We were off to a great start with Rick and Morty last week, and S6E2 “Rick: A
Mort Well Lived” absolutely continues that momentum with an episode that
seems to point at a season that will be striking a more delicate balance
between the elements that have divided some fans. It’s a fun, creative and
thematically interesting episode.
“Rick: A Mort Well Lived” opens with a shopowner berating a group of
teenagers…and they all sound exactly like Morty, with generic shopowner and
teenage dialogue. It turns out that the reason for that is during a session
of the virtual reality game Roy: A Life Well Lived at the Dave & Buster’s-
style Blips and Chitz, the arcade was taken over by terrorists, causing the
game to split Morty into every single non-playable character in the game.
Rick has jacked in as Roy, the player character, to rescue his grandson and
the billions of splintered pieces of his psyche scattered across the game.
Outside of the game, Summer is tasked with facing off against the terrorists,
e.g. “Doing a Die Hard.” Part of the joke here is that Die Hard is such a
established touchstone of action movies, every universe has their own Die
Hard with the same plot. As Summer does her Die Hard, the terrorists, having
seen Die Hard, think they know what to expect. But Summer, having not seen
Die Hard, is improvising, which is even more Die Hard than the Die Hard the
terrorists are expecting her to do. Shortly after, the terrorist leader
surmises that Summer hates Die Hard, making her “The ultimate McClane.”
“Rick: A Mort Well Lived” is a very fun episode, both in how it pokes fun at
Die Hard as well as in how it frames Rick’s mission: the five billion Mortys
in the game are treating Rick’s attempts to save them as a metaphor, and see
Rick as forming a cult. Soon, the Mortys are styling their hair and dressing
like Morty, singing Rick’s praise in song. Rick becomes progressively more
exasperated as he tries to explain that, yes, while he is delivering a
message, and yes, they all must ascend to higher plane for their salvation,
he is _not_ starting a cult.
And yet, Rick basically _is_ forming a cult, trying to gather as many Mortys
as he can to fly them all out to the edge of the game map and reset the game,
saving Morty–yet he is content to leave behind 8% of the Mortys, those that
don’t trust Rick. Marta, who is Rick’s right-hand Morty in the game, comes to
understand that the 8% of those Mortys are the part of real-world Morty that
doesn’t trust Rick—who resents that Rick seems unable to express love and
affection for his grandkid, and who is only doing this to continue to use
Morty as cannon fodder for his misadventures.
Due to time dilation, minutes in the real world equates to months and years
in the game, so as Summer does her Die Hard, Rick and Morty(s) are
participating in a decades-long holy war between the Mortys that want to
escape the game, and those that want to remain there, not trusting Rick and
living their lives. Marta has broken her alliance with Rick, but the latter
still waffles between trying his hardest to save Morty and resisting any
semblance of actual affection for his grandson.
Marta sends all of the Mortys back with Rick, on “one condition.” This
condition is revealed a couple of minutes later, when all is said and done, a
revived Morty cheerfully tells Rick that he trusts him implicitly. Summer
picks up on this, but Rick brushes it off, saying that he got “every last
piece” out of the game. He glances back at the machine, and in the next scene
we hear that “some rich douche” paid for the game to keep running—allowing
Marta to live out her life in the simulation. So did Rick do this out of
charity to that slice of his grandson, or did he take the opportunity to
stifle a part of Morty’s resistance to him? I’m inclined to think that it’s a
bit of both, but probably much more the latter, as earlier in the episode
Rick cryptically responds to a couple of Marta’s comments as “going to be
real funny when we get out.”
Another thing I thought was really great in this episode is how a lot of the
characters are framed in such a way that they could only come from a kid,
such as a Morty military officer mentioning a non-specific “overseas war” or
certain visual elements shown in such a way as to be drawn from the
imagination of a 14-year old who isn’t exactly savvy with geography and news.
Other good bits: Morty military officers invading the cult for them “Being
religious the wrong way,” Rick spitefully calling out the expendability of 8%
by stating “8% of the Snyder Cut was Batman dreaming,” and the absolute
multitude of callbacks to Die Hard both obvious and sly (including a mid-
credits sequence referencing the TV edit of McClane’s body sign in the third
movie).
Just two episodes in, this is already an extremely promising season of Rick
and Morty. It will be interesting to see, given the apparent commitment to
more continuity this time around, how much of the consequences of the events
so far will affect the following episodes. With Morty much more subservient
to Rick now that his cautious, distrustful side has been banished to the
game, how is that going to affect their dynamic now? Will the show find new
ways to foster suspicion in his grandfather, or will this push him further
towards what Rick is? We’ll find out in the coming weeks.