Warning: this review contains full spoilers for Rick and Morty: Season 4, Episode 6! If you’d prefer to avoid spoilers, you can watch our spoiler-free video review in the player above. And if you need a refresher on where we left off, here’s our review for Season 4, Episode 5.
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Arguably the greatest challenge any new season of Rick and Morty faces is figuring out how to top Season 1’s “Rixty Minutes.” That was the episode that introduced Interdimensional Cable – a surreal, stream of consciousness anthology format as only this series could deliver. The problem is that there’s always been a case of diminishing returns with that format. No matter how self-aware it was, Season 2’s “Interdimensional Cable 2: Tempting Fate” could never quite escape its predecessor’s shadow. Season 3’s “Morty’s Mind Blowers” shook up the formula even more, but it still wasn’t one of that season’s best.
Finally, with the return of Season 4 and the debut of “Never Ricking Morty,” the series has finally found a way to make the anthology format feel fresh again. And all it took was a heavy dose of outside the box thinking.
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This episode kicks off with a group of characters reminiscing about their encounters with Rick Sanchez and grows progressively weirder and more unpredictable from there. It may be an animated sitcom, but Rick and Morty specializes in high-concept science fiction storytelling. This episode is a testament to that, with a ridiculous plot that continuously seeks to subvert expectations and achieve ever greater heights of absurdity. Once “Never Ricking Morty” slows down long enough for readers to catch their bearings, we learn that Rick and Morty are trapped aboard a literal plot device that transforms ideas into anthology vignettes.
As in “Interdimensional Cable 2,” the writing constantly winks and nods at viewers as the episode repeats familiar tropes and revisits familiar elements from episodes past. But where that self-awareness was never quite enough to keep things fresh back then, “Never Ricking Morty” is much more successful at rehashing the past while also taking risks and exploring new angles. Even the vignettes that involve dusting off familiar bits from older episodes find ways of pushing the humor in wacky new directions. What begins as a rehash of the Roy: A Life Well Lived gag morphs into a hilariously grotesque look at what happens when a dying man is caught between two worlds. Another big moment actually shows us the grand showdown with Evil Morty that’s been brewing since Season 3. The fact that we catch a glimpse of that conflict here probably means that when the real thing arrives (assuming it ever actually does), it’s not going to be anything like we imagined.
It helps that this episode is only partly married to its anthology premise. Even as it veers on all sorts of random and bizarre tangents, it still tells an actual story with Rick and Morty at its center. It takes a while for that story to actually start making sense, but that’s part of the fun. Few episodes are quite so skilled at keeping viewers constantly off-balance yet fully invested in the narrative. And along the way, this episode is sure to spawn at least a couple enduring hashtags on the order of #PickleRick, one of which involves “Tickets, Please” Guy’s well-toned abs.
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Even if it is one of the series’ better anthology episodes, “Never Ricking Morty” isn’t quite a flawless in its execution. In its efforts to repeatedly top itself and keep viewers guessing until the closing credits, this episode does stumble a bit near the end. The multi-layered narrative winds up going one or two steps deeper than necessary. While Story Lord makes for a fun, logic-defying villain and the rare foe actually mentally up to par with Rick, the ultimate reveal that the whole episode was just a tiny conflict playing out unseen within Morty’s new toy train set is disappointing. The conclusion attempts to flip the script once more and doesn’t quite connect as a result. Still, this isn’t a bad way to welcome the series back to the airwaves.
Source: IGN.com Rick and Morty: Season 4, Episode 6 Review