rick and morty season 5 episode 3 thoughts

WARNING: This post contains SPOILERS for Rick and Morty up to and including Season 5. In particular, the following episodes are mentioned:
S4E1: Edge of Tomorty: Rick Die Rickpeat
S4E8: The Vat of Acid Episode
S5E1: Mort Dinner Rick Andre
S5E3: A Rickconvenient Mort


To be blunt about it: I thought that the new episode this week, A Rickconvenient Mort, had some serious issues.

I vaguely alluded to this on Twitter, in a non-spoilery way, but I'll go into more detail here. As you should be aware if you're reading this, the episode involves Morty getting into a relationship with Planetina, a female Captain Planet ripoff. The first half of the episode involves Morty freeing Planetina from her corrupt handlers (her "kids", who summon her into existence with their elemental rings); and the second half involves Morty and Planetina running off together, Planetina going full blown eco-terrorist, and Morty breaking up with her and crying into Beth's arms. Along the way, we have a B-plot with Rick and Summer going on a tour of apocalyptic planets and getting laid.

My problem with this episode is fairly straightforward: The second "half" of the main plot, involving Morty and Planetina's relationship and breakup, is rushed as HELL. It feels like they spent too much time on the first half of the main plot and/or on the B-plot, ran out of episode space, and had to cram the entire story of Morty and Planetina's actual relationship into the last few minutes. It's really offputting, the episode feels like it ends way too early, and the emotional moments of their breakup don't at all feel "earned", regardless of how well-executed they were on their own.

There's been one other episode that I've felt *somewhat* similarly about: the season 4 premiere. That's the one with the death crystals, where Morty is trying to follow the exact sequence of movements that will result in him dying with Jessica. The first time I saw that episode, I felt like it was cut off early: it felt like there was going to be a gradual exploration of *how* this sequence of movements would result in Morty dying with Jessica, and it was abruptly cut short by Rick taking the death crystal away from him before we could see how things played out. Again, it felt somewhat like they ran out of episode space and had to wrap things up really quick.

At the same time though, I admit that it isn't exactly clear how they would have allowed this all to play out without having to push a reset button: having Morty's whole life play out until he got old would seriously threaten the show's continuity, to put it lightly, and it's not obvious to me how they would get things back to normal so the show could continue (maybe reveal that the events were playing out through some device Rick was using to show Morty why he shouldn't use the death crystals? maybe have the events take place in an alternate timeline? I'm not really sure). Additionally, though, they actually *do* reveal the truth in the post-credits scene - that it wasn't *really* Morty ending up with Jessica, but rather him dying alone with Jessica coincidentally as his hospice nurse - and that payoff is funny enough that I feel it at least somewhat justifies the story seeming to be cut short earlier.

More generally, though, the death crystal episode was *fun*. All the stuff with Rick reincarnating in different realities that all just happen to be filled with Nazis, the hologram Rick being perpetually insecure about his hologram status, Morty's antics in trying to follow the death crystal... it's all *fun*. The jokes land, the concepts are interesting, and it's just a joy to watch. Meanwhile, the Planetina episode is... just kind of okay? I've seen it a few times by now, and while it was more enjoyable on subsequent viewings, it mostly just feels like a fairly average Rick and Morty story, if even that. To be honest, the whole concept of "Morty dates a female Captain Planet ripoff" wasn't very interesting to me to begin with, especially after the sheer insanity of the Decoy Wars in the previous episode. Even the more comedic B-plot doesn't really land for me, although of course there were some kinda funny moments.

The main appeal of this episode, for me, is the emotional stuff at the end, with Morty breaking up with Planetina and crying into his mother's arms. But it doesn't feel *earned* - all the relevant stuff goes by too quick for me to care. Their whole relationship was crammed into a couple minutes of montage, and falls apart into eco-terrorism about as quickly as it starts. Again, it feels like they ran out of episode space at the end, and had to rush through the rest. I feel like exploring their relationship should have been a whole second episode, or else the stuff about her "kids" should have been cut entirely, and the episode devoted entirely to exploring their relationship. It's just paced really weirdly, and it feels like something went wrong.

To be fair, Rick and Morty has developed a relationship over the course of a montage before - in the Vat of Acid Episode, where Morty starts and maintains a relationship with that black-haired girl during the montage of him using the place-saving device. But somehow, even this dialogue-less montage-within-a-montage managed to make me care about that relationship WAY more than the entire episode with Planetina, and didn't at all feel rushed either. Why is it that Vat of Acid could get away with developing a relationship via a montage, while Rickconvenient Mort couldn't? I'm not totally sure. I think at least part of it is that the whole relationship in Vat of Acid was itself a mini-story within a larger episode, whereas Planetina was an episode-spanning relationship that waited until the very end to attempt to develop. But I think also, the relationship in Vat of Acid had *more going on* within that small time span. Even though it was told over the course of a few minutes, it still felt like a much longer story - perhaps most importantly, the plane crash sequence provided a sort of adversity that they had to get through together, deepening the sense of a bond between them. (That part where it flashes back to the time they met, and plays a sad piano rendition of the leitmotif from that scene, still gets me every time.)

Meanwhile, the relationship between Morty and Planetina has barely anything significant happen. The montage toward the end (the one I've focused on) has barely anything besides a few short scenes of them spinning windmills, flattening car tires, and then escalating into eco-terrorism. The montage earlier in the episode (before the encounter with her "kids") does a bit better, but it's still just showing the bare beginnings of a relationship for a few minutes. What I would have liked to see was time spent on *developing* their relationship, similarly to what Vat of Acid did but on a larger scale. Maybe have a whole episode where they fight a villain alongside each other or something - something to put them both in an "adventure" situation (like the plane crash in Vat of Acid), give us time to see them interact, to get invested in the bond between them. Maybe show Planetina acting a little bit unhinged during that fight against the villain, to slowly build up to her going insane and setting innocent people on fire. The eventual breakup would then be *that* much more devastating, and really hit hard the way it seems like it was meant to.

Also: this might sort of be a "me" thing, but I personally found the relationship hard to relate to because of Planetina being a non-human supernatural entity, rather than a "normal" girl like Jessica or the girl from Vat of Acid. I feel like they could have played on this - had the two discuss how unusual Planetina's existence is, maybe even compare it to Morty's also-rather-unusual existence, have them bond over their similarities and differences in that regard. At the very least, it would have been a way to actually *develop* their relationship a little.



Having said all this... there's a possibility this was all totally intentional. After watching a couple more times, I have a potential theory about what this episode was supposed to be, and the possible allegory behind it.

I think it's very possible that this episode isn't really about Planetina at all. It's about Jessica.

A couple episodes earlier, Morty actually started getting somewhere with Jessica. This, like the relationship section in Vat of Acid, was really well-done - I had never really been invested in Morty's obsession with Jessica before, but that episode pretty much single-handedly made me care. And of course, at the end, Jessica spends the equivalent of hundreds(?) of years frozen in place in an alternate dimension, and gets *super* fucked up and has a total personality change, proclaiming herself a "time god" and breaking things off with Morty.

I think it's possible that the point of the Planetina episode is to show the fallout from this. The B-plot, with Rick and Summer going to the apocalyptic planets, focuses heavily on the idea of "rebounding": reacting to a breakup by quickly finding other people to take the place of the person you lost. I think it's possible that the point of Planetina is that she's basically a rebound relationship for Morty - he's projecting all his feelings for Jessica onto her, and getting disproportionately attached as a result. If this is true, it would make sense that Morty and Planetina get almost no time to develop their relationship - the *whole point* is that it was a superficial relationship that Morty was using to cope with the loss of Jessica, since he's too immature to process it in a healthy way.

"She's gone... I loved her so much." This is what Morty says at the end of the episode, when he's crying into his mother's arms. What if he's not *really* talking about Planetina here? What if, at least on some subconscious level, he's actually talking about Jessica instead?

I think it's also possible - although this may be a stretch, and I'm much less confident about this - that the episode may have been an allegory for something more abstract. The whole Captain Planet thing inherently comes with allegory, so it certainly wouldn't be out of bounds. Specifically: I wonder if this episode might allegorically represent Morty temporarily turning to extremist ideology to find a sense of purpose after the loss of Jessica. If Planetina represents environmentalism - and, in her unrestrained state, eco-terrorism - then Morty's relationship with her wouldn't just be a literal rebound relationship with a girl. It would, more abstractly, be a "rebound" in the direction of political activism: starting out with typical environmentalism, then "freeing" it from corporate sanitization, only to find a kind of extremism that he can't tolerate, and becoming disillusioned by it.

I have no idea if any of this was intentional, and I could totally be reading too much into this - it's hard to tell when Rick and Morty is *really* trying to be totally galaxy brain, and when it's just trying to do something simple that people *interpret* as galaxy brain. But it *would* make sense of why this episode is paced the way it is, and keeping it in mind as a possibility has made me appreciate the episode a little more.