I most love Rick and Morty for being unafraid to go dark and intense, but another of its strengths is its ability to juggle tones and to know when to ease off and just do a bunch of funny-ass, sci-fi bullshit. “Ricksy Business” demonstrates an awareness that you don’t want to go out on a down note so it’s pretty much a gleeful hodgepodge of funny-ass, sci-fi bullshit. The plot actually hews pretty close to those eighties movies and ridiculous sitcoms of yore, like Growing Pains or whatever. Morty is the square, constantly worried his parents are going to kill all of them and therefore not enjoying the party but instead policing everyone and cleaning up after their messes. Summer stays wrapped up in her concerns about becoming more popular. And Rick is a partying force of nature, getting wriggedy-wrecked and trying to get Morty to relax and enjoy himself. And just like those sitcoms and movies, everyone even kind of learns some lessons at the end of it all. What separates it from that stuff is that Rick and Morty is a sci-fi show that embraces its open-ended multiverse concept with relentless gusto, so what makes “Ricksy Business” so great is how much fun the writers and animators had with all of Rick’s guests. There’s Squanchy, a weird little cat sort of guy who talks about squanching all the time. Gear Head has turning gears all over his face and body and loves droning on about the Gear Wars to anyone who will listen. Bird Person (who I’m pretty positive is voiced by co-creator Dan Harmon) talks in a slow monotone, but is consistently hilarious (not to mention full of wisdom). And last but not least, there’s Rick’s creation, Abradolf Lincler, a being created from the spliced DNA of Abraham Lincoln and Adolf Hitler that Rick thought would result in a morally-neutral super-leader, but instead just “adds up to a lame, weird loser.” The plot in “Ricksy Business” is almost the total opposite of last week’s episode. “Close Rick-counters of the Rick Kind” was a tightly-controlled piece of narrative brilliance. The various narrative pieces here don’t go anywhere that exciting. Summer’s plot isn’t hugely developed. Morty gets to briefly try the moves on his crush, Jessica, but it doesn’t go much of anywhere. Rick just acts drunk and high (though this results in “The Rick Dance” which I enjoyed enough and can already tell I’ll have to appreciate at least somewhat if I want to remain a card-carrying member of the Rick and Morty fan club). It’s less about the story and more about throwing ridiculous sci-fi thing after thing at us, making for a sort of a quantity over quality episode. But that’s not really accurate because all the sci-fi stuff is pretty quality. The one-off characters are loads of absurd fun and there are a number of fantastic one-liners (“glip-glops” is “like the n-word and the c-word had a baby and it was raised by all the bad words for Jews.”). Like us on Facebook and follow us on Twitter for all news updates related to the world of geek. And Google+, if that’s your thing!
