Rick & Morty S01E08 Review: The One With Improv

Rick and Morty, Season 1, Episode 8: Rixty Minutes

This is a pretty great episode! While each season of Rick and Morty will try to have this as a once-off-per-season gimmick (and unlike most gimmick episodes, so far with only three selections, it hasn't lost its luster yet) it's a pretty fun one. It's clear that they just stuck the voice actors in a recording booth and told them to go wild and imagine what TV shows in infinite realities could become. It ranges from quick, slight visual gags (like a Game of Thrones parody where Tyrion is a regular man and everyone else are dwarves), to slightly longer visual gags (corn gangsters shooting each other) to the highlight of the episode, where there is improv voice acting that they clearly animated afterwards. There are certain moments where the voice actors were pretty audibly corpsing, and I thought that added to the charm.

It's also perhaps the sort of rapid-fire series of comedy that doesn't make sense but they just left it in and threw it in, and that's glorious. I'm not sure why it worked so well, because the B-plot of the rest of the family who's not Rick or Morty going on a brief little angst-trip in seeing the alternate-universe versions of themselves is... it's well-written, but it's not anything we haven't seen before with this show. And other than the endlessly-quoted, borderline nihilistic conversation between Morty and Summer at the end, most of what this episode has going for it is the random improv humour... and it honestly works for this episode. Whether it's a version of Thriller performed by telephone Michael Jackson, to the gory parody of cereal commercials, to the hamsters-in-people's-butts world, to Gazorpazorp Garfield, to the rapid-fire crime procedural, to Real Fake Doors, to Ants-in-My-Eyes Johnson the electronics salesman, to the sheer ridiculousness of The Two Brothers Movies.... to the absolutely fucked-up "a bunch of cats animate a corpse and get into rom-com hijinks" show. I dunno. It's all just in great, good, self-aware ridiculousness, y'know?

And, yeah, you could probably say that the whole point of the episode is to wax lyrical about how we have to "move on". Just as Morty ends up getting Summer to move on from the drastic plan of abandoning their house with his whole "nothing in life matters, come watch TV" speech, Rick and Morty eventually just moves on and on from every channel they're in. But nah. I just think it's all about the wacky improv gags.

Which I guess leads to the actual heavier storyline -- which I reckon this episode wouldn't have worked without. While Rick and Morty are happy to watch Ball Fondlers, Summer, Beth and Jerry are distracted by an alternate reality where Jerry is a movie star, and the three of them borrow Rick's alternate-dimension VR googles thing to see what their alternate-life counterparts end up doing. Despite what "infinite" should mean, apparently, for Summer, this means that every single time that her parents get together to accidentally produce her, this would inevitably lead to a boring, humdrum family life, whereas Beth gets to experience a reality where she becomes a human surgeon while Jerry experiences a reality where he snorts coke with Johnny Depp while banging Kristen Stewart on the side.

It's this bit of realization when Summer realizes that in all the realities where her parents had her, they ended up being unhappy and stuck unable to pursue their dreams. And with Beth and Jerry not being the most mature people in the world, they basically let slip the fact that, yeah, y'know, apparently alternate-universe Beth and Jerry are pretty much seemingly happier if Summer never existed. And while the two of them are sort of enjoying living successful lives vicariously through their alternate-universe counterparts, Summer is pretty much ready to leave their house... until Morty shows up, and reveals to Summer the revelation that he and Rick are actually not the native Rick and Morty of this dimension, but a pair that have replaced the dead ones. And as much as Morty is unsettled by the fact that his alternate-universe corpse is buried in his backyard, and the fact that he left his original dimension as a Cronenberged mess... he just has to move on, y'know? The ever-repeated-in-the-internet “Nobody exists on purpose. Nobody belongs anywhere. Everybody’s gonna die. Come watch TV?” It's honestly pretty neat that they took what could've otherwise been an eyeball-rolling inducing nihilistic rant and actually made it uplifting. And, yeah, sure, the base sentiment is kind of bleak and dark, but I dunno... I guess the ability to accept it and enjoy your life is sort of the closest thing to a moral that the episode can come as close to?

Or, y'know, maybe just pay attention to the hamsters that live in butts. That's funnier.

Overall, a pretty neat episode, and easily my favourite in the first season.

Random Notes:

• There honestly isn't much point for me in doing a 'random notes' segment, considering the fact that it'll just probably lead to me listing every single gag in the episode, and that's the opposite of what the point of this episode should be. So yeah. 
• The post-credits of this one has Rick take the entire family in a vacation to the hamsters-in-butts dimension so they can ask the specifics of how butt-home society works.