Discussion:
Pricks in Space - Cruel and wise, "Rick and Morty" remains TV's best animated comedy
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Ubiquitous
2019-11-12 09:31:41 UTC
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Here's a great joke. An unhappy married couple get the chance to view,
through the goggles of a dimension-hopping mad scientist, how their lives
have played out in an alternate reality. The husband, an insecure drip, goes
first. Turns out in a world only slightly different from this one he's a
movie star, doing coke with Johnny Depp. His wife, perpetually disappointed,
snatches the goggles away to see what she might have been. The news is
heartening: In another life, she's a respected surgeon!

Next up is their daughter, a teen beanpole who has inherited her parents'
neuroses but has not yet soured into cynicism. She straps on the goggles,
adjusts them, looks disappointed.

"I don't see anything," she says.

"Well, you should select a different timeline. I mean, if your father and I
achieved our dreams, there's a chance you weren't even born." She interrupts
that last word halfway through. "That came out wrong. That came out very
wrong."

That joke, while bleak, stands as a model of old-fashioned craft, an
existential sci-fi update of another era's character-driven TV comedy. It's
from the eighth episode of the first season of Rick and Morty, Adult Swim's
beloved but not lovable cartoon of a meh suburban family caught up in
bizarre, complex, parodic, and traumatic weird-fiction adventures, many
featuring the squickiest space abominations since John Carpenter's The Thing.
Rarely has a comedy drawn from and honored so many pulp and horror and s.f.
sources with such serious love for the rules of those genres: Timelines split
and pretzel; teeny-verses nest in mini-verses within micro-verses; alien
parasites poof into the living room to infect the family's brains with false
memories of warmth and love to soften the humans up for devouring. And gape
at the Galapagoan inventiveness of the forms those parasites take, gathered
together in scenes as densely populated as the Sgt. Pepper cover: a baby
chick with Popeye arms; a mariachi and a Shakespeare; Amish Cyborg and
Reverse Giraffe; Mrs. Refrigerator, a talking you-know-what, and
Pencilvestyr, a chatty sharpened pencil.

In one of the best episodes, the catalyst for all the interdimensional
mishegoss - grandpa/mad scientist Rick, voiced by Justin Roiland, who created
the series with Dan Harmon - hooks back up with an alien ex, a hive mind that
inhabits every body on an entire planet. That means everyone alive there
shares the mind of his lover, which for him opens up endless sexual
possibility. He requests a football stadium's worth of redheads. Rick and
Morty often strikes me as the most satisfyingly hilarious cartoon TV series
since the greatest years of The Simpsons. (That's seasons three through
seven, of course.) Watching it can be like strapping your face to the
discharge spout of a woodchipper that's been loaded up with the complete
history of geek culture: The Twilight Zone, Alien, Lovecraft and Asimov, D&D
and MMORPGs, Star Trek and A Brief History of Time, splatter horror and junk
TV and - blessedly, thrillingly - the full history of screen comedy.

But it's more than an explosion of references. The creators of Rick and Morty
take everything vital from their series' antecedents - Simpsons, Futurama,
Archer, the low-rent Seth MacFarlane shows, Harmon's own Community, a host of
Adult Swim excursions into dada - and Frankenstein it all together into a
series whose animating spark is a surprising emotional acuity. That brings us
back to that joke about parenting and discarded dreams: Rather than a one-off
swipe at the daughter character, as it would be on Family Guy, the punchline
inspires some aching moments of uncertainty for Summer, the daughter (voiced
by Spencer Grammer). She confides at last in her younger brother, pipsqueak
masturbator Morty (also voiced by Roiland), with whom she competes to be the
tagalong on grandpa Rick's sojourns into the beyond. Morty's response is no
joke. Instead, he points out two piles of dirt in the yard and tells her how,
at the conclusion of an adventure a couple of episodes back, alternative-
universe versions of Rick and himself died - and that's them, buried out
back. A dazzlingly dark surprise from earlier in the series haunts those
circle-and-dot eyes of his. But he tells her what he's learned: "Nobody
exists on purpose. Nobody belongs anywhere. Everybody's gonna die. Come watch
TV."

She does. We all do. And we're lucky to have TV like this. The shows that she
then joins Morty and Rick watching exemplify one singular element of the
series: improvised nonsense rattled off by the cast and creators, complete
with ums and uncertain pauses, and animated for our - and the characters' -
delectation. Few comic sketches beat the appliance store commercials of
Ants-in-My-Eyes Johnson. (Each of Rick and Morty's first two seasons devotes
an episode to the ridiculous improvised programming the family finds on
"interdimensional television"; the first go-round brushes against sublimity,
while the second is amusing but raucously violent.)

In the first episodes of its long-awaited third season, Rick and Morty has
maintained its prickly balance: wild invention, cosmic cock-ups, extreme
gore, grounded characters, an interest in therapy and its insights, and an
unflinching - even compassionate - fascination with human cruelty. It's a
tradition of TV comedy for screw-ups continually to relearn the same lessons.
Here, the parents again and again discover that their marriage is worth
fighting for, just as vain and bilious Rick is moved to admit that maybe his
grandkids aren't just stupid "pieces of shit." (In the finale of the second
season, he seems to perform an act of sacrifice to save them.) But here that
familiar TV repetitiveness seems a philosophy rather than a concession to the
episodic medium. Much like the study group in Harmon's Community, Rick and
Morty and family never stop being the people that they are at their cores,
despite their semi-regular climactic epiphanies. Most of the people I know in
real life don't change that much, either - but I love them for who they're
capable of being as much as for who they are.

Rick and Morty airs on Cartoon Network's Adult Swim.


--
Watching Democrats come up with schemes to "catch Trump" is like
watching Wile E. Coyote trying to catch Road Runner.
David Johnston
2019-11-12 23:17:23 UTC
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I'm not especially fond of the lesson that cruelty is smart and kindness
is stupid.
Ted Nolan <tednolan>
2019-11-13 03:44:07 UTC
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Post by David Johnston
I'm not especially fond of the lesson that cruelty is smart and kindness
is stupid.
Reminds me of the inverse review for "Futurama": Good deeds go unpunished.
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