"Nine more seasons, Morty!"
Who says nothing good ever comes from April Fool's Day? For those who missed it, Adult Swim's streaming website began airing the Season 3 premiere of Rick and Morty in a continuous loop for several hours. The rest of the season debuts this summer, but it was certainly a welcome surprise, and a nice way to catch up with the Smith family after a prolonged absence. IGN's review continues below.
As with the Season 2 premiere, "The Rickshank Redemption" picked up more or less directly where the previous episode left off. Rick turned himself into the Federation to spare his family a life as interstellar fugitives. With Rick in custody and the Smith family now back on Federation-occupied Earth, things were looking especially bleak for our heroes. And true to their usual form, Justin Roiland and Dan Harmon managed to craft a conflict that was hilarious, darkly poignant and completely unlike anything fans were expecting. Right down to the oddball manner in which this episode premiered, "The Rickshaw Redemption" was all about defying expectations.
It's worth reiterating just how seamless a transition this episode offered. If you've been following the delayed production process for Season 3, there's a sense that Roiland and Harmon have been struggling to to get their scripts to the level they want. But whatever difficulties might be going on behind the scenes, the finished product is as a fresh and funny as ever. The way this episode breezed along, it felt as though it could have aired a week after "The Wedding Squanchers" rather than 18 months.
At this point I'm going to get into spoiler territory, so if you weren't able to catch the premiere yesterday, consider yourself warned. Hopefully Adult Swim will make the episode available again before summer rolls around.
Roiland and Harmon were defying expectations from the very first scene, as initially it looked like they were going to completely gloss over Rick's jailbreak and revert the show back to a traditional status quo. That approach might have been funny in its own right, even if it would have been served as lousy payoff for the year-and-a-half wait between seasons. But instead, it turned out that Rick's happy reunion with his family in Shoney's was nothing more than a mental construct created as the Federation's scientists were attempting to mine his brain for useful scientific secrets. Naturally, Rick proved a rather difficult subject to manipulate, as he spent most of his time manifesting farting butts in coffee cups and trying to stock up on discontinued Szechuan sauce packets.
This episode continued to defy expectations as it turned what looked to be an emotional flashback to Rick's origin story into a prolonged, messy jailbreak. It's debatable whether Rick really needs an origin story in the first place, and Roiland and Harmon seem to fall into the "Why bother?" camp. It is interesting to note how "The Rickshank Redemption and "The Wedding Squanchers" treated Rick in such polarizing extremes. When Season 2 wrapped, we saw Rick in a rare moment of vulnerability, willingly turning himself in for the sake of his family. But here, we learned that the whole thing was part of an elaborate plot to rid himself of both the Federation and the Council of Ricks in one fell swoop. This time out, Rick's self-serving side won the day.
Summer and Morty went through some pretty dark hurdles this week, as well. Summer wrestled with the same dilemma that's often plagued Morty as she tried to reconcile the grandfather she looks up to and admires with the man Rick actually is 99% of the time. Along the way, we got to revisit the Cronenberg universe and be reminded of just how badly things can go for people in Rick's orbit. As always, it's fun to see this show reference its own continuity and build on past events in unexpected ways. How many degrees of separation are there between Rick and his original body at this point?
This episode continued to deliver laughs even as the tone grew progressively darker. The Council of Ricks had an entertaining last hurrah. I especially enjoyed the revelation that they have their own assassination squad dubbed "SEAL Team Ricks." The all-out war between the Federation and the Council of Ricks also proved highly entertaining, delivering all of the spectacle and excess that Rick claimed he was going to skip over in the beginning. And Rick's solution for defeating his enemies was hilariously, devastatingly simple - take away their money.
Above all, "The Rickshank Redemption" defied expectations by leaving the characters in a much, much darker place. There was no joyful reunion between Rick and the rest of the family. Instead, Rick continued his manipulative games right up until the end. He preyed upon Beth's love and managed to cut Jerry out of the picture entirely (hopefully this doesn't mean we've seen the last of him). And he restored his old status quo with Morty, even though that's about the last thing Morty wants right now. Rick's long-winded "Nine seasons!" rant to Morty was plenty amusing, but it also served as a sobering look into the mind of a man who ca't allow himself to grow or move on. Rick is a surprisingly complex character beneath all the bravado and the belching, but that doesn't necessarily mean he's a good person. We'll see if this episode really does set a darker tone for the rest of Season 3.
The Verdict
"The Rickshank Redemption" is almost enough to redeem this whole April Fool's Day thing. This episode picked up right where the Season 2 finale left off, keeping the level of quality high even as it repeatedly defied expectations about where the story was headed or what Rick was actually trying to accomplish by turning himself in. True to form, this episode delivered plenty of weird, high-concept humor even as it offered a grim portrait of a mad scientist who hates everyone else almost as much as he hates himself.
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