It happens to Rick and Morty (HBO Max), the hilarious animated series from Justin Roiland and Dan Harmon, as it does to the universe. This extends to infinity and beyond, and this seems to have had only one beginning and can have no end. Roitland himself said this before he was abruptly fired earlier this year after a very serious allegation of domestic violence – involving injuries and restraint against his will through threats – leaving the 70 chapters still outstanding – such is HBO’s security on the adventures of the “the smartest scientist in the galaxy” and his clumsy and incorrigible grandson – in the hands of his partner Harmon. And don’t worry, everything is still intact. Or you would say: better than intact. Because the attempt to give the season a storyline as a common thread – as Chris Chibnall did miserably wrong with “Doctor Who”, which still seems like a reference to Rick Morty’s endless references – is fortunately history.
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Although Roitland is also history. And that means Rick and Morty doesn’t sound like Rick and Morty because the co-creator was also the voice actor for the characters. But everything must change so that nothing changes, as the maxim of a close but antagonistic universe, Marvel, goes. And something like that happens in the seventh season of Rick and Morty. And not only because the chosen voices are different, namely those of two not very well-known actors – Ian Cardoni, who has only a few TV films and the film “The Challenge” with the Olsen sisters, and Harry Belden (“Christmas” ) Again?) – but because the small earthquake brought the series back to a certain starting point. An episode in which the closed episode predominates – complete in itself – and in which a freshness is regained that, although not lost, had suffered some disturbances in the last season.
A caustic homage
The anthological first episode of this seventh season makes it very clear. The protagonist is Professor Poop Pants – also known as Mr. Dirty Butt – in an extremely dark moment. His wife has left him, he has never seen his son again, he is a mess, and he drinks more than necessary, alone and in the dark in a corner of the Smiths’ house. Yes, the character who was born – among other things – to break the fourth wall is completely broken, and doesn’t that say something about the series itself, or what’s left of it after the Roitland hit? That Rick and Morty step aside for a moment to pay a bitingly sarcastic tribute to the friends – there’s a disastrously perfect gang partying in the equivalent of a Jo, what a scatological loser’s night – points in this direction. The fact that Roitland himself was also the voice of the lost Professor Poop Pants seems to confirm this.
The state of each chapter’s mutant object, which is always completely unpredictable, remains intact. It is, in fact, the flagship of Rick Sánchez’s adventures – this endless universe of universes, this intergalactic Russian doll, this space-time multiplied to infinity – borne or driven by everything we have seen before, but never like this. Because everything in Rick and Morty is also an homage, a wink, a nourishing resurrection of other fictions. A universe that devours itself to rebuild itself without pause, like a monster with countless heads or very different versions, as many as the protagonists have, which are at the same time the world in which they find themselves and all their possibilities, and that increases The Pulp is a metafictional artifact and a collective work that grows in all directions and in all at once.
Part of the animated “Ricky Morty” cast. (HBO Max)
The fact that there are an infinite number of Ricks – and an infinite number of Smith families, an infinite number of Morty, Jerry, Beth and Summer – not only guarantees the longevity of the series – which hopefully follows in the footsteps of the equally unpredictable storylines that mutate to the point of delirium, The Simpsons – but tirelessly explores everything that fiction promises and science fiction achieves: that everything is possible. Like how Rick and his son-in-law, stupid Jerry, cross heads in one of the episodes of this new season, an instant classic, and end up becoming inseparable because they’re made of each other’s pieces, and they eventually fall apart. In fact, they love each other, they cannot live without each other because they are twins in spirit. Particularly admirable is his ability to explore each character as if they were their own universe, determined to collide at every moment with what they fear most.
The question isn’t so much whether Rick this season – because that’s what it’s about, or what it’s about, as he pretends: his rebellion is in the juicy, saucy details – will finally find Rick Prime, the version of himself that already is killed his wife. his daughter – the series’ main antagonist – and how everyone – versions included – will reconnect to expand further. “Rick and Morty” doesn’t intend to reflect the world, and that’s inevitably the case, as it looks for an escape from every – every – aspect of reality that gets in its way. The fact that Rick’s final enemy is himself, in fact a very specific version of himself, says a lot about the possibilities a character or any of us can have: destroy us or transform us into what we will never be, or what we thought we were and in reality never were.
Yes, Rick is looking for some kind of redemption, and isn’t that the species he belongs to? Because everything could have been different, and it wasn’t, but we still want it to be that way. And the road ahead of Dan Harmon may not be that long – because nothing is easy when you have to deal with something you created with your best friend alone – but measured by how good he is emerged from that first round – in which he regained the enviable and brilliant punching power that was lost in the sixth season – it didn’t have to be that way. After all, every day the world has more reasons to pick up the portal gun and fix itself as if it were just another hooligan, the lovably foul-mouthed (and brilliant) Rick and Morty.
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