Rick & Morty S01E01 Review: *urp*

Rick & Morty, Season 1, Episode 1: Pilot

So yeah, Rick and Morty is a show I have a vague recollection of watching, but didn't really take super-seriously or pay full attention to. The voice acting was always excellent, and while the humour might not always land, it's probably better at being adult-and-cynical without resorting to basically being sort of just insulting everyone. Plus, the art team is amazing, especially once you get used to the look of the human characters. Particularly the background and the weird creatures in the background.

For those of you who have been living under a rock, Rick and Morty is super-duper popular, often quoted by people out there as memes and whatnot, and it's... it does deserve part of its hype. Sure, there are way too many people who think the show's smarter than it actually is, and the fandom for the show has a fair share of obnoxious twits, I'm going to review the show, not its ruder fans. We're getting the long-awaited fourth (?) season this year, and I'm rewatching the first season because it's been a while since I watched this show (I don't think I finished the third season) and I've forgotten a lot of it. It's nice to review something that's not superheroes for once on this blog, too.

Anyway, the first episode is... it's kind of rough? Pilot episodes tend to be, anyway, and while Rick and Morty do a decent job at showcasing what the show is all about, it feels a bit off compared to how I remembered the rest of the show is going to be. In particular, it basically focuses a bit too much on lampooning the sort of "boy-and-his-fantastic-friend" trope so commonly found in cartoons, with a huge sub-plot of how having a crazy mad scientist for a grandpa is going to negatively affect Morty's life even without the fact that grandpa Rick is a crazy sociopathic drunkard. It also lampoons some sci-fi tropes like harmless freeze-guns or whatever as black comedy jokes. Rick and Morty as a show always sort of went back-and-forth on whether it actually has a heart underneath all this, or if it's just dark comedy all around, and this first episode... sort of showcases both, but sort of still has trouble figuring out the tone it wants to take. Which is understandable, it's the first episode after all.

And mostly, this show runs on creepy, fucked-up jokes and the fact that Justin Roiland, who voices both Rick and Morty, is an amazing voice actor that probably has to ad-lib a lot of his lines. He plays Morty as meek, submissive and generally just overwhelmed by everything that's going on, trying his best to put his foot down a couple of times in this episode but gets immediately swooped up by more powerful personas. Rick... Rick urps and bleches and burps a lot and is a sociopath and ends every other sentence with "morty". I don't remember the specifics, but I do think this episode ends up playing up the burps and belches a bit too much, and scales it down a bit more afterwards.

The plot of this episode is... it's sort of simple? We get a bizarre cold open that ends up having no bearing to the rest of the episode (and sort of implied to be a dream Morty has), but ends up sort of quasi-important later on, I believe? It's basically Rick randomly waking Morty up, and in a drunken haze, basically brings Morty on a random UFO and is about to blow up the world with a Neutrino Bomb and just wants to make the rest of the world for Morty and the girl he's crushing on, Jessica, or something. We're not really sure, since he's drunk. Morty forces Rick to land the ship, and as Rick babbles that this is a test for Morty' morality, he slumps down on a pile of beer bottles and ends up blowing up the world anyway.

Bit bizarre, but it's mostly a setup of the two characters, and I would probably believe if you told me that the cold open was a proof-of-concept bit that they tacked on to the first episode. This pilot episode keeps things relatively simple, with the main overarching conflict is whether the Smith family thinks letting grandpa Rick stay at their house is a good or bad influence on Morty. And... well, Rick doesn't really give a shit, although he is polite in front of his daughter Beth and passive-aggressively verbally lambasting his son-in-law Jerry. It's a fun bit of juxtaposition between the fantastic, extra-dimensional adventures of Rick and Morty into the colourful, acid-trip Dimension 35-C, compared to the relatively mundane problem of Morty's performance at school.

And it's a fun little first scene in breakfast, where we get to see the full family. Jerry clearly doesn't like Rick at all and argues about sci-fi adventures, while Rick gives this long, long speech about how school is useless and all that jazz, which I felt was a bit put-on. And as Morty goes to school, the episode ends up portraying Morty's poor performance in class through a bizarre hallucination of him just looking wistfully at Jessica, and later on sinking into a hallucination where he falls into a pile of numbers, and then Jessica shows off her tits to Morty... but in the real world, Morty is actually groping his teacher, who is creepily fine with it. It's honestly a bit of a non-sequitur, and felt like it's just there to throw in a lewd joke.

Morty then gets quickly pulled by Rick to help him do things in Dimension 35C, looking for special mega seeds to help Rick "do important stuff", and we get the first sight of Rick's all-purpose green gloopy portal gun, which is always a nice, fun visual effect. And Rick, of course, ends up giving this whole completely-and-obviously-fake inspirational speech about how he's making Morty ready to deal with situations through these adventures, except Rick himself is completely full of shit and completely panics when they are beset with a creepy giant spider-maw monster.

And when Rick gives Morty some super-shoes that allows them to walk on all surfaces, Morty forgets to turn them on and falls down a cliff and gets his legs completely fucked-up, and we get a bit of a long sequence as Morty just writhes in agony and anger... while Rick, of course, cares more about the seeds until Morty gets super angry. Then Rick portals away, leaving the audience looking at writhing and gasping Morty before he returns with an instant-cure injection... but because he runs out of charges for his portal gun, they have to go through Inter-Dimensional Customs... which means that Morty will have to put the seeds right up his butt-hole, through a pretty long speech and a bit of a gross detail that Rick's own bum is "too loose".

They eventually go to Interdimensional Customs (I'm not sure how they got there?) and there are a lot of wacky looking aliens and creatures in the background, which I love. Of course, the bug aliens running the place end up pulling Morty to a "random check" bit, causing Rick and Morty to break into a run as they try and escape the police, and it's just a whole load of fun visual gags as they charge through the pretty fun location.

And while the previous jokes have mostly relied on gross-out squicky moments, the final standoff has Rick jury-rig a dimensional portal while telling Morty to "hold them off" with a gun, telling them that they're "robots, leading to Morty blasting off the leg of some poor bug-man, and it's played straight as the bug-man bleeds to death and coughs blood and his friend weeps over him. Of course, our heroes jump back through the portal and straight into the cafeteria. We get a brief bit more of Jessica, but Rick pulls Morty away.

While all of this is going on, we cut back to Jerry and Beth, and the two are... dysfunctional. Jerry acts like a nice guy, but even this early on he's clearly shown to be super-unlikable without being a dick, interrupting Beth's horse-heart surgery and clearly dismissive of his wife's career, handwaving her job as "pfft, horses", casually being angry if Beth ever gets into an affair with random heart-throb sexy co-worker and he really wants Rick gone to a retirement house because he's a bad influence for Morty. And, of course, Principal Vagina (a genuinely eye-rolling joke that didn't land for me) calls the two parents to tell them that Morty's been skipping a large amount of school.

And while Jerry's a bit of a douche, considering just how much of a sociopathic ass Rick is, he kinda has a point, and that's part of the charm of the series, I guess? Rick clearly protects Morty to a point, helping to cure him from broken legs and tolerates his concerns to a point, but he also clearly emotionally manipulates Morty to do things like accompany him on adventures and shove things up his butt.

And this is when Beth and Jerry end up meeting Rick and Morty after they teleport into the school cafeteria, with Beth and Jerry ready to kick Rick out of their house for being such a horrid influence to Morty. Except Jerry's pretty dismissive and basically outright calls Morty kind of stupid... but then randomly Morty ends up stating a lot of science and mathetmatics facts, like the law of thermodynamics and the square root of Pi, and Rick basically gives another spiel about how Morty is special and he's helping Morty to learn in a special way, allowing Beth and Jerry to let him stay.

The kicker, of course, is that Morty's intelligence is the result of having the Mega Seeds in his butt, and the side effect is losing motor skills for 72 hours, leading to Rick ranting for nearly a full minute as we pull away to the credits, "just me and you, Rick and Morty for a thousand years", and it's meant to be pretty scary, sort of? Rick Sanchez is kind of a complex character because in-universe he's kind of a toxic, assholish person, and particularly in the pilot we don't really see a whole lot of redeeming qualities about him, but from an audience's perspective he's so funny and entertaining and arguably the best part of the show. The pilot is mostly just here to establish the characters and the setting and hasn't really begun to add any sort of depth to the characters yet. It's a neat enough pilot, showing the sort of wacky sci-fi humour that was what drew me in, and establishes the dynamic between most of the family members (bar Summer). It's all right, but it's not until later episodes that the show ends up living up to its hype.

Random Notes:

• There's a lot of great background jokes in Rick and Morty episodes, and I'm not going to let those clutter up the body of the review. In this episode, my favourite bizarre and unexplained one-off joke has to be when Morty and Rick were running away from the bug cops, and then Morty accidentally inhales some green gas from an alien bong... and then breathes out a little blob that grows up into a running humanoid and then gets old and die immediately. "Don't think about it!" indeed.
• Summer appears in this episode, but she's basically a slightly-bitchy teenager that's just... there. There's the brief background mini-plot black comedy bit where Rick freezes a leather-jacket bully with a freeze gun and he ends up not fine and all and shatters to death in front of Summer, leaving her a sobbing wreck in the background. 
• "Harry Herpson High School" made me giggle. I don't know why. 
• The detail about Rick spending a lot of time as a celebrity in a dimension where they've cured all disease and everyone is young and hot forever is perhaps a bit long, but it's basically a fun example of the weird "don't think about it too much" random dimensions in this series. 
• I really like Rick's insistence that he can do "all of the science" with the Mega Seeds, without actually explaining just what they are for and why Morty's shoving them up his bum. Knowing Rick, the seeds probably help him get high. 
• There's a bit of continuity error of the bug-aliens having an interdimensional portal of their own, considering a huge plot point in the subsequent series, but my memory of seasons 2-3 is a bit foggy, so I'm not 100% sure. 
• Really love the creepy aesthetic of the body-horror gross-out designs for the aliens/extra-dimensional monsters. Stand-outs include:
• The gray spider-tick monster with multiple eyes and a body that's 90% mouth that chases Rick and Morty after the speech.
• The weird background flesh-rock formation things that have eyes and pink tendrils all over them. Also, a flying hairy butt. 
• The weird shit with a vertical mouth, saggy boobs, multiple disjointed limbs and just looks like the personification of "what the fuck". 
• The giant fang-faced alien in a suit-and-tie talking to Fake Kermit.
• The giant bug-men that guard the Interdimensional Customs place are pretty neat, too, even if I definitely could do without the weird non-testicles and non-mammaries that hang down from their bodies.