses her when someone asks, with a “She hates me,” and hey, if that means the character is on a break for a while, I will not be disappointed. 
• Tilda Swinton’s name popped up in the end credits, which surprised me. (This is my week for “Wait, what?”, I guess.) She has to have been the voice of the Collector, right? It’s a good performance, and I’m a little embarrassed I didn’t recognize her.