There's a new patriarch in Season 3 of Rick and Morty, and he's somehow less capable of dealing with human emotions than the radioactive mutants of Episode 2's Mad Maxuniverse.
It's telling that both Summer and Morty find more comfort in this nihilistic post-apocalypse than in their own toxic family environment back home.
The long-awaited and delayed season picks back upin media reswhere the premiere — released all the way back on April Fools' day to everyone's surprise — left off. We return to the dysfunctional Smith family as they reckon with the consequences of their biggest threat yet.
This time, though, it's much closer to home and harder to defeat than the Intergalactic Space Federation. 'Rickmancing the Stone' instead opens on a house divided by the monstrous acts of the evil puppet master known as grandpa Rick.
The overarching question this season's arc appears to ask is: What happens when a mad scientist with no moral compass takes over, in his own words, as "the defacto patriarch of your family and universe?"
Spoiler alert: It isn't a talk therapy session. But it's the warped Rick and Mortyversion of it.
SEE ALSO:Rick Sanchez's series arc fulfilled: McDonald's appears to be bringing back Szechuan sauceHovering awkwardly at the garage door with a moving truck behind him, disgraced father Jerry Smith asks for permission to say goodbye to his own children. Rick begrudgingly allows it, but warns him to do so from the driveway since "the killbots are live and I took you off the whitelist."
Morty, clearly racked with guilt at knowing the role he played in his grandpa Rick's takeover, tries to console his father with meek promises of weekend visits.
Meanwhile, an unburdened Summer conceals her murderous rage behind the facade of being, like, totally whatever about this whole divorce thing. She begs her grandpa for an excuse to leave, before disappearing with him into a portal without looking back at her pathetic father.
The three unhappy musketeers quickly find themselves in a desert car chase to find the super potent Isotope 322. Morty, too much Jerry and not enough Rick, can't seem to shoot straight. Summer, channeling her inner Furiosa and grandpa Rick, assimilates to the brutality with ease.
In fact, their trip into the hyper-masculine Mad Maxuniverse proves to be the perfect battleground for both kids to work out their issues with the flawed male role models in their lives.
After Summer annihilates the car of Fury Road's supervillain, Immortan Joe, he drags his legless body across the desert. "Kill me," he begs her. "Ok," she sighs, shooting him execution-style. "But not because you told me to."
But shotgunning her issues with patriarchal figures in the face isn't enough to keep Summer from seeking male approval wherever else she can find it. Rick shows genuine (if fleeting) respect for her total lack of concern for her own life and wellbeing.
Then a new masculine ideal quickly swoops in to replace her father and constant need for validation. She goes rogue, running off with her new apocalypse boy crush and leader of the Deathstalker gang, Hemorrhage.
In the midst of their blood-soaked scavenging date, Hemorrhage shows a brief moment of vulnerability. Touching the smiling face of a young boy on a billboard, he remembers who he was before the “Boom Booms” mutated him and his world.
SEE ALSO:'Rick and Morty' Season 3 finally, finally gets a release date and a new trailerSummer looks down at the billboard's scene of a happy-go-lucky family. “Wanna piss on him?” she asks, essentially uttering the "you had me at hello" moment of her most long-lasting romance.
But all in all, Summer's not coping with her parents divorce in the healthiest way. And when Morty voices this concern to Rick, he does little more than remind him that they have infinite Summers to choose from if this one goes haywire.
As it turns out, SumSum (Rick's new pejorative for his niece) isn't the only one to receive some therapeutic murderous wasteland healing. When Rick realizes the Deathstalker crew she's teamed up with has a whole rock of Isotope 322, he changes his tune about staying in the world longer.
As Rick is wont to do whenever Morty protests his decisions, he regurgitates (or, more aptly, burps) Morty's own concern for his sister back at him by convincing his grandson that Summer's rampage is actually supes cathartic.
Increasingly, Morty's not buying the bullshit Rick's laying down. But he still winds up serving as the distraction his grandpa needs to snatch up the Isotope rock.
Rick Sanchez completely impervious to his grandchildren's painCredit: adult swim, cartoon networkRick injects him with the muscle memory of a disembodied arm that definitely never missed bicep day. To Morty and Rick's surprise, though, the term "muscle memory" proves more literal than expected.
After sucker punching Rick in the face, Morty's super jacked arm makes a beeline for the nearby BloodDome fighting ring. At first, Morty is appalled by the actions of his sentient limb, begging the perpetual onslaught of mutants to stop lining up to die horribly at his own hand.
Morty tries one last time to distance himself from culpability, before a flip switches — and wasteland combat therapy kicks in. "Why would you want this to happen?" he yells to the arm at first, before turning to the dude who's face he's pummeling clean off.
"All you had to do was go away! Stop standing in the driveway talking about custody and either tell her you want to stay married or get on with your life but whatever you do stop being a baby and act like a man!"
Having returned from her scavenging, Summer catches her sibling's breakthrough on his own daddy/granddaddy issues. "This is my brother!" she cries in a rush of pride, before remembering her 'deal' this episode. "Not that family means anything!” she corrects.
But when her new cannibal boyfriend assures her that thisfamily between the two of them matters, she's all swoons.
SEE ALSO:'Rick and Morty' creator Dan Harmon goes deep explaining the meaning of lifeThen a mutant finally realizes the sacred green glowing rock is gone, and all hell breaks loose.
In the episode's second car chase, though, the tables have turned. Summer tries to convince Rick to surrender to her new family lead by bae Deathstalker. Meanwhile Morty, now also emphatically team Deathstalker, urges his grandpa to stay so he can keep working out his issues with singlehanded decapitations.
"Listen both of you kids need to get out of this environment so we can properly deal with your parents divorce!" Rick spits back at them, once again warping Morty's moral reasoning to fit his needs in that moment.
When both refuse, Rick does what he does best: abandons them, leaving his grandkids for dead and escaping through a portal. But back home, he's immediately confronted by the first problem he tried to abandon.
Beth is spiraling, questioning how her divorce is affecting the kids. But, like all his best lies, Rick is quick to reassure her that her kids are actually out flourishing right now. A timely cut to said flourishing child shows Morty in the BloodDome, asking which one of his opponents "wants to be my pussy of a dad today?!"
But in a flashback, Morty learns that he and Summer aren't unique for taking comfort in violence in the face of familial loss. The arm, who Morty aptly names 'Armothy' later on, brings him back to the day he watched his own family literally burned to ashes.
Understanding more of Armothy's rage as an individual, Morty vows to help him kill the man who destroyed his family life.
Summer's doing great, guys, leave her aloneCredit: adult swim and cartoon networkBack in the Deathstalker camp, there's trouble in wasteland lover's paradise. Summer's apocalypse boyfriend overlooks her grandpa's transgressions. But she then learns that all his masculine bravado is just covering up a hot mess of self-doubt beneath that helmet — along with an ill-advised mustache.
Summer cuts off Hemorrhage's insecure babbling with a kiss, perhaps seeing too much of herself in his facade of toughness to resist.
Back in the loving home that created these two perfect images of mental wellness, Rick has decided to spend his time building robotic facsimiles of his grandchildren rather than reason his actual, real-life grandchildren.
These uncanny valley versions of his grandchildren are good enough for Rick, so he takes them up for a lovely family dinner where Beth's alcoholism is on full display.
You get the sense throughout that Rick wishes he could tell everyone in his life to dial back their emotions by 15 percent as he does to his robot grandchildren. And, sure enough, he does exactly that to Beth, after SummerBot reassures her mother that it's OK to have feelings because she's, like, totally a carbon-based human life form instead of a bunch of computer parts.
Beth runs off to call Jerry and Rick gets angry at the bots — not for being such poor replicas of human life, but for showing too much humanity toward his daughter. He turns them off, another function I'm sure he wishes came with his actual family members.
SEE ALSO:'Rick and Morty' trolls fans with an 'exclusive' look at Season 3Back in Armothy's revenge plot, Morty finds himself getting emotional at the prospect of losing his now beloved sentient limb, and being abandoned by yet another father figure. “What if we just went back to the BloodDome to take our baggage out on unrelated people? We could do that forever!”
The arm insists, though, and they hug it out in a tearful goodbye much more heartwarming than the one with his actual father — before choking out some slaver in his bathtub.
Right on cue, Rick waltzes back in, having finally decided that convincing his original grandchildren to come back is less of a hassle than robotizing them or searching for one of their infinite copies.
But before they leave, Morty summarizes that, "Maybe the lesson we’ve learned is that whether it’s our parents marriage, or a glowing green rock, or an awesome giant arm, sooner or later we gotta let it go.”
Convincing Summer, however, requires a longer con. He hands back the chunk of Isotope 322 he stole, and teaches the Deathstalker gang that it's an energy source that can power electricity, gasoline, and all the other dwindling resources that turned their world into such a brutal ruin.
Three weeks later, and the Isotope has rebuilt the wasteland into a suburb that looks eerily identical to the one the kids were trying to leave behind. Despite her new apocalypse outfit, made complete by a stomach-organ purse, we find Summer once again dissatisfied.
Beth having a great time with her robot childrenCredit: ADULT SWIM AND CARTOON NETWORKShe was happy to assimilate to the brutal wasteland, but now the Isotope's making her apocalypse buddies succumb to the societal norms she vowed to stop believing in. Worst of all, she sees herself repeating her own mother's mistakes, as the deeply insecure man she married overcompensates for his spinelessness with more empty bravado.
As Summer repeats the scene from the premiere when her own parents divorced, Morty congratulates Rick for pulling off his scheme while Rick prepares the portal gun for their return.
“Come on, Morty, no union based on running from your problems lasts for more than five, maybe seven years tops,” he says, sounding an awful lot like the show's creator slipping in a subtle expiration date for their titular characters' own partnership.
Summer joins them in the garage to inform the rag apocalypse tag team of her divorce. But unlike her mother, she tells her grandpa Rick to cut the crap when he pretends to sympathize, because she knows he used her love life as a power trip to prove his point.
It seems grandpa Rick's manipulation tactics are losing their effect on his grandchildren with each misadventure they survive.
SEE ALSO:'Rick and Morty' update brings Mr. Poopybutthole to 'Rocket League'Back at another SmithBot family bonding session, MortyBot plays out an entire episode ofBlack Mirrorand Spielberg’s A.I.in a single minute, developing sentience, true love for his mother, fear of death — before having his programming automatically reboot to factory settings in the middle of him screeching about his newfound humanity.
Yet another function only a creator like Rick Sanchez could think to embed into his own sentient creations.
When the real Rick, Morty, and Summer return, the kids set out to apply the life lessons gained from wasteland therapy to their current situation
Summer visits her dad in his sad, lonely apartment, bearing the gift of the skull of the first mutant she killed in the poison zone. “He had a chance to escape, but he looked back — which is something we shouldn’t do,” she tells her father.
"I wanted to give this to you as a reminder to not look back,” she says, releasing him from both his duties and guilt at having to save himself from their now Rick Sanchez-corrupted family.
Meanwhile, Morty has come to the opposite conclusion from where he began, explaining to his mother that, if his father really wanted to be with them, he would be there. So, “Either he just doesn’t want you back or he doesn’t have the strength to fight for it. Either way, he’s got his life. And I’ve got mine.”
In the end, the world of Mad Max teaches the kids valuable emotional understandings that their own father, mother, and grandfather couldn't.
Which is, of course, that families who cannibalize together, stay together.
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