The Rick and Morty Darkometer: S3 E4 – ‘Vindicators 3: Return of Worldender’

Rick and Morty season 3 episode 4

We start off this week in fine dark form, with Morty collecting some space bugs that, if they get into earth’s food chain, will make all humanity sterile, which of course Rick keeps around for when he needs to sterilise a species. This is capped off by – when Morty is distracted by the episode’s main narrative – a pigeon flying off with one of the space bugs in its beak.

The distraction comes when they’re called up by the titular Vindicators, a well-known bunch of conventional superheroes in the Avengers/Guardians of the Galaxy style – there’s a woman made of outer space, a million ants acting as a coherent body, a guy who summons ghost trains, a half-crocodile half-robot, and a normal guy with a devil-may-care attitude, who in this scenario comes off like a PG-rated version of Rick, sanitised for mainstream consumption.

Vance Maxiumus (renegade star soldier!) gives Morty an official Vindicators jacket and a canned speech about good and evil. So naturally, Morty is drawn to their more structured, traditional adventures, to Rick’s obvious disgust. In fact, disgust colours all of Rick’s reaction to the Vindicators, to the point where you’re forced to wonder why they ever worked together in the first place – the only person on the Vindicators staff he seems to have time for is Noop-noop, the Mr. Poopybutthole-esque janitor.

Many parts of this narrative is left offscreen, only gestured towards and left for the viewer to assume. Case in point, the ‘3’ in the title – this is the Vindicators’ third time assembling to fight some supervillain or other, though Morty was under the impression it was the second, and is horrified to discover he and Rick were left out of the last one due to Rick’s acerbic personality. Rick attempts to reassure him in his own special way, telling him he is essentially the Vindicators’ team mascot, a ‘wide-eyed unremarkable’ to provide a baseline to their heroic antics and make them look amazing by comparison.

The underlying tension here is Morty’s obvious preference of the Vindicators to Rick, for their more wholesome and upbeat attitude, and Rick’s reaction to this – when Morty describes them as his heroes, Rick immediately leaves and drinks so much he passes out in his own diarrhoea. Despite this, the Vindicators do not let Noop-noop take his spot on the mission, instead choosing to carry Rick along with them.

Come the mission itself – tracking down and stopping Worldender, a monstrosity whose powers are never specified but fairly obvious – Rick, once awake and having cured his hangover, treats the situation with utter scorn, mocking Morty for taking it seriously. In spite of this being a grandfather mocking his grandson, these moments are anathema to the darkometer rating. If he can’t take it seriously, why should the viewers? But then they stumble upon Worldender and his henchmen, all dead and dying, and the reason why vindicates (title drop!) everything that had gone before.

It transpires that during Rick’s bender – which he has no memory of – he had gone to Worldender’s hideout, killed him, and then proceeded to set up a series of deadly games for the Vindicators, which he insists is nothing like the Saw franchise. This is not just Rick hijacking the antagonist’s spot, this is him doing it while blackout drunk on a whim, in order to prove a very poorly defined point.

Despite the videos that last night’s Rick left, warning them not to try and escape, Vance tries to do just that and is cut in half trying to get out through the vents. With the rest of the Vindicators both disgusted and furious with Rick, it’s up to Morty to pull out his cynicism and solve the puzzles based on his knowledge of drunk Rick. Which he does very easily, particularly since a lot of the answers involve mocking the Vindicators for being interchangeable and one-note.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Su1zETMu2fc

To step back a moment: despite having an old Jewish sitcom writer’s name, as Rick once put it, Morty is a child. Yet he is intimately familiar with his grandfather at his drunken worst, to the point that he can predict at what stage Rick will go off on a tangent and begin giving his opinions about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, in a way that may or may not become anti-semitic – fortunately we don’t have to find out.

We also get a callback to the cold open of the very first episode, when Rick had built a neutrino bomb to destroy all life on earth – again, while incredibly drunk – and then passed out, leaving Morty alone with an armed doomsday weapon. We never saw the consequences at the time, but, as one might have assumed, it turns out Morty disarmed it. And has had to do so more than once, so is now perfectly confident in taking on a neutrino bomb built by drunk Rick.

At about this point, Rick’s dysfunctional nature seems to begin to rub off on the remaining Vindicators, when it turns out that Supernova and Million Ants had an affair while Supernova was still married to Alan Rails. The tables turn quickly, and now they are at each others’ throats, while Morty glumly cleans up his grandfather’s mess (not literally). To be honest, given that most superheroes are played by incredibly attractive actors, it’s amazing the Avengers haven’t run into an issue like this yet, even without Rick’s presence wearing on their collective mental state.

At last they reach the final puzzle, to put what Rick values most about the Vindicators on the platform in front of them. Had he not been quite so clear how much he hates them, they could well have been up the creek there with most of the team having died. Morty reaches powerful heights of cynicism when he suggests the answer is nothing, but then the unspoken war for Morty’s adulation and respect comes to a head when Rick suggests that – since he gets emotional at that stage of the night – the answer may be Morty.

Morty is quite pleased with this development, Rick awkwardly insists he may be wrong, but when Morty takes his place on the platform it all seems to go to plan. Morty is taken below the floor and treated to a Disneyland-style rollercoaster ride where the final video of Rick gives a slurring, heartfelt speech about how much he appreciates…not Morty, but Noop-noop, who had of course been meant to come on the mission in Rick’s place and to ultimately witness these recordings. Drunk Rick praises Noop-noop to the point of actually crying, to Morty’s sickened disbelief, then says to tell the Vindicators one thing – at which point he breaks off and realises he has fouled himself, bringing the story full circle.

The combination rollercoaster/video, interestingly, comes very close to something the Joker cooked up in Alan Moore’s sublime The Killing Joke, which formed the basis for all the best parts of The Dark Knight. For our purposes, it should be noted that this once again casts Rick as the villain.

After this, Supernova trying to kill Rick and Morty, and murdering her former lover Million Ants in the process, barely even registers on the darkometer. The platform takes them up to a concert celebrating Rick’s victory over Worldender, and Supernova flies off, possibly to return as an enemy, possibly never to be seen again. As Rick points out there and then, he has more than his fair share of enemies. And as another devil-may-care space-exploring animated character once said ‘with enemies, you know where you stand – but with neutrals, who knows?’

Beth and Summer are there (because their voice actors have contracts) and Beth praises Morty for having become part of the Vindicators – which is of course the very last thing he needs to hear. He takes off the official jacket, from where it is stolen, abused, and then disgraced by Gearhead. And in one final twist of the knife, as emcee of the concert Logic gives it way up for Noop-noop, sober Rick reveals that he doesn’t even remember who Noop-noop is.

The darkometer, which goes from ‘flu’ to ‘unexpected brain aneurysm’, rates ‘Vindicators 3: Return of Worldender’ as ‘the mainstream media’s attitude to AIDS before 1980’ – beyond any trifling notions of hatred or anger, reaching the level of pure cold indifference. Specifically, Rick’s indifference, to the rest of the universe and apparently now even to Morty.

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