“Welcome to the darkest year of our adventures,” Rick said to Morty in the garage.
It sure seems like it.
The rest of the season won’t be out until summer, but an April Fool’s broadcast isn’t a bad way to have your favorite show come back. Especially when the infamous question, “Where’s season three?” has been hammered into the minds of die-hard fans, myself included.
“The Rickshaw Rickdemption” picks up at a family friendly restaurant, Shoney’s, with Rick telling the story about how he broke free from the prison. It doesn’t take long before it’s revealed that a Galactic Federation agent (Nathan Fillion) is inside Rick’s mind and wants the formula out of Rick about how he created the portal gun.
This leaves Rick with two options: stay inside the Shoney’s restaurant and have his brain melt, or give the agent what he wants.
Rick is no fool, so he uses this as an opportunity to free himself from prison. He fools the Galactic Federation by uploading a virus from a “fabricated origin story” about Rick’s portal gun.
This leads to absolute mayhem with multiple Ricks killing each other and the Galactic Federation rapidly collapsing on itself.
Morty, on the other hand, seems to be adjusting just fine without his demented grandfather dragging on their misadventures. Under the Galactic Federation, Morty is 35 and can rent a car.
He spends most of the episode trying to convince Summer that their grandpa should not be their hero.
“I wanted you to have a normal life, that’s something you can’t have when Rick shows up. Everything real turns fake, everything right is wrong. All you know is that you know nothing, and he knows everything,” Morty says to his sister when they are faced with other-dimension Ricks.
Morty has seen first-hand the kind of trouble he and his grandfather can get into over the last 21 episodes. At this point, it is frustrating and wearing him down.
Who can blame him? He’s tired of his intelligence being insulted by his grandfather, sister and parents, and they have to travel to another dimension to live after Morty gives his crush a love potion that managed to spread a disease across the world.
They’ve also come close to death on multiple occasions (such as in the Purge episode and an animatic from an upcoming episode this season), and it all feels like it’s going to reach a boiling point where the family may never be the same again.
When Morty shoots Rick in the head with the fake gun he thought it was real at first, he thought, for a brief period, that he was free from all the insanity his grandfather put him through.
“Who’s stupid now?!” Morty yells to Rick after shooting him.
In the first episode of the show, Rick and Morty are in the garage when Morty loses control of his bodily functions, causing him to be paralyzed for 72 hours. Rick sets up what the show will be about: those two going on adventures forever.
However, at the end of this episode, it’s a mirrored version of the Rick we first saw. Rick looks more menacing than he did in the first episode, saying that everything he just did was to bring himself as the main patriarch of the family and seek revenge against Jerry.
Poor Jerry, too; for the first time in a while, it seems like he is finally winning, with him getting six promotions to whatever job he had with the Federation.
Honestly, I think the best part of this was seeing everyone’s reaction to the new episode. I texted my 15-year-old brother to turn on what was scheduled to be “Family Guy,” and he was shocked and delighted to see a new Rick and Morty episode.
Whatever happens next in these nine episodes, I’m here for it. Wubba Lubba Dub Dub gang, season three is off to a fantastic start.
