For as excellent as its first season was, Rick and Morty never seemed like a show built to last a long time. Its sitcom format allowed it to bury wider plotlines and character developments, where each of this bizarre family’s psyches are ravaged time and time again through fantastical sci-fi concepts. But even beyond mere retconning, the off-hand style of humour was purposefully half-hearted, with Rick’s efforts to cobble together explanations or theories for his plans and schemes coming across as the writers’ short attention spans kicking into gear. In its own weird way, the show had a kind of punk rock feel to it, where the characters wouldn’t just make jokes within an episode’s format, but would bend the elasticity of that format, poke through its covering, and make fun of its design. These weren’t fourth wall breaks necessarily, but ADD-riddled reminders of how much the series could pack into 20-something minutes, where even poignant, tragic endings could be on the cards.
Now the TV show is a long-running empire, having become firmly enmeshed in popular culture. Over a decade since its release, there have been Fortnite skins, the brief return of a rare McDonald’s sauce, and Funko Pops in honour of Rick and Morty, with the upcoming premiere of its eighth season marking almost 12 years since the show was first broadcast. It’s near impossible for any series to be fresh and original after that timeframe, let alone punk rock or subversive. Rather than constantly try to outdo itself with even more outlandish plotlines (sans season 5’s ghastly “Rickdependence Spray,” which coincided with the show’s most lacklustre season), Rick and Morty has settled into a (relatively) comfortable formula over the years. Ubiquity tends to do that; when your presence is inescapable, you can only reinvent yourself so many times.
That’s not to say that the series hasn’t had some evolutions, whether that’s a greater prevalence of canon events that result in multi-episode storylines, or character developments whose seismic shifts will reverberate through entire seasons. There’s also the highly publicised change of hands for the show’s main voice-over work, where Justin Roiland, Rick and Morty co-creator and the original voice actor for the two eponymous protagonists of the show, was replaced by Harry Belden as Morty and Ian Cardoni as Rick. The replacement was seamless for the former and near-seamless for the latter, producing a minor flaw that has since been corrected in this eighth season. There was something slightly gravelly missing from the vocal tones of the deranged, nihilistic granddad / genius inventor in the previous season, whereas now it would be impossible for viewers to even tell the beteween Cardoni and Roiland’s vocal work.
Like all of the post-season 3 outings, this latest batch of episodes doesn’t compare to the series’ early highs. But even if the storytelling spark is no longer there, entertainment value isn’t diminishing across each season, a rare feat for a show that’s been out for over a decade. Rick and Morty does show its age with characters like Summer, where every ounce of humour or intrigue related to her has been exhausted, to the point where her most notable traits are her referencing herself as a sex-crazed party animal with a host of substance abuse addictions. These are one-note comments that become even more unimpressive when racked up together. The fears, hopes, and anxieties of a teenage girl are forgotten about entirely, with the series having (mostly) transcended the school setting where Morty and Summer have to contend with the simultaneous mix of dread and excitement at being surrounded by like-minded peers.
Instead, Rick and Morty has been around for so long and explored so many different sci-fi avenues that it has finally adopted Rick’s persona as its outlook, where little matters in the context of a world in which virtual reality is hyper-realistic, there are endless universes and multiple lifetimes’ worth of negative experience are to be suffered through. All one can hope to do at that point is continue on with new adventures and try to forget about the trauma endemic to many of them. For that reason, the rare dramatic moments that proved so successful in early seasons have gradually become less prevalent (and effective), except when they take place in multi-episode storylines or episodes that shift focus away from these protagonists.
The eighth season’s third episode, “The Rick, the Mort & The Ugly,” does just that, exploring a fraught world where Mortys are subject to the ghastly whims of Ricks. One of the series’ greatest assets is how sparingly and brilliantly it delivers dramatic episodes. This episode is one of the highlights of Rick and Morty’s eighth season, with constant action and surprises in a plot that refuses to rest at any storytelling pit stop for long. This is a TV show comprised of restless storytelling, a quality that’s just as enjoyable as it can be aggravating, with the fourth episode, “The Last Temptation of Jerry,” and its Easter-themed shenanigans failing to rustle up many laughs as it zigzags between its ridiculous plot beats. The episode never coheres around a central storyline that makes you care about what’s happening or where it will all end up.
But it’s only natural that a sitcom trying to be a source of controlled chaos would occasionally spin out of orbit, careening wildly with nothing to centre the experience. As a whole, this eighth season is continued proof that Rick and Morty has firmly settled into a groove of enjoyable, if occasionally unremarkable, sitcom television. The animated series has by no means fallen to the wayside in 2025, even if its glory days (also known as the first three seasons) are firmly lodged in the past.
