Review: Rick and Morty ‘Mortynight Run’

First stop? Deja-vu-ville.

Spoilers Below:

Season two of Rick and Morty started off with a pretty solid premiere, but it would need to find some of last year’s magic in order to stay strong. Not to tip my hand too soon, but that didn’t happen last night. Please keep reading though; I gots more things to say.

During a mission, Rick realized Jerry had joined him and Morty and dropped him off at an intergalactic daycare. Rick then sold a gun to a hitman and took Morty to an arcade to take his uneasy mind off of it.

A morally-troubled Morty instead decided to track down the assassin and saved his would-be-victim – a gaseous cloud – and hopped in the spaceship with a reluctant Rick. However, it turned out that the cloud was a wanted person (due to its potential power) and our friends soon had many adversaries giving chase. The cloud helped them out of the situation in a way that I won’t even attempt to explain, and the three were home free. Upon arriving back at the cloud’s home planet, Morty found out that its plans were to exterminate human life and killed the cloud.

Back at the daycare, Jerry realized that he was only being kept there voluntarily, and tried his chances in the outside world. After experiencing a lot of odd people and places and a sizeable language barrier, he shamefully returned to the daycare and awaited his pick-up.

In Case You Missed It:

1) Under “Reason for drop-off” on the Jerry Daycare form, Rick checked both “unwanted stowaway” and “annoying me.”

2) Rick’s best insult of the episode? “Stupid-ass, fart-saving, carpet store motherfucker.”

3) The alien mechanic said Rick only saw vehicles as “wheels with teeth” because his own teeth were made of gears.

4) At one point, Rick was watching a TV show called Ball Fondlers.

5) The homeless alien’s sign read: “Why lie? Will use glems for gloobies!”

Normally if I were to say an episode of any show was all over the place, it would be a bad thing. But saying that about Rick and Morty would be like saying “this week the Simpsons were yellow.” We get it. Rick is a mad scientist capable of time, intergalactic, and inter-dimensional travel, and creates both havoc and help with his far-out inventions. Shit will always be weird.

And to say things were random – well, par for the course once again.

For “Mortynight Run,” both of these descriptions were true, but it didn’t feel quite the same as before. Or maybe it actually felt like too much of the same.

Wait, before you sick the men in white coats on me, let me explain. We started off the show already in Rick’s ship, with Jerry in tow, only to have him ditched in a sad little babysitting scenario. It was random but was different from the show’s usual brand of randomness because it had no purpose and acted only to prove the father’s ineptitude in surviving in any world, much less an unfamiliar, far away from one. This is all something we already knew. Jerry tried, Jerry failed, Rick and Morty bailed him out.

As for R&M’s adventure, it was definitely creative and intricate, but it was also a bit reminiscent of season one’s “Meeseeks and Destroy.” The main plot of that installment (or the namesake story, at least) involved the blue dudes, but the B-side focused on Morty picking an adventure instead of his grandpa for once, only to have it backfire due to Morty’s overly trusting personality.

Sound familiar? It should because that’s exactly what happened last night. Rick was apparently only concerned with selling his gun and playing at the arcade (which of course doesn’t make for much of a story by itself) when Morty hijacked his plans to save the life of what he thought was an innocent victim. Again, Morty’s judgment was flawed, and everything almost blew up in his face, but Morty blew up the creature’s face instead. If Rick is so space-smart and savy, why didn’t he just stop his grandson from getting involved? Not only did he reluctantly tag along in an un-Rick-like way (remember how much Morty initially had to twist his arm in “Meeseeks”?) but he never even knew the evil truth in the end. Or maybe he did, and he was just fucking with Morty.

Either way, take all this, add in two weird musical numbers – one of which was rightfully interrupted and insulted – and a weird running gag about a super depressing video game, and that was the episode. It was entertaining enough but ended up unfulfilling.

It wasn’t awful and had a few quotable lines and laughs, so I don’t want it to seem like a total catastrophe, but instead, it was just a passable effort that was a far cry from last season, and a step down from last week. The main plot saw Rick tagging along with Morty in a rare occasion, which not surprisingly ended up in pointless failure. The other story was a familiar dud, with the only redeeming quality being the last twist of uncertainty about the “real” Jerry.

If Rick and Morty continue like this it will still be one of the better shows on TV, but unfortunately, that’s not saying much considering the fact that it’s capable of much, much more.