Rick & Morty, Season 1, Episode 2: Lawnmower Dog
After that pilot episode, we go into one of the more highly-rated episodes in Rick and Morty's first season, and it's interesting how much the first season try its best to mix and match different sci-fi/fantasy tropes and genres together and spend each episode as a relatively standalone affair taking their own spin on them, compared to the more... unique bits in the subsequent seasons. "Lawnmower Dog", for one, has Rick and Morty essentially go into what's a crossover between Inception and Freddy Kruger as they explore the nonsensical world of dreams and how sci-fi try to make some sense of it. Meanwhile, thanks to a freak Rick invention, the rest of the Smith family has to deal with bizarre hybrid of Skynet and Rise of the Planet of the Apes, where Rick's improvement of the house dog end up nearly causing the Earth to be invaded by hyper-intelligent animals piloting mecha-suits.
And... and it's fun, really. There's really not a whole ton of depth or any attempt at being bleak or whatever here, it's just a bunch of wacky nonsensical fun -- notably, Rick is a lot... nicer in this episode, especially compared to the pilot. Sure, the ultimate end-goal of his Inception plan is to get Morty's math teacher, Mr. Goldenford, to give Morty an A so Morty can go around and fool around with him, and that's super self-centered, but he's at least doing it in a relatively benign way, and at one point even helps Morty defend Scary Terry from being bullied, for what it's worth.
And the Inception plot is... I kinda-sorta wished the show didn't really hammer home that "HEY GUESS WHAT INCEPTION SORTA KINDA DON'T MAKE SENSE", but the sentiment is ambiguous enough and the episode itself does play a lot of the story straight... even if I wonder about just how possible it is to "incept" an NPC from Mr. Goldenford's dream. When their attempt to enter Mr. Goldenford's dream ends up with them pretending to be terrorists and Goldenford ends up becoming an action hero in his own dream (complete with James Bond supervillain death trap), Rick and Morty end up incepting themselves into the TV character Goldenford is fantasizing about, and that character has a creepy den of sex and debauchery... which, disturbingly for our main characters, also includes a slutty Summer. Faced with the threat of being attacked by the centaur pimp-dude, they jump in again into... a horror movie where they are stalked by Scary Terry. Or, as Rick puts it, a "legally-save knock-off" version of Freddy Kruger. Except he's got weird scrotum-chins and says BITCH after every sentence. 
And after what seems to just be a one-note joke to prolong the episode, they end up... following Terry back to his house where he gets into a brief argument with his wife. And then Rick and Morty incepting Scary Terry himself, showing up in Terry's own nightmare where it's a storm of high school cliches, not wearing pants and not being able to answer when called upon... except, y'know, it's all grotesque face-horror Freddy Kruger knockoffs. It's honestly kind of... kind of bizarre? I'm not going to question the exact science of dream science, but this ends up causing Scary Terry to help Rick and Morty get free of all of the dangers on each layer of the dream in a ridiculous gore montage, allowing Rick and Morty to get free and leave the real Goldenford with the idea of giving Morty an A. 
Far more interesting, in my opinion, is Rick's off-handed solution to Jerry's complaining and ill-mannered demand that Rick "fix" the dog by building a communicator. Despite Rick's warnings that they'll regret it, he does so anyway, and while it's initially cute that Snuffles is able to sort of listen to orders perfectly, Snuffles ends up becoming smarter (hilariously, by discovering extra battery slots in his little headgear) and starts to develop rudimentary speech, builds a robot arm, watches documentaries about how wolves are domesticated and selectively bred to become puppy dogs... and all the while, Summer is just laughing and videoing it all because, hey, Youtube views! And while this quickly sort of turns into a horror show, Summer at least shows a wee bit of depth compared to her early shallow-teenager portrayal by refusing to "take away sentience" from a being that just received it. 
This then leads to the obvious horror movie homage where Snuffles arrives in a mechanized suit, able to speak in a monotone robot voice, and enters Summer's room at night... and, of course, the dialogue he says is "where are my testicles, Summer?" And before Summer, Beth and Jerry can do anything, we get the revelation that Snuffles (or rather, Snowball, as he prefers to be known as) has armed his fellow dogs with similar robot-suits, and they will strike back against the injustices of the humans breeding them to have weaker bodies and cutting off their balls and all that.
Snuffles/Snowball basically forces the humans to live like dogs, wanting to ascend to the greater species, and, of course, while Summer and Beth predictably freak out, Jerry is a putz and completely tries and fails to act defiant and cool, while also completely missing the spay-and-neuter threat. Rick and Morty arrives and rescues the rest of them, but, of course, Jerry continues to try and show up people who clearly have a better idea of what to do, and while it's definitely a case of gross-out humour, Snuffles forcing Jerry to kiss his own piss on the ground is a pretty neat callback to the horrible shit that Jerry does earlier to the dogs.
And, yeah, the show definitely tries its best to portray Jerry as an ass pretty hard, huh? He mistreats dogs, though, so it's hard for me personally to feel sorry for him. And then we basically get Morty being treated above all other humans by Snuffles as his personal pet, while he unleashes his massive army of dog domination, and in a montage, ends up conquering the world. In perhaps the most hilariously uncomfortable scene is the brief glimpse of a gigantic dumpster with human testicles, which is probably the funniest joke in this episode. And while Morty enjoys a nice life being the pampered pet of the dictator of Earth, turns out that Rick shows up, tells Morty to drink some pills... but instead of Matrix-style "wake up" bit, this causes Morty to nearly die, causing Snuffles to basically demand his doctors (dogtors?) to cure Morty whatever the cost, because "we're not them."
And... and, of course, this whole sequence turns out to be part of Rick's Inception gambit to insert the idea inside the smart dog's brain that they must be better than humans, and this means leaving to another dimension and start anew. The fact that this is the second episode in the series (and the first episode features Rick wiping out the human race within the first couple of minutes) makes it ambiguous if the show will bother to keep humanity's status quo intact or not, which I feel helps to enhance the twist that, hey, the dog invasion is actually a dream they have to manipulate. The ending of Snuffles and Morty sharing a farewell with a lick and Snuffles allowing Morty to call him "Snuffles" is actually touching for what little we see of them.
Overall, though, while it doesn't have any huge, over-arching theme or huge plot ramifications, "Lawnmower Dog" really ends up being a pretty solid episode of Rick and Morty, having a lot of fun with the types of sci-fi it's lampooning, and having pretty fun visuals. Perhaps the only complaint is that Rick feels uncharacteristically mellow, but Rick's definitely going to fluctuate a lot between being completely sociopathic to throwing Morty a bone, so. It's a fun episode.
Random Notes:
- A bit of a gag in the sex dungeon level is that a lot of Mr. Goldenford's fantasies are icky blob monsters and weird gnomes and dwarves... and Summer's there, with Rick noting that it's a suppressed desire, which is why they encounter it in a dream-within-a-dream. Rick and Morty are both completely disgusted at the idea of a slutty Summer flirting with them and trying to make an "intergenerational sandwaich". This joke gets a brief blink-and-miss-it payoff when Morty and Rick rescue the rest of the family, and Morty is so uncomfortable when Summer gives him an innocent hug that smooshes Morty's face against her chest.
- Rick going straight into a BDSM gimp outfit to 'blend in' is totally something he's looking forward to, and if not for him being grossed-out by a dream-figure of his own granddaughter, I'm pretty sure he'll be happy to waste time there.
- If the show didn't commit so much to having Scary Terry end each line with bitch, it probably wouldn't have worked, bitch. As it is, though, it actually ends up making him kinda funny. I'm not the biggest fan of the Scary Terry sequence, which I felt didn't work that well, but at least the whole sequence feels fun.
- Also fun is the royalty's pet treatment that Morty goes through in the dream, from being spared the neutering, being allowed to 'breed', having a dog bowl full of hamburgers and Snuffles even employing another dog as a pet-caretaker.
- This episode is the first to have a post-credits scene, and this episode's is a somewhat underwhelming one that features a hippie teacher showing up at Scary Terry's dream-class.
No comments:
Post a Comment