Adult Swim‘s “Rick and Morty” is back for Season 8, and the nearly year-and-a-half break has resulted in a burst of creative energy for a show that, at its best, can only be loosely described as a sci-fi sitcom. Creators Scott Marder and Dan Harmon have returned to the core Smith family dynamics (partly inspired by “Succession”), now severely impacted by Rick (Ian Cardoni) and Morty’s (Harry Belden) rippled universe mayhem. Season 8 offers up some provocative existential problems, along with eye-popping world-building, and even more imaginative body horror. At the same time, there are a few callbacks to feed the fanbase.
Here are some early highlights: In Episode 1 (“Summer of All Fears”), Morty and older sister Summer (Spencer Grammer) return from being prisoners inside a simulated “Matrix” as punishment for not returning Rick’s phone charger. Summer became a ruthless tech firm leader while Morty suffered PTSD from going to war. Now they must resume their normal lives as scarred adults trapped inside their former bodies. In Episode 3 (“The Rick, the Mort & the Ugly”), we return to the Citadel arc, where a population of Ricks manipulate and control the subordinate Mortys. And, in Episode 4 (“The Last Temptation of Jerry”), the Easter Bunny has been turned upside down into a sex horror nightmare of alien proportions, especially for Jerry (Chris Parnell) and Beth (Sarah Chalke).
“What guides us is what usually guides us,” Marder told IndieWire. “ We’ve just found we never wanna leave [the family] out. Obviously, our favorite stories are [about] Rick and Morty, but everyone’s so strong that it’s just so natural in the cooking up of ideas that a Jerry one, or a Summer one, or a Beth one will pop up. We get together in a room, and the most exciting idea comes in on any given day, and that’ll win the day.”
Then, as the season begins to fill up with new ideas, Marder tries to take the long view in figuring out a season arc that has started to take shape. “And this season it’s certainly got a fun return to form with just kind of crazy [episodes] and heady ones. But it’s also got a nice light arc that touches on Rick dealing with being home, figuring out what’s next, and what it means in terms of his relationships with [the family].”
The seed of “The Summer of All Fears” came from the notion of putting Summer in an Easy Bake oven and then seeing what happens after she pops out as a 17-year-old again. “ This allowed her to live to adulthood, then gain some autonomy, and become not just a grown woman but a woman with supreme agency,” Harmon told IndieWire.
What’s different is that the viewer is dropped unceremoniously into the episode and forced to play catch up throughout the adult Summer and Morty set up, which pays off with a little conspiracy theory for cynical measure.
“We don’t normally like to play games with the audience by misleading them,” added Marder. “But there’s a little bit of intrigue with what’s going on here? Why are these two adults now? It was heavily influenced by ‘Succession.’ I think that series really made us excited about getting to do something grounded with adult versions of Summer and Morty. We could be doing so much with these kids as adults. I know the writer, Jess Lacher, connected to that fantasy of what if you could go back to high school or back to college, knowing everything you know now. That’s like such an age-old dream. But it wouldn’t go the way you hoped it would go.”
With “The Rick, the Mort & the Ugly,” the creators were intrigued by the idea of crash-landing on the Citadel and turning the focus away from the main Rick and Morty characters. “ There’s infinite Ricks and Morty’s, and, every once in a while, we can touch on a different set,” said Marder. “ We knew we didn’t wanna just reset it and have it magically come back and there not be any repercussions from [Season 5 Episode 10]. So it was cool to check in with it later and see a good amount of survivors and Ricks being Ricks, kinda rebuild this thing, and we found some cool back guys in there.”
As for turning Jerry into a monstrous Easter bunny as part of an intergalactic war in “The Last Temptation of Jerry,” the original concept began as Santa Claus meets “The Fly,” where he gets punished for turning into a magical holiday character.
Harmon explained that it was an episode that needed a lot of mining. “We found a really fun story that was challenging, but one where we ultimately hit gold,” he said. When Jerry irks the family by insisting they celebrate Easter, he bizarrely transforms into an Easter Bunny sex machine as part of an alien plot to destroy the planet. “Easter, which in spite of it being a pagan solstice, a fertility ritual draped even more ironically in Christian resurrection myths, had us questioning what this means to Beth?
“ We had fun with piling on mythology on top of mythology to a point where no one intentionally could make sense of it,” Harmon continued. “Who’s on what side? Who’s fighting who? It became very funny and really layered.”
For Marder, the world-building became another imaginative component to explore. “Every episode is a completely new landscape with brand new characters,” he said. “The production crew was really open to getting to take swings at these new things with a brutal war in the first episode, and the Citadel and the whole Christian mythology, stuff that looked like cathedrals in the sky. All of them have different color palettes, too. The war one is really blue, the Citadel one is really red, and the Easter one is really pastel. When you take a step back to look at this season, it’s all really intentional, which is neat.”
“Rick and Morty” is streaming on Adult Swim.
