*CONTAINS SPOILERS*
The finale went out on Sunday (Monday ritual for me), and I have spent the last day quietly revising which episode of season nine was the best one.
I wrote about Ted back in June and called it a new favourite, which it still is: Two weeks stupid sounds like actual bliss. But two episodes further into the run have been rearranging themselves in my head ever since, and the finale has made it fairly obvious why.
Evil Morty gets closed out in the premiere. The entire multiversal apparatus, the thing the show has been carrying since season three, swept off the board in the first twenty-two minutes of a ten episode season. What is left after that has nowhere to go but inward. No Citadel. No curve. Just Rick’s self-hatred and Morty becoming into something harder, dare I say stronger, with no cosmology available to change the subject.
‘Mortgully: The Last Rickforest’ is the one I have watched twice and loved/laughed. They land to harvest sap, the tree turns out to be alive and objects to being carved up for someone else’s margin, and it drags them underground as balls of energy. From there they have to climb back up the evolutionary ladder to get out. Mitosis, then fish, then lungs, then land.
The crawl out is the bit I keep going back to. Morty makes it onto the shore as a lungfish, gets his first proper look at everything that is already living up there, and chokes to death on air. I am fairly sure the episode is proposing that as the origin of human anxiety. You drag yourself out of the water, having done the hardest thing anything has ever done, and the immediate reward is the sight of every other creature that also made it and is doing fine. Rick drowns himself so he can go back and be with him.
For the record, I had FernGully on VHS as a kid and I loved it. Not for the message, which hit subtly. It was the nature. Same reason The Land Before Time landed, and both Rescuers films, Down Under especially. Something about being shown a landscape at that scale and told to sit and look at it. I still rate all of them, though now it’s the art doing the work rather than the environmental bit. Hand painted backgrounds with real depth in them, from before everything got flattened out and rendered. The golden eagle flight in Down Under is still one of the best things anyone has done with animation.
So the episode title is a small trap. It sets you up for ninety seconds of environmental satire and then declines to deliver any. The prisoners are not being punished. The Warden is being fed by them, by the deaths and the rebirths and the endless honest effort in between. Spiders die tangled in their own webbing. The birds get all the way to the tree and can do precisely nothing when they arrive.
What sold it is the split in the middle. Rick raises an animal army and throws it at the Warden’s defences, because that is what Rick has always done and it has always worked. Morty tries becoming a tree. Morty gets further than anyone. Neither of them gets out alone, and the episode isn’t especially interested in tidying that up afterwards. It never bothers explaining how everyone ends up normal again either, which is a fair complaint that I have chosen to ignore. The reviews have it returning to the same poop joke too many times. I laughed every time. Reducing the whole of existence down to eating or shitting, and then landing on both at once, got a proper laugh out of me, and the animation in the underground sequences is the best the show has done.
Then ‘Rickuiem Mort a Dream’, which is where I fell out with people online.
It opens with Rick in a good mood, distilling something ridiculous, (I thought it was honestly a Breaking Bad reference) right up until Morty knocks the still over asking for a lift to buy Pokémon cards. Rick pulls up a holographic chart of his own happiness plotted against Morty’s presence and points out that the two lines have never once intersected. Nine seasons in, that is the worst thing he has ever said to him, and it is delivered as a data visualisation.
The rest is the repair attempt. Rick needs a rare alien potato, the potato is only winnable through an interplanetary dance competition (shout out to that whole dance sequence – *chef kisses* for Godzilla music choice too), and so Morty gets implanted with a Sympathid, a parasite that turns up the empathy by changing how the host perceives everyone else. Morty re-doses himself without being asked. He stops hearing what people say and starts hearing what they mean underneath it, becomes the most understanding person in any room he walks into, and goes to buy Rick something sparkly as a present. Rick pulls the bug out of him. Morty comes back to a version of reality in which the sparkly thing was an explosive and his arm is gone.
The parasite then eats his empathy and moves into Rick, which is the actual payload. Rick spends the back half flooded with compassion he did not earn, and talks the Cat and Mouse Killer down by simply being kind to him, while Morty sits there cold and unbothered. The killer gives his speech, comes quietly, and the police shoot him anyway. I laughed and raised the old eyebrows, which I suspect was the intention and is definitely the point (ACAB). The best line in the episode is the killer being sincerely disgusted at Jerry who had gone around pretending to be one. Actual professional standards.
Rick does apologise properly afterwards. Says Morty should have been allowed to see how toxic he is rather than having it smoothed over by a bug. Hands over the Pokémon cards. Post credits confirms the parasite never fixed anything for anybody.
The reviews came apart over this one. The complaint I keep seeing is that the episode makes radical empathy a product of delusion, and that this is a nasty thing to argue. I think that is the episode. Nothing in it suggests the compassion was fake while it was happening, only that it was borrowed, and it arrives after the arm has already come off.
Growth turning up too late to prevent the thing it would have prevented is the show’s whole position on Rick, and has been since ‘Rickmurai Jack’. The structural mess is a fairer criticism. It does take until the third act to reach the premise it is about.
Adult Swim sold the season on being organic human slop, made by people with back hair and cysts, no machines involved. Then the season it was advertising turned out to be nine episodes about manufactured feeling and whether an emotion you didn’t build yourself counts for anything. I doubt that was deliberate.
The finale settles it. Rick walks away from the peaceful life he had assembled, slides straight back into the habits he had supposedly grown out of, and the deaths on the way there mean nothing in particular. Same mechanism as the button in the Ted episode. Press it, nothing happens, tell everyone it worked.
The angst has moved over to Morty, though. That is the bit I haven’t decided about yet. Morty has seen a light all of his own making.
BEST SEASON EVER!
