Rick & Morty is very good. It’s also fascist sometimes.
First of all, this is not some sort of take-down or linkbaity garbage article that tries to tell you that the cool thing you like is actually bad and you’re a bad person for liking it. There’s enough of those to solidify both your and my self-loathing elsewhere. I actually like Rick & Morty. It’s very funny and the most audacious comedy show I’ve seen in years. It fully commits to its world, in both writing and animation, which makes it a wonderful gem on the Adult Swim lineup. The second season just ended and I can’t wait for season 3.
It’s also probably one of the most dour and nihilistic shows on television. Yes, it’s on Adult Swim, where every other series involves He-Man pooping on Skeletor or satanic dogs graphically murdering children, but I think the striking quality to Rick & Morty’s animated cruelty is just how sincere it is in its delivery. This may be a leftover from the late Community mindset, but the show actually engages with the dysfunction of the Smith family while most other familial cartoon sitcoms like Family Guy and current Simpsons just gloss over their strife for crude, humorous effect.
The Smith family, along with Rick, is in so much visible pain. The Roadrunner can trick the Coyote into running off a cliff but after the next cut you know that the Coyote is up and scheming on how he’s going to get that Roadrunner next time. With Rick & Morty, there’s actually an episode where the parents Jerry and Beth argue over why they didn’t abort their daughter Summer. This is a show that involves aliens and robots and an innumerable catalogue of nonsense characters (Mr. Poopy Butthole has a special place in my heart), but its actual human darkness has consequences. Trying to capture the true emotional conflict in this show is what makes it a roller coaster ride. You don’t always know if Rick’s snide comments about the ugliness of living are meant to elate a laugh or guffaw of shocked disdain.
The “fascist” element I gleamed comes out of the nihilist tinge each episode tends to conclude on. In the episode “Auto Erotic Assimilation”, Rick reacquaints himself with an old girlfriend Unity, who’s a sentient hive-mind that controls the actions of a whole planet of people. Through governing everyone’s minds, Unity creates a utopian paradise where there are no wars and no singular identities held by the inhabitants. Unity exists only by enslaving others and because of this the planet lives in peace. At one point, Unity is lured into the decadent and inebriated Rick Sanchez lifestyle and loses control over the planet, leading to chaos, hatred and race riots. All is eventually restored, and the hive-mind makes the planet right again. This episode is great in depicting the confusion and turmoil of a flailing relationship in using a complex science fiction concept (which I think is the show’s charm, it’s willingness to take an absurd concept and stretch it to its thematic limits—“Total Rickall” is a brilliant example), but what gets lost in the metaphor is the resolution that people are too cruel and dumb to take care of themselves so they’re better off mind-controlled and enslaved.
A lot of the episodes in the second season take this ending route. We are viscious and dumb and the bitter anxiety of our own wanton brutality just makes us cold and unfeeling—that’s Rick’s general set-up. Rick has been around the universe and knows that we’re bad. Morty enters the picture as an innocent being exposed to the barbarous laws of the universe that Rick welcomes. Each Rick and Morty-centric episode involves Morty being exposed to something Rick knows all too well, so Morty tries to do the right thing, then learns that the right thing doesn’t work, then resorts to the violent tactics of Rick. In “Look Who’s Purging Now”, the conclusion is that a “purge”, one day a year where there are no laws and we’re allowed to murder all we want, is a good thing. Yes, it’s a metaphor, all science fiction is, but even in a colorful (much blood is spilled in this episode) adult cartoon it’s a pretty bleak message. Morty, the audience surrogate, eviscerates and murders a whole bunch of aliens by episode’s end. Rick tries to assuage Morty that the candy bar he ate made him aggressive because it contained the chemical “Purgenol”, but this is revealed to be a lie as an end-of-the-episode joke. What you can take out of this allegory is that Morty (you) is a rage-filled monster that just wants to kill and destroy. You’re a bad person.
With “The Ricks Must Be Crazy”, Rick’s flying car is powered by a pocket universe and when that pocket universe builds another pocket universe to power its world, Rick (the cruel god) does everything in his power to stop them, destroying entire universes just to do so. In “Mortynight Run”, Morty does everything he can to help a seemingly innocent alien convict escape the intergalactic police while Rick thinks they should just kill the alien—eventually, Morty gives in and does murder the alien. And when all this is happening, the show jumps back to an A or B plot that involves the Smith family members getting into a fight that seems alarmingly too real, even distractingly so. Depending on your emotional stance, The Smith parents talking about how they almost aborted their daughter is more alarming than seeing Rick casually murdering someone.
Then again, this is a comedy show. To believe that Roiland, Harmon and the rest of the writers actually think this is a bit much. Me even feigning to take this all seriously speaks more for my current emotional state than those of the creators. I think the cord with me was struck just by how sincere it is compared to other adult cartoon fare. The clash of subversive nihilism and emotional sincerity really does a number on your brain if you think too much about it. Done well, you have the brilliant “Total Rickall”; done poorly and you have that infamous Ctrl+Alt+Delete comic page that tried to shove a miscarriage plot into a webcomic about how wacky video games are. Once again, I like the show, but I feel like the first season episode “Rixty Minutes” kind of fell into the category of the latter, being both an hilariously absurd episode that also involved two depressed parents self-medicating on boxed wine and lamenting the spiraling destruction of their family.
The general narrative that the show tries to unite is that we are gross monsters and the only way to survive is to be the grossest monster. We deserve a fascist omnipresent alien to enslave us or we need to murder people sometimes. But the other soother interpretation is to take the show’s resolutions as a joke. If you surmise that “people are terrible” as a closing moral of the episode, then it’s a joke. Like any realm of humor that dips into a punchline about “9/11” or “Hitler had some good ideas”, you have to take it as the subversive ultimatum. The collision of sincerity and subversiveness definitely perks up the viewer and can leave one contemplative (at least for me) and that’s why this show’s a treat when it doesn’t go overboard.
Maybe that’s why this show puts me off sometimes. It’s engaging.
Now I’m ending with this glorious and wonderful clip:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nLB4dU3Yc6M
