Interdimensional Cable has been canceled.
Warning: Full spoilers for the episode below.
"Rixty Minutes" is easily one of the best installments of Rick and Morty Season 1. It was basically an excuse for Justin Roiland to get drunk and riff in a recording booth, conjuring up all sorts of oddball TV concepts in the process. But sequels are rarely as satisfying as the original, and there was definitely a case of diminishing returns with Season 2's "Interdimensional Cable II: Tempting Fate." And the formula really played itself out in the recent comic book sequel in Rick and Morty #28. For a show that prides itself on its ability to constantly subvert expectations, there's just not much to be gained by going back to that well again and again.
But apparently every season needs a gimmick episode of some sort (even though I'd argue last week's "The Ricklantis Mixup" covered that ground well enough already). And so it was that Roiland and Dan Harmon swapped out the Interdimensional Cable premise with "Morty's Mind Blowers," a deep dive into all the horrible adventures Morty would just as soon (and did) forget. The results were amusing, but this episode still lacked the freshness of "Rixty Minutes."
To their credit, it's not as if the writers pretended this episode was anything more than a blatant attempt to spice up an old bit. I'm always amused whenever Rick breaks character long enough to make some meta comment to the audience, and this episode was full of knowing winks and nods to the audience. There was even a self-deprecating dig at the show's behind-the-scenes production woes. As Rick himself said, this was a faux-clip show episode very similar to what Dan Harmon tackled with the Community episode "Paradigms of Human Memory." Basically, a chance for the writers to toss out a bunch of wacky ideas that make for fun little vignettes but don't really have the legs to support an entire episode.
Sidebar - more than usual with this series, the premise has to be taken with a grain of salt. It's a little weird to think that Rick has been spending all this time removing his grandson's traumatic memories when so much of Morty's journey on this show has revolved around him coming to terms with the horrors he's encountered in their adventures. Why did Rick remove these memories but not, say, the time he and Morty had to flee their own dimension in "Rick Potion #9" or the time Morty was almost raped in "Meeseeks and Destroy"?
It goes without saying that some of these flashback vignettes were more entertaining than others. My favorite scene actually came during the cold open, before the blowing of Morty's mind actually began. That opening sequence was a pitch-perfect parody of DC's Sandman comics, and that's a world in which I would have happily spent more time. The other big standout moment came at the very end, as Jerry bungled his way into the picture and we got a hilariously depressing parody of E.T.: The Extra Terrestrial. It's hard not to be frustrated with the relative lack of Jerry material this season when he practically steals the show every time he does appear.
None of the flashback clips were bad by any means, but none reached the heights of those opening and closing segments. Well, that brief shot of Mr. Poopybutthole proposing to Morty was pretty great. But the formula started to grow stale after a few minutes, so it was just as well when the writers threw an extra curve ball by having both Rick and Morty lose their memories. This is a series that does bleak and depressing moments very well, and there's plenty of bleakness about two amnesiacs who have nothing but the worst memories of each other as a resource to repair their broken minds. This episode didn't play up that angle as much as it could have, but it didn't really need to. The idea that Rick and Morty couldn't even figure out they were related to one another from those terrible memories really says it all.
I did enjoy the abrupt way this conflict resolved itself, with a nonchalant Summer wandering in and realizing that another round of Morty's Mind Blowers was underway. Something about the idea that this has happened often enough that Rick has drawn up special protocols and countermeasures makes the whole thing that much more absurd and silly. But despite the strong ending, this episode just wasn't clever enough to run with the best of Season 3.
The Verdict
"Morty's Mind Blowers" is more entertaining than another "Interdimensional Cable" sequel likely would have been, but it's far from the strongest installment of the season. Nor is it a formula that demands its own sequel. As it is, the faux-clip show approach started to get stale until a new series of complications upped the stakes. Why Harmon and Roiland felt they needed another gimmick episode at all after last week is a mystery.
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