There are few shows that carry quite as much meta baggage as Rick and Morty.
The show’s excellence, and escalating fervor of its fandom and critical attention, reached a level of noisy online chatter surpassed only by even bigger global sensations like Game of Thrones.
Season 4’s response was to double down on the show’s natural tendency toward meta-commentary, embedding the creators’ anxieties about the show’s identity into the episodes.
Whether or not the creators took this general consensus about Season 4’s disappointments to heart, what does seem clear is that Rick and Morty Season 5 is done getting in the mud with us.
While the premiere does start in medias res, with Morty fighting to save the duo from some interdimensional threat or another, it isn’t a plot carried over from the last season — as some of the show’s most popular premieres have been in the past.
While more subtle than Season 4’s overt meta-commentary, the symbolic message to viewers reads loud and clear.
Another internal battle debated among critics and fans revolved around whether or not the show was still properly balancing its own headassery with enough humor, or too often belaboring highfalutin concepts and/or emotional character arcs that lost the pure comedy of it all.
But these more ambitious long-term arcs are kept as added background texture, while the full focus of the episode remains on a self-contained and joyfully non-sequitur plot that packs a whole season’s worth of emotional stakes into 22 minutes.
A greater division between the show’s world and ours feels like the right move to serve the longevity of Rick and Morty’s quality and timelessness.
The Season 5 premiere is one of the most laugh-out-loud funny episodes I can remember in recent show history, with the infectious and unfettered joy of creators that have liberated themselves.
All of that comes with less encouragement to read between the lines, though — removing the promise that rewatches will reveal more about what the writers and characters are thinking about or wrestling with.