Another season of Rick and Morty has gone by, but not as quietly as usual. Just recently, headlines went up over Rick and Morty fans acting like spoiled children over novelty Mulan sauce McDonald’s brought back, including videos of people jumping on counters and screaming that they didn’t get the mediocre fast food slime. For those unaware, the season three premiere made a joke by showing that Rick was obsessed with a forgettable movie tie-in sauce from the late 90s called schezwan sauce. It did not take long for McDonald’s to seize on the joke for some publicity and eventually had a one day special with the stuff – and it was a disaster of untold proportions.
It’s even more bizarre when you remember the point of season three seemed to entirely be “Rick is wrong.”
Season two started to shape the show’s identity in full, really going into nihilist thought, and as a friend pointed out to me, some materialist ideas. The nihilism is fairly obvious, but the materialist ideas stem from that and Rick’s view of reality. Materialism is a view of reality that places the physical first, not the conceptual. All comes from material and it forms the consciousness. Everything is simple and comes with hard rules that can never be broken. Rick says he has infinite families and infinite replacements due to the existence of infinite time lines, there’s nothing special about anyone because they’re all existing in an infinite manner and just living out slightly different possibilities. It can all be easily explained, and there is nothing special about the majority of people. However, Rick doesn’t fit that equation. As he stated in season one, he is the “Rickest Rick,” the one Rick who refuses to conform to the citadel society the other Ricks have carved out. What’s more accurate is not that Rick is correct in that everything is infinite and therefore not special nor matters, but that Rick is making this truth by acting as a ubermensch.
The ubermensch is a nihilist idea thought up by the philosophy’s founder Friedrich Nietzsche, and probably the most misunderstood concept in nihilist philosophy. Thanks to racist monsters making their own reading of his work the most known version, the ubermensch is commonly associated with Hitler’s idiotic ideal of a perfect white man. In reality, the concept of the ubermensch is someone who will take the place of god in creating ideals for humanity to follow, creating new values that affirm life and creativity. The full concept is more vague, suggesting it could be a collective point of enlightenment, but the single person view is more common and also not outright tossed out in Nietzsche’s words, at least as far as I have seen (feel free to discuss nihilist philosophy in the comments on this article about the cartoon show with the pickle rat corpse gundam). It’s a far-fetched idea, since this idea could fit a lot of famous people throughout history and none have had such a level of impact, but Rick Sanchez is a surprisingly solid idea for what a real ubermensch might be.
Selfish, contradictory, and short sighted.
Season three practically makes all this text by the first episode, which starts with the new status quo set up at last season’s finale, only for Rick to rip it to shreds and make his own. It follows Rick playing the government bugs that he surrendered to with a fake origin story, then coming to destroy both the galactic government and the citadel of Ricks, who tried to assassinate him and kidnapped his grand kids. He is set up as the so called ubermensch that writes what is right and wrong, rejecting the rule of his other doppelgangers and the meritocracy of the galactic government, replacing it with a different peace where he rules over his family after pressuring Beth to pursue divorce. He even says as much to Morty, and Morty refers to him not as a hero but “a demon, or some kind of fucked up god.” Rick makes everything you think right wrong and vice versa, he does not do good but rewrites norms to a despaired gray. Rick does nothing to enrich or uplift, he only drags people down with him, or removes them from his world outright. Well, most of the time.
What makes Rick right in some twisted way is that he shows people uncomfortable truths they don’t want to confront. He does this to the Vindicators, superhero parody characters whom he ends up killing in a drunken black out via complicated games and traps. Well, until the last three. By that point, the remaining characters have their own baggage spill out, worsened by the stress they’re under, and they start killing each other until only one is left alive. He does this to pretty much the entire family in one way or another, explaining to Jerry how he’s a predator who uses pity to manipulate people, and showing Beth that he’s not the saint she trick herself into believing he is – and she may not be that different. Morty has been getting this treatment for a long time, while Summer gets this in the season’s second episode as Rick manipulates a situation so she realizes that her nihilistic attitude …is wrong.
Yes, really. That episode has Rick, Morty, and Summer take a trip to a post-apocalypse world, where Summer blends right in as she embraces nihilism to its fullest, even dating a man with a similar outlook and similar insecurities about their self-obsession and need for validation. It’s when Rick introduces modern life to the world that everyone becomes too comfortable to bother with the lifestyle anymore and Summer is forced to deal with her own baggage she’s trying to run from by adopting Rick’s outlook in her own way. Rick’s justification is to avoid extra work trying to make robot duplicates, but we later find out at season’s end that he can just create clones. So, why would Rick actually try to help these versions of his grand kids so bad if he has an infinite amount of them through different timelines and can clone them so easily? Why didn’t he clone them?
Rick states that he sees the universe as something that creates “normal people” simply to devour them, his explanation for tragedy and cruelty that permutes natural law and behavior of living organisms. He views intelligence as the only way to break this cycle. You’re doomed to lose in the end, but you can ride the monster before it bucks you off. This is what Rick wants to believe, it’s not actually what he knows as the truth. That’s where the toxicity episode comes into play.
After a particularly insane adventure, Rick and Morty go to an alien spa and use a de-toxifier, which removes the toxic elements of their personality. However, the machine removes toxic elements based on what the person’s idea of what toxicity is. This results in Rick losing his passion, ego, and most importantly, his “irrational attachments.” The “healthy” Rick is the ideal version of himself based on his beliefs. He’s smart enough to just genuinely enjoy life without losing himself to his obsessions, and he can properly exercise moral decision making. He actually takes responsibility for his actions. The toxic Rick is where some of Rick’s worst qualities went, but also Rick’s single best quality that occasionally rears its head: His love for his family. Without that, a “healthy” Rick has no real attachment to the world, showing this by calling toxic Rick’s bluff by shooting his toxic Morty to force him to merge back.
The pickle Rick episode is also notable for showing the massive downside to Rick’s way of life we rarely see. He completely transforms his body, nearly dying in the process, to get out of having to go to therapy. In the end, he goes, partly to get the antidote Beth took, but also because a part of his realizes he needs to take responsibility for his actions and to keep the bonds he’s managed to form. He meets a man who lost his daughter, and despite his ever tired argument of infinite timelines and infinite daughters, he decides not to burn the bridge with his daughter in this timeline. We also get the therapist’s speech here, lining out something fundamentally important and delivering a major part of the season’s thesis. Rick is intelligent, but he is sick and unwilling to put in the work to get better. He nearly killed himself just to avoid one small responsibility, and the one concept he can’t quite get is that he is the master of his own mind. His adventures and experiments are partly a way to escape having to try and put the work in to be better, and while he doesn’t end up going to therapy, he is affected by these words and starts trying to reach out a little to his family. He even seems to have some minor attachment to Jerry (very, very minor, mind you).
Rick is a character defined by intelligence, but also his stunted emotions. He doesn’t really understand himself, and much of his life has been trying to avoid that because he sees emotion as weakness and doesn’t want to see his own flaws. He doesn’t want to make decisions based on feeling, because he knows how wrong that can go. His specialty is manipulating people by their emotional reasoning. However, completely closing himself off has left him bitter and alone, and for possibly the first time in his life in a very long time, he’s seeing something he’s truly wanted and can have it, but refuses to admit or accept it for a good while.
And that is his main flaw, the one that lets two different Mortys bring the world of Ricks down.
Season three is notable not just for taking Rick down a peg and developing the rest of the family, but for also showing just how much Morty has grown into his own, and how dangerous that is to Rick’s established world. The season three opening episode really brings this home, as Morty, having seen Rick destroy entire worlds, shows Summer just exactly how bad Rick is, and how he’s contextualizing all the mind blowing things he’s seen. There’s even an entire episode where we go through some particularly traumatic moments Morty has had that Rick removed from his memory and stores in his lab.
Titled Morty’s Mindblowers, the episode starts as a clipshow replacement of Intergalactic Cable from the last two seasons, up until Morty starts noticing that there seems to be a pattern in the colors of the memory tubes. Upon seeing a memory where Rick made him forget a moment where Rick made a minor vocabulary error, Morty realizes that Rick has been stealing memories from him to save him any possible embarrassment or show of shortcomings. That moment is the clearest example of Rick’s fragile ego, with the Beth episode cementing Rick’s genuine affection for his family. Those two elements put together ultimately makes Rick an abusive presence, something past seasons have toyed around with, and it’s only after the therapist speech that Rick starts having some awareness of this and starts making small steps towards fixing this so he can have relationships that don’t hurt those he cares for. Basically, he doesn’t want to treat his family like he treated Unity from season two. Every one of the Smith clan has moments like these this season, becoming aware of their faults and showing signs that they can be better people despite them, but it takes both Rick and Morty to help the others get there. Rick’s improvement could even argued to be connected to Morty’s influence.
As season one stated, if this Rick is the Rickist Rick, then his Morty would be the Mortiest Morty, and it really shows this season. Morty has grown dramatically as a person, seeing everyone in his family for who they really are, and loving them anyways. During the Mad Max future episode, Morty comes to terms to why his family broke up and why his dad isn’t seriously fighting to get back with Beth, and he reaches a sort of peace over how Jerry chooses to live his life. When Beth, obsessed with proving herself, ends up hurting Summer by trying to figure out how to use a size ray, it’s Morty who helps her realize how much her abandonment and insecurity complexes are hurting those she cares about, getting the two to make up. Despite his endless issues with Rick, he still goes on adventures with him, and even starts to talk to him as an equal. When Rick goes over the edge and has a feud with the president, Morty is smart enough to know he doesn’t have to be involved in any of it.
If Rick is an ubermensch of nihilism and materialism, Morty is one of humanism and idealism. Rick values the ability to stand above others, to see the grim truth of reality and enjoy it as he sees fit in the moment, seeing the basic mechanics and using that as an argument against emotional attachments and normalcy. Morty, on the other hand, genuinely connects with people, and it’s where he seems the most fulfilled. It’s also how he learns more about himself and grows as a person. He can see the good and bad in most everyone he meets pretty quickly, with exception to the Vindicators. Morty’s major fault is that his idealistic side wants more defined lines between good an evil, but Rick constantly rips those to shreds. He understands that Rick had points in that situation, but also hates that because Rick being right helps nobody, it just tends to make people as miserable as him.
Humanism is a philosophy that isn’t an opposite of nihilism, but more like a positive reflection of it. Humanism values humanity, individual and at large, looking towards science and reason for our ability to grow collectively as a species. Morty has a lot of this way of thinking in him, valuing what Rick can do with his intelligence, but also identifying that Rick’s nihilistic beliefs aren’t something to be celebrated. Idealism, on the other hand, is the opposite of materialism, finding more value in the mental as the core of what shapes our reality. It even connects back to sociology, examining and valuing how belief can shape people. Morty isn’t all sunshine and rainbows, not by a long shot, but he shows a remarkable understanding of how people think and why they think the way they do, even picking up on the faults of the Vindicators before everything goes overboard and simply wanting them to not be defined primarily by those faults. He pegs down the issues among his family, deduces why there’s emotional distance between him and Jessica, and he’s the first to question Rick for reasons beyond prideful spite. Even if there are infinite timelines, Morty understands the people he’s with now are not the same as any other versions of those same people.
Both Rick and Morty manage to prod at their family and help them grow into their own self-actualized selves. Summer has had the most development over three seasons, initially shown a greater cosmic truth by Morty when he was still on board with Rick’s nihilism, then forced to question herself by both of them in season three as she’s shown by Morty who Rick really is, then placed in that aforementioned scenario by Rick and forced to question her own desire to be nihilistic and free. Beth is shown her darker side by Rick, but also shown her potential to do amazing things with her intelligence, while Morty helps her realize how important her family is to her and how much she values those bonds. Jerry is forced to confront his pathetic habit of manipulating people with pity by Rick, then pushed by both Morty and Summer to admit to more of his faults and start working on them. There is values in the philosophies both represent – but it’s Morty who comes out on top as the soul of the family.
Rick’s philosophy can never really leave him fulfilled, as it actively ignores major and important parts of the human experience. While he won’t admit it due to stubborn pride, Rick knows this better than anyone. It’s why he stays in the finale when Jerry and Beth get back together instead of jumping to another timeline. It’s why he volunteers to help Beth take some time for herself and explore the universe. It’s why he goes back for Morty and Summer and even helps them out with the messy emotional states after the divorce. That desire for emotional connection is core to Rick’s character, obvious even in season one. He can’t fight it, no matter how hard he tries. Thus, it’s Morty that manages to rebind his family and change Rick, someone who was once seen as a deity who could reshape reality on a whim. He didn’t make clones because a part of him was never going to abandon his family, and he’s always been a tad aware of that attachment and never truly gave it up. Morty was the first person to really push at Rick’s beliefs just through showing his will and strength from his opposite beliefs.
But that doesn’t mean things will stay this way.
The dynamic is changed, but we have hints that Morty’s values have inherent issues. When he loses his self-loathing in the toxicity episode, Morty also loses his desire for emotional connection. He’s described as someone who could get bored being in a relationship, and it’s not an incorrect observation. He knows what people need to hear and how to help them be better than they currently are, but without that self-doubt, he becomes an eerily disconnected manipulator. He does still value right and wrong, but he no longer questions his own viewpoints and values, and that can be potentially dangerous – which we get to see played out in disturbing fashion with that other Morty.
The citadel episode is a very flawed one, mostly a white guy’s understanding of social conflicts played awkwardly with a bunch of Ricks and Mortys, but it does bring back a major villain from season one, the Morty who overtook his Rick. He had multiple Ricks killed across various timelines, using his Rick’s body like a mind-controlled puppet to hide himself, and integrated himself into citadel society. When our Rick destroyed the current order in the citadel, this Morty finally returned and ran for office, winning by manipulating the voting public. He understands what people needed to hear, and what the various self-centered Ricks surrounding him could never really consider. He’s a master of the social in a world that values the logical, and that gave him a massive leg up. Now he’s being set-up as a dictator, having his political enemies killed and preparing to change the dynamics on the citadel into something else, and most likely not what he was promising. He is the Morty with no heart, and he’s going to come back at some point.
The stage is set for season four. Rick no longer shapes things as he wills, now it’s his grandson and his understanding of people, not science, that guides things. Where is this all heading? It’s hard to say, but one thing is clear: Rick was wrong, and even he knows it. If only the fans realized that and stopped acting like angry children hopped up on coca-cola and gummy bears because of a joke on a cartoon with a character named “Mr. Poopybutthole.”
Bi The Dark Side 
loveddd, best analise of the show
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