Tag Archives: Rick and Morty

Rick and Morty’s Surprise Season 3 Premiere Asks Big Questions About Rick

Posted on April 3, 2017 by Andrew Bloom


There’s something perfect about the much-awaited third season of Rick and Morty debuting, without warning, on April Fool’s Day, even after Adult Swim had announced the show would not return until July. It fits with the series’ “pull the rug out from under you” spirit. But it also fits the specific episode that kicks off the season. The surprise debut is a way of toying with the show’s devotees, just as “The Rickshank Rickdemption” constantly finds ways to play with the audience’s expectations: about how Rick will escape from prison, about his backstory, and most importantly, about whether he is a good person in pain or merely a self-absorbed bastard.

At its best, Rick and Morty is the sum total of these things. When it’s firing on all cylinders, the show combines off-the-wall, imaginative sci-fi action with dark, introspective character moments, and if “Rickdemption” is any indication, there’s plenty more of each to come. The bits of thrilling sci-fi weirdness — from Inception-like journeys into the mind to leapfrogging consciousness transfers, to neon-hued battles between disparate forces across space — were colorful and inventive from start to finish. There are few shows on television with such a commitment to mind-bending storytelling and madcap left turns all over like Rick and Morty.

But what elevates the episode is how it serves as the perfect follow-up to the question the show asked in its Season 2 finale: What motivates Rick Sanchez? Is he a hero, as Summer thinks, some sort of demon or crazy god, like Morty thinks, or is he someone whose motivations are so opaque and arbitrary that he more or less defies that sort of binary characterization?

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The Simpsons: Hank Scorpio and a Perfect Tone Are the Keys to Greatness for “You Only Move Twice”

Posted on September 9, 2016 by Andrew Bloom


One of the most persistent narratives about how and why The Simpsons fell from grace is that, at some point, the series lost its tether to reality. The argument goes that the tone of the show was always meant to be exaggerated, but also ultimately grounded, and that as the series got on in years, its quality suffered as it moved further and further away from the conceptual limits that kept The Simpsons at least nominally within the real world.

And yet “You Only Move Twice,” one of show’s most acclaimed episodes, also features one of the most outlandish twists in Simpsons history. After Homer moves the family for his new job in faraway Cypress Creek, it turns out that, unbeknownst to him, his cool new boss, Hank Scorpio, is actually a Bond villain. The twist isn’t depicted by way of subtle hints here or there or a last-minute reveal. Instead, the episode spends much of its run time ensconced in city-destroying lasers, ineffective death traps, and flame-thrower battles to repel the U.S. military, the very sort of farfetched fare that typically rankles diehard fans.

Then, to add to the absurdity, at the end of the episode, Scorpio seizes the East Coast and gives Homer a special parting gift — ownership of the Denver Broncos, replete with the team practicing on The Simpsons’ front lawn. It’s so far from reality, not to mention the standard rules of the show’s universe, that the series doesn’t even begin to address these developments in later installments. It’s exactly the kind of ridiculous, game-changing-yet-ignored ending that hated former showrunner Mike Scully and current ruler of The Simpsons roost Al Jean are routinely excoriated for today.

So why does this work so well in “You Only Move Twice”?

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Rick and Morty: “Wedding Squanchers” – Leaning Into the Unadulterated Complexity of Rick Sanchez

Posted on October 7, 2015 by Andrew Bloom

Who is Rick Sanchez? Is he simply an amoral (or post-moral) mad scientist with a drinking problem? Is he a reluctantly self-sacrificing grandfather who secretly loves the family he occasionally torments? Is he an anti-authoritarian hedonist with no regard for sentient life or anything else that stands in the way of his fun? Is he a man in pain who keeps himself constantly moving forward so as not to have to face his own demons and personal failings? Is he a jaded spacefarer who’s seen a universe’s worth of crap and has to dig through it to recover the remaining scraps of his humanity buried underneath?

Rick Sanchez is all of these things. He’s a man who’s keen to kick back and watch the turmoil of a “Purge Planet” like it’s a spectator sport. He’s a man who’s willing to sacrifice his own life to save his grandson. He’s a man who would create an entire miniature universe, complete with intelligent life just to power his spaceship. He’s a man who attempts to kill himself after being left by an old flame once more and told he’s a bad influence. He’s a man who has fought in a war, walked away from a failed marriage, and accordingly refuses to leave himself vulnerable. And he is also a man who scarred his daughter by abandoning her when she was young, but who later turned himself in to the authorities to keep her and her family from having to live as intergalactic fugitives.

In short, he’s complicated. It’s easy to mistake the divergent takes on the same character that inevitably emerge from the cacophony of voices in a T.V. writer’s room for complexity. But given Rick and Morty co-creator Dan Harmon’s history of writing damaged, multifaceted characters, it’s no stretch to see these characteristics as something more than just a jumbled series of inconsistent traits. Instead, they are signs of the conflicting impulses within one of the most three-dimensional characters to ever anchor a comedy as madcap and irreverent as Rick and Morty.

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