Last night's episode of Rick and Morty finally returned to the Rick Prime subplot, but also brought Evil Morty back into play. In "Unmortricken," we watched as Rick C-137 finally tracked down the version of him who killed his wife before he proceeded to violently and savagely beat his foe to death.
It's one of the most harrowing and violent moments in the show's history and, as the episode ends, Evil Morty leaves with a device capable of killing every version of someone in existence (he'll only use it if he's not left alone). As for Rick, he now has to figure out where he goes from here.
Talking to Variety, Rick and Morty co-creator Dan Harmon addressed the decision to finally revisit - and resolve - this plot thread after it was last touched on in the season 6 premiere.
"I think now it can be said that there’s been so much turbulence going on behind the scenes that Season 6 kind of represented me [unplugging] those wires from my heart and my obsessive brain," he says. "I had to look at the show as a job."
As for the decision to let Evil Morty escape with the Omega device, Harmon believes Rick "basically gave a leash that’s around his neck to someone that isn’t him, because he’s more invested consciously in the destruction of himself. I think that’s both tragic and also, writers and drunks like me consider that kind of noble and interesting - the commitment to self-destruction."
When it comes to Rick Prime's demise, the co-creator doesn't view that as the end. "I think there’s still a conclusion to a story here," he argues, "because the narcissist will tell you that destroying yourself, it doesn’t solve a problem."
"This is how far we’ve come with Rick’s journey. He is now the one who is existentially isolated. He is the one that doesn’t feel like he fits in the universe around him. Which puts him on the same level as a 14-year-old boy learning there’s multiple universes 10 show-years earlier."
Showrunner Scott Marder agrees with that assessment and points out that, "[The] episode would have been a series finale on a lot of shows, and I liked that it was just an episode in the middle of one of our seasons. We move at a really crazy pace."
"What do you do if you’re Braveheart and you’ve been avenging your dead wife and succeed and don’t die, and then live beyond it?" he wonders. "Where’s your story go when that’s all that’s defined you?"
These are all very compelling points and where Rick and Morty goes from here promises to be fascinating. However, for Harmon, the end of Rick C-137's mission isn't something he views as a problem for a show which only occasionally tackles serialised storytelling.
"This show, the least of its concerns is wearing out its canonical credit card," he says, likely alluding to Justin Roiland's firing. "If the show was going to be destroyed, it would have been destroyed by any of the other Godzilla-sized problems that have happened to it, including pandemics, writers’ strikes, and other things."
What did you think about Rick and Morty's latest episode?