*CONTAINS SPOILERS*
It sat in the Emby ‘recently added’ row for a week before I touched it. New Rick and Morty, season nine, second episode, and I just… didn’t. I was knackered, mostly. The kind of week where the idea of paying attention to anything, even twenty-two minutes of cartoon nihilism, felt like effort.
Watched it last night. Should not have waited.
The premise only works because it’s Rick. He takes a holiday. Not a holiday in the normal sense – no beach, no cocktail, no phone left face-down on a sunbed – but a holiday from the one thing he can’t usually switch off, which is being the smartest and most miserable man in any given universe. So he makes himself stupid. Deliberately. Dials his own brain down to something soft and uncomplicated, calls himself Ted and goes off to spend a fortnight being a happy idiot.
And the thing is, it sounds like bliss. That’s the bit that got me. Strip out the cynicism and the genius and the constant despair, and you’re left with a man who’s just pleased to be somewhere. Two weeks of not knowing anything and not minding. I’d take it. I think most people would if they were honest, which is presumably the entire reason someone sat down to write the episode.
Then something goes wrong, and someone takes a shot at him.
Because of course there are protocols. Of course Rick didn’t actually wander off to be stupid without building in a failsafe first. Paranoia!
That’s the joke buried under the joke – Rick can’t take a holiday from himself without engineering a version of himself to come back online the second things get shifty. The ‘stupid’ was never real. It was a setting. Ted is a person right up until the situation requires him not to be, and then the bloke who built Ted quietly reasserts control and Ted finds out he was never the one driving. He isn’t who he thinks he is. He never was.
That’s what tipped it into one of my new favourites, and it isn’t the action. It’s the small, slightly sad mechanism underneath it. You can build yourself the perfect holiday from your own head and still not be allowed to enjoy it, because some earlier, cleverer, more paranoid version of you didn’t trust the world enough to leave the safeties off.
I get that more than I’d like to admit…
The writing on this show remains my favourite of anything on telly, and it has done for years now. There’s no episode where I sit there afterwards feeling short-changed. It takes a premise that could carry a whole gimmicky half-hour on its own – Rick goes stupid, ha – and then refuses to leave it as the gimmick, and digs underneath it for the part that actually hurts. It just doesn’t disappoint. I keep waiting for it to and it keeps not.