Television Review - Rick and Morty: Season 5 Episode 3

Spoilers Ahead

Typically when Rick and Morty allows itself to explore its characters’ emotions, it hits the mark with truly poignant accuracy. However, this week’s episode was the biggest miss since the time Morty got a Dragon, marking the first time an episode of Rick and Morty left me a little bored. A Rickconvenient Mort, attempts to provide us with an episode whose emphasis is on character. What should have been a breath of fresh air for the show unfortunately fails to give us the cathartic character growth it tried to find.

Throughout the episode, Morty develops a loving relationship with the super powered and eco-conscious Planetina (Alison Brie), a character modelled closely on Captain Planet. Where it isn’t unusual for Rick and Morty to have parody characters such as this, there is usually an attempt to provide them with their own mythos. The Vindicators in Season 3 may have been based off of The Avengers, but they weren’t The Avengers. Planetina on the other hand is Captain Planet and if you don’t know who that is, then this falls very flat. While her “Kids” being a bunch of money hungry monsters in their forties was a fairly interesting subversion, there just weren’t enough ideas nor jokes to get us through this paper-thin parody smoothly.

The most enjoyable scene of the entire episode is where Morty was given an opportunity to demonstrate just how capable he is of being a violent monster when pushed. Thinking fast and using the tools at his disposal against Planetina’s kids was admittedly delightful. However, its extreme violence only serves to undercut the legitimacy of the episode’s emotional climax.

Morty’s horror at Planetina for murdering a group of miners, whom she deems to be hurting the planet, is what ultimately ends their relationship. This would make more sense if Morty hadn’t also violently murdered hundreds of Dog People for no good reason just two episodes ago. Finding Planetina’s actions so reprehensible that he can no longer be with her, makes no logical sense for his character, leaving Morty’s character arc feeling totally unearned. Despite this, some credit should be paid towards Justin Roiland’s performance as Morty who has never been as emotive as he is in this episode.

Arguably worse than this was Rick and Summer hopping from alien orgy to alien orgy, between three planets each facing a different kind of apocalypse. Where Rick and Morty has always danced the line between highbrow and lowbrow with grace, this storyline flopped squarely into lowbrow. This wouldn’t be an issue at all if it was also funny but it very rarely was, it was instead practically groan inducing as it stooped to levels far below its usual standard for comedy. Though it was nice to see Summer given an episode to flourish, delivering some of the funnier lines and ending an entire apocalypse out of spite. It is refreshing to see an episode where Summer outshines both Rick and Morty, it was just unfortunate that the episode in question was so bland.