Rick: A Mort Well Lived

The snappy, high-intensity dialogue of the first seasons is long gone, replaced by over-explaining everything and repeating the same joke over and over.

I do like the concept of the Roy subplot. It's creative and inventive, but execution is lacking. It gets too sentimental at times - it would be good if the writers weighed up the softer pieces with the more brutal humour that Rick and Morty is known for.

In the end, both the overall plot and the Roy subplot is painfully predictable and generic.

Some people wanted more Rick and Morty and they wanted it now. Unfortunately, the result is that the episodes are just not that special anymore.

In fact, they have been perfectly mediocre adult-cartoons.

Rick A Mort Well Lived is nothing that special in comparison to the episodes that came before it. I found it pretty boring throughout its run, especially the entire Die Hard subplot. It was sort of funny at first, but the joke gets old quick when you realize that's the entire subplot. The main plot with Roy was interesting at first, but didn't maintain its neat concept for long. I feel that there was a lot of story potential for a return to Roy, but it didn't work super well here. This episode was a large step down from last week's premiere and hopefully the next episode is better in terms of its premise and execution.

Back to its ol' recognizable self, I can't believe it. The torment of the past year is gone.

For most of the episodes up till now since Vat of Acid, the characters weren't like themselves at all for some reason, and the content of the episodes was too random, meaningless-seeming and disjointed, lacking intellectual content and emotional depth, not to mention not funny most of the time (even the first episode this season). I'm relieved it's finally back to how it was before with this episode, and I'm glad they seem to have payed no more attention to the fans and the internet now. I hope they continue doing that.

Thank you.

Like last week's episode, it's another Rick and Morty that I'm not sure I'd describe as being hilarious, but one running two plots, both of which have the seed of a good idea, but neither of which felt developed quite enough.

An off-world arcade is attacked by terrorists and the power disruption leaves Morty's (Justin Roiland) consciousness spread over the millions of non-playable characters in the game he was playing. Rick (Justin Roiland) goes in to convince these individuals of their true nature, but a divided Morty struggles to decide whether to believe him. Meanwhile Summer (Spencer Grammer) tries to foil the terrorists, led by an Alien Hans Gruber (Peter Dinklage) by doing a "Die Hard", except she hasn't seen the film.

The Rick and Morty story feels like it's ground we've covered before, with Morty struggling to decide whether Rick actually cares about him. There's a nice little moment in a late scene that suggests he does, more than he lets on. The "Die Hard" story has an excellent vocal performance from Dinklage, and some comedy from the rest of his group of Jar Jar-esque aliens. But it's central joke, about everyone acknowledging that their doing "Die Hard" is beaten to death pretty quickly, and lacking in an imaginative twist to elevate the premise

As I say, both these stories are decent enough ideas but neither felt quite fleshed out enough to me and neither of them produced enough laughs. I wouldn't go as far as to say that the edition was a failure, but it's a fairly underwhelming episode for a show that often aims, and hits, much higher.

My biggest gripe with the show over the past few seasons is that they almost always try to fit two storylines in a single episode and often have them tie in together at the end. That is very hard to do well in a 23 minute runtime. Both of the stories in this episode had potential (ESPECIALLY the 5 billion Mortys concept) but it felt rushed and barely developed since they kept cutting back to Summer.

Also, I don't know to put this into words very well but the spacing/timing of jokes and punchlines feels...off? Characters respond too quickly without letting a setup develop is the best way I could describe it.

Overall, this show is still entertaining but a fraction of what it was in seasons 1 and 2.