In the first episode of series 3, Rick bade us ‘welcome to the darkest year of our adventures’. Each week, we’re going to judge the new episode on exactly that basis and see where it registers on the darkometer.
We open this week in straightforward fashion, with Rick and Morty planning their exciting journey to the lost city of Atlantis – just like that one episode of Futurama! Of course, I should properly say ‘our’ Rick and Morty, since their preparations are rudely interrupted by another Rick and Morty, collecting charitable donations for the Citadel of Ricks. Naturally coming to our Rick – the Rick who murdered the Council of Ricks and nearly destroyed the Citadel – is rather like a pair of Jehovah’s Witnesses knocking on the door of a card-carrying Satanist.
And both our Rick and Morty are fairly vocal on this point. Charity Rick and Morty – even as both Ricks bond over frustration with their Mortys – beat a hasty retreat. Our Morty wonders whatever became of the Citadel, prompting Rick to assert that only an idiot would care about that up against their journey to Atlantis. So, as you may have guessed by now, this week we’re being shuffled into a completely different storyline and getting a look at everyday life in the Citadel.
The Citadel, it should be made clear, is hardly a fanciful sci-fi civilisation. It is more a way of examining the Rick and Morty dynamic when it comprises the whole of society. Of course, a society it takes the dynamic to some more extreme places than one isolated duo, hence the Morty re-education school – a chintzy, Hogwartsish place complete with Snape-style Rick, its sole purpose to instil in them deference and obedience to their Ricks.
Why aren’t their Ricks doing that their damn selves, you might ask? Well, these are more of the ‘poor Rickless bastards’ our Rick mentioned back in ‘Close Rick-counters of the Rick Kind’ – Mortys whose Ricks are dead or have abandoned them. As to why, pick a reason. Any given Rick is constantly pulling out enough of them.
Snape Rick is all too happy to use their Rickless status to keep them in their places. ‘Tall Morty’, meanwhile, a Rick even more developmentally disabled than Doofus Rick, keeps himself in his place with everything that spills out of his tragic mouth. However, it is the end of term, which can only mean one thing, that it’s time for a group of plucky young Mortys – fat Morty, nerdy Morty, lizard Morty and slick Morty to go on a wholesome coming-of-age adventure.
They decide to bunk off and go in search of the ‘wishing portal’, a Citadel urban legend. Over a campfire, we have slick Morty’s heartbreaking confession that he’s been implanted with a chip to make him create drama – which could be mistaken for an idle flourish by one of his past Ricks, but remember, in the Citadel Mortys are a consumer good. Remember the coupon for a free replacement Morty? These modifications will be happening on an industrial scale, and with no regard to what the individual Mortys want.
Eventually, they find the wishing portal, which like all sinister myths demands sacrifice – specifically, for its users to throw in something they care about. Slick Morty, wishing for a change in Rick-Morty relations (for fairly obvious reasons), takes this to its obvious extreme conclusion and hurls himself in, to the others’ horror. When they return to school, they’ve missed graduation – but this doesn’t matter. Things have changed. The school has been shut down and Snape Rick’s off to get riggity-wrecked.
At this point it might be worth a mention of the story of Moloch, often alleged to be a god of the ancient Carthaginians. Moloch is the ur-example of sinister myths demanding sacrifice, his specific deal being that he would grant you victory in war if you threw children into the fire. While ancient, Carthage was, much like the Citadel, as advanced a civilisation as any of its day – with G.K. Chesterton likening the spectacle to his contemporary society, analogising it to ‘a number of Manchester merchants with chimneypot hats and mutton-chop whiskers, going to church every Sunday at eleven o’clock to see a baby roasted alive.’ Granted the Citadel isn’t doing this as a matter of course, but it comes to something when this serves as the climax of a coming-of-age adventure.
So, outside of school, what are Rick-Morty relations like on the Citadel? At one point lizard Morty fears ending up in ‘Mortytown’, and in another subplot we get an unflinching look into this place – the bad neighbourhood of the Citadel – via a policeman Rick and his new partner, a jaded policeman Morty who has some fairly strong opinions about other Mortys, opinions which coming from a Rick might seem almost Mortyist.
After brutalising some street Mortys for information, they bust up what initially seems to be a meth lab but is in fact an operation to cook up illegal portal gun fluid – which, thankfully for the rest of the universe, doesn’t work. While searching the joint, policeman Rick encounters a Morty who begs him for help, playing on their familial bond – somehow still in place in an all-Rick-and-Morty society – then literally stabs him in the back.
As policeman Rick dresses his wound, policeman Morty sets off the portal fluid, destroying the entire house and everyone remaining inside it – a gross abuse of power and betrayal of any sort of legal ethic, which he dismisses as just ‘Mortys killing Mortys’. Then he takes policeman Rick to some kind of underground Morty strip club – thankfully, showing nothing graphic, only weird – and introduces him to a friend of his, big Morty, boss of the Morty underworld.
Policeman Rick refuses to take a bribe and it all goes south. Policeman Morty gets the better of it, and gets big Morty at gunpoint. Policeman Rick begs him to arrest the man, to do it by the book, and for a moment, it seems like he will – but this is not that kind of show. Policeman Morty murders big Morty, and in turn, policeman Rick murders him, and turns himself in.
Yet policeman Rick, despite having made a full confession, is not prosecuted. Perhaps unsurprising since he’s a policeman, but they don’t even put him on paid leave. Instead he’s right back on the beat, with a shiny new badge. Something has changed.
I mentioned familial bonds earlier – so what of Beth, the missing link in a Rick and Morty-based civilisation? Well, they have a pill for that. Or rather a delicious candy bar, ‘Simple Ricks’ imbued with all the feelings of a Rick beholding his beloved daughter – which have of course been extracted from the brain of a Rick held in an induced coma. Our third subplot this week concerns a Rick working the operating line at Simple Ricks, pushing a button and dispensing the pink feelings-goo that turns an ordinary item of confectionery into soma.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tbb6VNqUgyk
One of the pervasive questions about the Citadel is how a society that is 50% alcoholic genius mad scientist could possibly have corporate structure and menial workers, the sorts of people who on encountering a ‘purge planet’ don’t immediately want to check it out. In the opening to this episode we saw Ricks working in construction rather than engaging in high-concept sci-fi rigmarole. Our Rick put his finger on the paradoxical nature of it when he described how the Ricks of the Citadel, in wanting to escape government control, they formed their own ‘stupid government’.
Long story short though, assembly line Rick goes berserk, kills his manager, and barricades himself in with the Rick they’re milking the pink goo from. The surprising thing is that it stems specifically from him being passed over for promotion, instead of any possible reason imaginable or just an act of Rick being Rick.
With not just any hostage but an economically important hostage, assembly line Rick demands an untraceable portal gun, which beats the hell out of the traditional chopper to the airport. The SWAT team Ricks hand it over, but when assembly line Rick tries to send through comatose candy Rick first, it becomes apparent that it was a trick and the portal gun was preset to go to the blender dimension.
His hostage now in a million splattery pieces, it looks bad for assembly line Rick. He’s all ready to go out in a hail of bullets, howling that he’s more Rick than any of the SWAT team Ricks – and then, in a game changer, Willy Wonka Rick appears and agrees with him. Wonka Rick, like our Rick, decries the state of the Citadel and claims it was meant to be a place where Ricks could be free. To the adoring cries of the rest of the shop floor, he leads assembly line Rick out of the factory and to a better life.
Perhaps things have changed. And then, at assembly line Rick’s moment of triumph, about to drive off in his fancy new space-car, Wonka Rick shoots him from behind. Because they needed a new flavour for Simple Ricks, and the sensation of freedom assembly line Rick enjoyed in his final moments sounds like a hot seller.
And change is at the core of the final subplot of this week’s episode. With the Council of Ricks dead, the Citadel’s having a go at good old-fashioned democracy and throwing themselves a Presidential election. So, what, brash Trump Rick and awkward, fumbling Clinton Rick, right? Not so, a surprise candidate’s thrown his hat into the ring, and he’s – record scratch – a Morty!
Despite being the obvious underdog, since this is going on in a society that treats its citizens in a fundamentally unequal way, politician Morty emerges the unlikely victor of the first debate – mainly because he’s the only one who actually gives a stump speech rather than being distracted by juggling. And to be fair, we know what Rick’s oratory is like, any speech of his would soon devolve into ‘you’re all pieces of shit and I can prove it mathematically’.
The cracks start to show in politician Morty’s facade when, seconds after giving that inspiring, heart-winning speech, he cold-bloodedly fires an aide who had doubted him. We next see aide Morty in a bar drowning his sorrows, watching politician Morty’s garbled ‘nothing to fear but fear itself speech’, only for a secretive Rick to pass him a dossier of secrets and slink away.
Whatever’s in the dossier is bigger than any mere Watergate scandal, since aide Morty doesn’t bother taking it to the press, but rather leaps straight to trying to assassinate politician Morty. He is taken into custody having only winged politician Morty, and – very likely – a major factor in politician Morty winning the election. Taking a bullet on the campaign trail and surviving is a power-move double-whammy, this is why Teddy Roosevelt and Ronald Reagan are remembered so fondly.
Aide Morty is horrified to learn of politician Morty’s victory, and makes a last, desperate attempt to show the secret service Ricks the contents of the dossier, before they blow him out into space. But what of now-President Morty? That’s the real change, after all.
Wonka Rick joins a meeting of other powerful Ricks who were apparently the power behind the throne, even under the Council. President Morty – getting a haircut – seems placidly accepting of this in classic Morty style. Then, with a snap of his fingers, he has the most rebellious Ricks summarily executed by the guard Ricks. He pours himself a villainous stiff drink and idly considers giving a sinister speech, but concludes that now is the time for action.
As Blonde Redhead’s ‘For The Damaged Coda’ swells in the background, President Morty’s political enemies are dumped out into space alongside aide Morty, and we finally see the contents of the dossier – the other shoe finally drops – it turns out President Morty is the evil Morty from ‘Close Rick-counters’, the one with the eyepatch who it turned out had been pulling evil Rick’s strings the whole time.
It’s been more than an entire series since we saw him last (unless there was a background event I missed), and it seems all the more significant for it. Evil Morty is the closest thing Rick and Morty has to a true antagonist after the title characters themselves, and that’s no coincidence, indistinguishable as he is from one of them.
The best clue to his true motives perhaps came in ‘Close Rick-counters’ – the events of which, in retrospect, seem entirely geared towards getting evil Morty into the Citadel to go about his wicked-foul business – when, as he imprisoned our Morty with the other Mortys, he claimed ‘Mortys have no chance of defeating a Rick’. Which he has just proved dramatically wrong. This seems to suggest a grudge against Rick-kind, though with no obvious cause other than the general way Ricks treat Mortys. It also demonstrates, of course, that he feels no particular Morty solidarity either.
The darkometer, which goes from ‘harp’ to ‘organ, with thunder for effect’ rates ‘The Ricklantis Mixup’ squarely on ‘end of act two’ – the villain triumphant and a genuine sense of unease that whatever heroes we have might not be able to stop them.
A final note. To reiterate, after having the boardroom purged, evil Morty pours himself a glass of something. Remember in my review of the last episode, when I speculated that all Morty needs to descend into Rick-style amorality is to get past a few lingering inhibitions – by, for instance, having a stiff drink?
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