Rick And Morty's Game-Changing New Episode Brings Us Back To Season 1's Darkest Ending
Say what you will about the later seasons of "Rick and Morty," but when it's time for a big lore-heavy episode, they always deliver. So goes "Unmortricken," last night's mid-season episode that unexpectedly tied up multiple series-long questions within a standard 21-minute run time. The episode didn't just wrap up the storyline with Rick Prime — something they've been hinting at as early as the season 3 premiere — but it brought back Evil Morty, a character we've only gotten in little bits and pieces throughout the first five seasons. This all could've easily felt overstuffed, but somehow the pacing felt just right.
Well, mostly: One small issue with this episode is how it feels like it came a little too soon. The season 6 finale hinted at a whole season-long, serialized storyline about Rick going up against Rick Prime. While it's perfectly in character for the show to stick to its more episodic approach, it does admittedly feel like a let-down to have the whole thing wrapped up so quickly. But "Rick and Morty" doesn't just acknowledge this critique; it wraps it into Rick's character arc. Rick throughout the past half-season has been surprisingly driven, thanks to him regaining a proper sense of purpose after returning to his revenge quest on his mortal enemy. But now that purpose is gone. He's gotten revenge on the man he's spent most of his life wanting to kill, and sooner than he expected, too. So, now what?
A needledrop with a lot of weight to it
Rick doesn't have an answer to that question. The version of him we see in the episode's final moments is completely quiet, lost, and disconnected from the world around him. Everyone else in the Smith household seems to be having a great time, but Rick's incapable of staying present. He's too wrapped up in what just happened, seemingly incapable of coping with the idea that he might not have any purpose left.
Throughout this montage, we hear Mazzy Star's song, "Look On Down From the Bridge," with all the characters' dialogue cut silent. The result is a scene that serves as a blunt parallel to the season 1 episode, "Rick Potion #9," where a stunned Morty walks around his new home, shell-shocked, still struggling to accept the massive events of that week's episode.
Morty's reasons for being upset back then were pretty straightforward. The episode had him accidentally kill nearly everyone in his original reality, so he and Rick had to go to a new reality and bury the corpses of their original selves. It would be a traumatizing experience for anyone; the fact that everything goes back to normal afterward might seem like it'd help, but all it does is reinforce how meaningless his world is. If the horrors Morty's witnessed throughout the episode could be so easily swept under the rug and left behind them, if everyone Morty's ever known can be replaced with near-exact copies that easily, then what's the point of anything? Rick's often maintained throughout the series that nothing matters, but this is the first time Morty has truly been forced to take that message to heart.
Disorientated, but in a different way
By the start of the show, Rick had long since accepted the inherent meaninglessness of the universe. He's not one to be thrown off by the reminder that there are infinite copies of himself and his family, so in "Rick Potion #9" he's chilling and watching TV with Summer while Morty's off having an existential crisis. But six seasons later the tables have turned. Morty is fine in this story's aftermath, whereas Rick is the one questioning everything. He's spent his whole life searching for revenge, and that revenge turned out to be hollow and anti-climactic. Now he's stuck wondering what could've been if he'd let it all go sooner if he'd put it behind him before he let it destroy so much of his life.
This is all shown beautifully in the episode's post-credits sequence, where the wife of the recently-murdered Slow Mobius goes on her own quest for revenge. But unlike Rick, she finds another person in a similar situation, falls in love, and finds a peaceful life with him instead. Rick doesn't witness any of this, of course, but it's the question that's undoubtedly going through his mind. What if he'd been able to just let it go? How much of his misery over the years could've been avoided if he did?
It's with those final few moments that we realize why this episode aired so early in the season. Season 7 will not be about fighting Rick Prime, but about Rick finding his purpose outside of Rick Prime. At least that's certainly what we hope the rest of the season will be about; it's scary to think where Rick might go if he can't find a new purpose soon.