#RICK AND MORTY SEASON 2 WIKI FULL#
Again, this cannot help but feel like taking the safe option.Īdmittedly, these expansions of the canon are treated as the banner events they are, full of spectacle, sound, and fury. So here, they’ve met those expectations exactly – confirming what the fans had thought, and giving a shrug of ‘yeah, we came out and said it’. There has been a lot of speculation over the wider story, which is perhaps why the writers were reluctant to go into it, for fear of not living up to expectations. Part of the issue here comes back to the kind of praise that Rick And Morty has always attracted, and the enthusiastic fans that go with it. As the show itself once said of some crowd-pleasing fluff, it really gets their dicks hard. Still, at this point it’s hard to imagine that particularly matters to the fanbase.
Now, the only laughs to be had from it are self-satisfied, self-deprecating little chuckles of ‘wow, we’re really doing this, aren’t we?’. In a possible apogee of clinging to the familiar, this run actually sees Rick And Morty throw its hands up and delve into Rick’s mysterious backstory, something which they’d previously mined many laughs from leaving deliberately vague. The self-awareness it once wore so lightly has turned into a patching-over of obviously weaker material – and parts of this season are played so straight, like the episode where horrible monsters are mown down with no consequences, that it’s hard to even recognise it as Rick And Morty. Unfortunately, this is what the broader show has failed to do. There’s nothing necessarily wrong with finding a niche and doing it well. Poopybutthole is still knocking about as a meta-voice. It also has yet another go at the strange, lumpy, subaltern creatures that seem to follow Rick around like a rotating slave caste, which isn’t a type the show does badly but is well-trodden territory by now. (The baby boomer generation gets a lot of stick, but my God, the gen-Xers who think reference humour is so much cleverer than it is are a millstone around the neck of culture.)Īnd that’s not even close to where this season stops leaning on familiarity, bringing back one-off characters from times past, most notably President Keith David and the artificial intelligence of Rick’s car. This season has them drop in big, clunky, episode-long references to 1980s Saturday-morning shows Captain Planet and Voltron – and what’s more, they do so in ways that make it perfectly clear they’re expecting a big laugh and possibly applause simply for including something recognisable.
Rick And Morty’s track record of spoofs isn’t spotless, there was that groan-worthy episode in the second season where they were simply redoing forgettable horror film The Purge, but at least that was a notable aberration. Material that would surely have been left on the writers’ room floor in previous years is suddenly coming up on screen, with an air of ‘where’s our cheques?’. Even Rick And Morty’s idiosyncratic schedule (think of the show inviting us to rejoin them “in, like, a year and a half…or longer”) apparently isn’t enough development time to maintain the level of quality to which we’ve become accustomed.Īnd so it is that with this season, the fifth of the twenty or so already earmarked for this obvious ratings whale, you cannot escape the feeling that they’re not merely taking their foot off the gas, but popping it on cruise control and wandering into the back for a drink. The issue there is that having become such a hit so quickly, there’s nowhere to go except down. When Rick And Morty pops out an enduring idea, you’ll know about it – hence the way Pickle Rick became a meme, and the much-mythologised run on the limited edition Szechuan sauce. What they have too much of is, straightforwardly, praise. Rick And Morty being an animated production, money and equipment (and indeed being deep in the Philippine jungle) don’t register so much as concerns. But I’d be very surprised if similar words didn’t flash across Dan Harmon’s mind from time to time. “We had too much money, too much equipment and, little by little, we went insane”Ĭoppola was speaking about the troubled production of Apocalypse Now, having essentially been granted a blank cheque after the success of the first two Godfathers.