Part of the fun of every new episode of Rick and Morty is wondering what flavor of episode it’ll be. Will it be surprisingly melancholy character exploration? A classic sci-fi premise extrapolated and made silly? Out of control genre parody? This week, we got the latter. The genre in question: Heist movies. Justin Roiland and Dan Harmon aren’t fans, it would seem. (Actually, having heard Harmon’s Now You See Me rant, I guess I should have seen this take coming.)
Rick and Morty are having an Indiana Jones parody adventure where they don booby trap-proof suits and waltz through a tomb. Darts, sawblades, and snakes bounce harmlessly off of them in a clever rapid-fire sequence of sight gags. As much as I enjoyed last week’s toilet-themed meditation on friendship, the jokes in this episode are landing a lot better. I laughed hard enough throughout this half hour to put any fears about this show losing its effectiveness to rest for now.
(Via Adult Swim)
They reach the grave they’re going to rob to find out that someone’s beat them to it. A heist artist has left his origami calling card. To finish their adventure, they now have to track down the heist artist, who’s giving a presentation at Heist Con. Only Rick wants to get in without paying, because he doesn’t want to support heisting. The only way to do that is to assemble a crew, which we are constantly reminded is the most tedious part of a heist movie. We get a parade of guest stars, each putting in work that’s almost too good for how few lines they get. (“You son of a bitch, I’m in.”) We’ve seen this joke before. I’d argue that MacGruber did a funnier riff on the whole putting-a-crew-together scene than this initial one seven years ago. But Rick and Morty’s strong suit is often that it doesn’t quit after one joke.
The heist artist challenges Rick to a heist-off, only to reveal that he’s already completed the heist. Or so he thinks. Rick had built a heist-bot to enlist the entire convention into his crew. Rick gave Morty the crystal skull to hang on to, then pooped in the artist’s bag, and replaced it without anyone noticing. All the while, he’s ranting about how stupid and contrived heists are. The main thrust of the argument is that heist movies try to seem more clever than they are by making their plots needlessly complicated and then claiming it was all part of some intricate plan at the end. And the stories never really hold up if you think about them too hard.
(Via Adult Swim)
Some episodes, you can really feel the writer’s presence in the script. Like, you can always tell when Justin Roiland gets on one and starts riffing. Here, this feels like Dan Harmon’s show. His fingerprints are all over the writing of this episode. The long monologues of film analysis dripping with contempt for the genre it’s parodying, that’s Harmon’s playbook. Some of Rick’s dialog sounds like it’d be right at home in an episode of Community. If Jeff and Abed were merged into one character. And shotgunned Buckfast before every scene.
For a second, the story looks like it’s over, but it wouldn’t be a Rick and Morty episode if it didn’t take a simple premise to an outrageous sci-fi extreme. Rick’s heist bot has been programmed to double cross people, so it double crosses Rick. It assembles its own crew out of everyone it can find with mind-controlling nanobots. It soon begins to heist entire planets. The only way Rick can see to stop it is with a counter-heist. One so completely stupid and random there’s no way the heist-bot could possibly be one step ahead of it. He assembles a completely random, incongruous group of people, including Mr. Poopybutthole. He’s a professor now! Oh, and Elon Tusk.
(via Adult Swim)
Man, of all the weekends to have an Elon Musk voice cameo… Did it really have to be right after he unveiled a truck that looks like it fell out of Destruction Derby 64? The one with the shockingly fragile “unbreakable” windows? While reports of safety violations inside his plants keep popping up every few months? And an administrative judge ruled that Musk’s union-busting activities violated federal labor laws just two months ago? And he’s facing a lawsuit for calling the diver who saved a bunch of kids trapped in a cave a “pedo”? The point is Elon Musk sucks, and his presence here really put a damper on my enjoyment of the episode. Especially since the most biting critique Rick can offer is that our universe’s Musk doesn’t work well with others. Oh ho. You sure got him there.
Fortunately, he doesn’t have a ton of lines, and you can just kind of ignore him. What follows is a series of incongruous images where each member of the team does something silly and wholly unrelated to the task at hand. It’s a funny and generally accurate representation of the last 20 minutes of any heist movie. In the end, they all scoot into the Heist Robot’s lair like dogs dragging their butts on carpet. The Heist robot says he’s been expecting him, and Rick reveals he’d programmed him to say that and switched the Heist bot’s processor with the Chaos bot’s at the beginning. The heist bot explodes, and the Chaos-bot-but-actually-Heist-bot shows up initiating a slow clap sequence. It’s all so stupid and needlessly complicated and that’s kind of the point.
(Via Adult Swim)
A big part of Rick and Morty’s charm comes from how it drags familiar concepts out to their logical conclusions and then takes them even further. Usually, it’s hilarious and endearingly weird. Here, it kind of backfired on them. When Rick and his robot are arguing over who was actually one step ahead of whom, it’s funny at first. Then it keeps going. There’s even a “two hours later” joke. The show doesn’t do anything new with the joke, it’s just a “two hours later” joke. The argument itself was funny, but at this point the show has been telling the same heist joke for 15 minutes straight. It’s gotten old. I realize that’s part of it. It’s meant to show how tedious the explaining-the-heist part of this kind of story is. But pointing out that it’s tedious doesn’t stop it from being tedious. And if the best joke you can come up with is that the two people arguing get caught in a feedback loop for two hours? That doesn’t make up for the fact that you did the thing you’re complaining about.
This episode wasn’t a high point for Rick and Morty, but it’s nowhere near a series low either. For the most part, the jokes landed. This was a thoroughly funny episode, and that’s really all Rick and Morty needs to be. Not every week needs to bring us a grand revelation in animated comedy storytelling. The only problem is, this episode had one thing to say and nothing else. As a result, the jokes lost their bite towards the end.
The ending was worth it, though. Morty, whose been working on a heist screenplay all episode is revealed to have scored a meeting with Netflix. Rick acts all supportive and makes sure he gets there on time. In the middle of his pitch, Morty realizes how stupid the idea sounds and becomes disillusioned with his own screenplay. Turns out, that was the plan all along. Beth had forbidden Rick from interfering in Morty’s dreams. If he stopped pursuing them, it would have to be a result of his own disillusionment. Rick set this whole thing up so Morty would realize how dumb heists are. It’s the greatest heist of all. It’s the dumbest ending, and I love it so much.
Rick and Morty airs Sundays at 11:30 p.m. on Adult Swim
Previously on Rick and Morty:
- Rick and Morty Season 4 Episode 2 recap
- Rick and Morty Season 4 Premiere recap
- Rick and Morty Season 3 Finale recap
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