Rick & Morty S01E03 Review: The One With Hepatitis C

Rick and Morty, Season 1, Episode 3: Anatomy Park 

The third episode of Rick and Morty's first season is probably my favourite from a visual and thematic standpoint, for the simple reason that it explores a sci-fi trope that is near and dear to my heart -- exploring a cartoony version of a human body. It's how little me learned all about how the human body is connected to each other, and it's always been something I love when any sci-fi material does something similar. 

Of course, the titular "Anatomy Park" is mostly done as a riff on Jurassic Park, with a shade of other sci-fi horror movies and a "someone is trying to steal the THING from a facility" sub-plot thrown in, making it feel like a combination of Jurassic Park and Alien thrown into the setting of the dying body of a hobo. 

And it's just... it's just solid fun, y'know? The visuals are entertaining, and the additional wrinkle of the diseases (portrayed as massive gross monsters) breaking out of the pathogen zoo and the hobo's body itself is shutting down and causing a bunch of changes causes Morty and the crew of Anatomy Park to have to survive and escape. Sure, the show takes immense liberties with actual anatomical science (Hepatitis C "eating" Hepatitis A? Gonorrhea in the small intestine? E. coli looking like bacteriophages) but it has enough actual nods to science that I really don't mind. From the little maps in the background to things like the body dying thanks to the villainous muscle man shooting up the alveoli forest, or the hobo's liver being so fucked up that it's a haunted house, or the little gag about how the gas is building up inside the dead body, or the gag about the small intestine? All pretty well done. 

The main plot, of course, is that Rick's shrunken Morty down and tells him to meet with the sentient bacteria Xenon Bloom and figure out what's wrong, and it turns out that it's sabotage done by the huge muscle-bound gun-toting Poncho, who's about to smuggle out Bubonic Plague. Morty falling for one of the workers, Annie, felt kind of shoehorned in, but it's a lot better executed than all of the previous Jessica jokes earlier in the season (or later on, for that matter). Also fun is the constant whinging from Rick about how proud he is about the Pirates of the Pancreas attraction, and how he keeps insisting that he had lobbied a lot for said pirate ride. 

The eventual solution as the cast gets picked off and killed one by one and Morty and Annie ends up riding the "bone train" to the hobo's left nipple (Morty's joke about wanting to get to 'both of them', referring to Annie's, is hilarious). We get another Jurassic Park parody when the Hepatitis A monster that's been hounding them for a while gets eaten by Hepatitis C for no reason. Rick enlarges the hobo in Earth's orbit to save Morty and Annie is pretty fun and hilarious, even if we do get the expected joke of a giant naked man in orbit. After the rescue, the giant hobo explodes and rains gore all over America. Rick, in quick succession, realizes that Annie is a smart lady and shrinks her down to make the next Anatomy Park. 

The B-plot works in a lot less interesting way. Essentially, the episode starts off with Jerry forcing his family to not have any electronics in order to connect as a family during Christmas, particularly when his parents have arrived... but then Jerry's parents arrive with a new lover, Jacob (voiced by Arrow's fantastic Echo Kellum) and poor Jerry ends up reacting with revulsion, shock and horror when his parents go into detail about how they have found a new lease in life with Joyce fucking Jacob while Leonard watches while dressed up as Superman. Nevermind the obvious swinger joke, anyone would react like Jerry when exposed to their parents' sexual kinks. 

And... I dunno. All of the jokes just sort of land flat on me, because unlike most other "haha let's make fun of Jerry, the loser" jokes, he's honestly not that unreasonable in this episode. Also, we have an even smaller sub-plot of Summer's boyfriend Ethan who is angry that Summer hasn't been returning his calls and is all possessive and shit, but Jacob's slow talk ends up with this random character confessing that he was raped by his brother as a kid. What? Then everyone makes up and makes out with their respective partners, and Jerry is horrified, and it's only the giant body exploding outside that stops this. I dunno... there isn't much of a punchline for this B-plot.

Overall, it's not the strongest episode that Rick and Morty has to offer, with a straightforward plot featuring interesting visuals, and a pretty bland B-plot. It's one that I enjoyed a lot, though, and it really speaks to the strength of the voice-acting that so many of the jokes land in what would otherwise been a pretty-but-average episode. 

Random Notes:

• The post-credits sequence for this episode has them build the next Anatomy Park inside Ethan's body, but Rick ends up getting pissed off because the other board heads led by Annie veto the Pirates of the Pancreas ride. 
• I really do like that sequence with the reporters making anatomy-related jokes when a giant naked hobo body manifests in the orbit. 
• The totally-atheistic Rick talking shit about the rest of his family being obsessed with phones and ranting that Christmas is the day of Jesus Christ's birth is probably the comedic highlight of the episode for me. 
• Random Anatomy Park rides, which we only briefly see... but you can learn more about it in the official board game!:
• It's A Small Intestine, a parody of Disneyland's It's a Small World but is in the intestine. The joke, of course, is that it's super-duper long. 
• Haunted Liver, which, of course, is because a hobo's liver is in pretty sorry state. It has animatronic werewolves, for some reason. 
• The Bone Train, which Xenon Bloom admits that he made just for the joke of asking people to get on his bone train. 
• Spleen Mountain, a parody on Disneyland's Space Mountain. 
• Bladder Falls, which is probably not something you want to ride unless you like being splashed by hobo piss. 
• Colon Log Ride, which sounds even worse than Bladder Falls.
• Cerebral Cortex Carousel, which... probably is why the hobo is so brain-dead. 
• Not sure what the ride is called, but there's a House of Love style ride featuring red blood cells. 
• Pirates of the Pancreas, which, according to Rick, features accurate, rapey depiction of pirates because he doesn't "whitewash that shit". 
• The random pathogen monsters:

• Tuberculosis is portrayed as little black blobs with bendy spider legs and a single red eye, and Xenon Bloom notes that they are often dormant in most people. Neat!
• Gonorrhea is a giant yellow monster with spikes and tentacles, with a subtly phallic head. It's encountered in the intestines for some reason, though.
• Hepatitis A is the giant yellow gorilla monster from the opening, and it has some of those ball-scrotum bits that the show designers seem to really like for some reason. 
• Hepatitis C is an even bigger gorilla monster with giant bat ears, spikes and balls all over his body. 
• Bubonic Plague is a little baby blob with four eyes and fangs. 
• E. coli is portrayed as bacteriophage-like monsters, which is completely wrong, but it's a neat take on such a monster, with a smaller green blob piloting the spider-like entity from the core, and two mouths on the 'body'. 
• The random deaths of the Anatomy Park crew is honestly pretty hilariously brutal. One gets sucked out of the respiratory system when the hobo coughs in response to the alveoli rupturing, being ripped of to skin and bone... and then we cut to a simple cough onto Rick's face. We've got another dude who falls from a ledge, and another one who gets wiped out when the large intestine sphincter ruptures, literally drowning in shit. Xenon Bloom, meanwhile, gets consumed by E. coli in a hilarious "oh shit there actually is an autopilot" gag. 
• So what the fuck was Rick's "puffy vagina" comment? He tells Morty that he dodged a bullet with Annie thanks to her puffy vagina, which seems to imply... an STD of some sort? But that would mean that Rick has been hooking up with a much, much younger woman?