Review: Rick And Morty, "Valkyrick" | Season 8, Episode 2

You review enough television, you eventually develop tricks to come up with good opening paragraphs. I used to start with some kind of personal detail relevant (ish) to the content at hand; but when readers made jokes about how you could just skip the first few sentences of anything I wrote, I stopped. (There are people who can do autobiographical content in their work, I’m just not one of them.) These days, I try to avoid gimmicks, but “Valkyrick,” this week’s episode of Rick And Morty, gave me a chance to trot one out, just for old time sake: highlighting the arc of a specific gag as a way of demonstrating a larger shift in the show’s philosophy and tone.

The gag is, there’s a bug army, and the bug army is extremely willing to sacrifice low level units for science. We see several bug grunts die in rapid succession as Rick works on a cure for a mutation disease invented by an evil bug doctor. When the cure finally works, the bug grunt lives; the twist is, he’s upset he survived because the on-death payment was going to fund his kid’s college plans. Later, in the middle of the episode’s climactic bug-on-bug fight, the soldier finally gets his chance to die in the line of duty. He’s thrilled, he’s wearing a college hat, and after his death, Rick says, “Let’s all make a point of checking in on his kid in school later.”