The Rick and Morty Darkometer: S3 E8 – ‘Morty’s Mindblowers’

Morty's Mind Blowers

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.

This week, we’re thrown right into the action of one of those classic Rick and Morty adventures – they’re running for their lives in an Escher dimension, fleeing what appears to be Dream from Neil Gaiman’s Sandman. Dream seems to be furious with them because they’ve stolen the rare and expensive ‘truth tortoise’. Rick implores Morty not to look into its eyes, only for Morty to reveal he’s been looking into its eyes the whole time, and now things are getting weird.

Back at home, whatever terrifying cosmic realities the truth tortoise revealed are really playing on Morty’s mind. He looks sleep-deprived, and – more importantly – can’t even enjoy interdimensional cable anymore. He ends up wishing Rick could erase the memory from his mind – a development Rick seems to see coming. So the more astute of you may have guessed by now that this isn’t the first time they’ve gone on an adventure that went to a place that Morty just wants to forget.

Rick leads Morty down to one of the spiralling galaxy of secret facilities he keeps under the garage. This one is well-stocked with colour-coded lightbulbs, each a recording of a memory Morty wanted rid of. Surprisingly nobody actually mentions Harry Potter’s pensieve. The nearest we get are a couple of references to the Men in Black franchise, which are just ragging on the subpar part 2, and don’t even mention the memory-eraser – or, indeed, how it just gets rid of memories instead of saving them (as Rick does) for future entertainment.

So, after the obviously diminishing returns of the interdimensional cable conceit – and nobody was more sad than me to see the second instalment of that degenerate into Justin Roiland farting into the microphone for minutes at a stretch – they are by Rick’s own admission mixing up the formula, and having the quickfire sketches come from erased memories that you might say were too hot for TV. Or, as Rick might term them, ‘Morty’s mindblowers’ (roll credits!).

Unlike the tortoise of truth, a lot of the mindblowers aren’t simply encountering some horrific Lovecraftian influence – no, a great deal of them are times when Rick and/or Morty messed up bad. As an example, look no further than the first – through a telescope, Morty spots a man wandering about on the moon. To his fury, the family dismiss it as a smudge on the lens, and then to his horror, the same man – a ‘Mr. Lunus’ – turns up at school as the new guidance counselor.

Morty takes the matter to Principal Vagina. Vagina and Lunus have words, Vagina punches Lunus, some accusations of paedophilia are thrown around because of Vagina’s severe misunderstanding of most everything. In short order, Lunus tops himself, and is given a solemn burial by his former buddies from the marine corps, who share some memories of the man – including how everyone always said he looked like a smudge. Morty blames himself, a lot, entirely correctly.

I described the tortoise of truth as Lovecraftian earlier. While the tortoise’s exact nature is mainly implied, the modifier ‘of truth’ points to what’s really going on – it reveals truths we would rather not know. Truths like ‘you are capable of driving a man to his death through an honest mistake’. It was this sort of subject H.P. Lovecraft was often driving at – in his iconic short story ‘The Call of Cthulhu’, he claims in the opening ‘some day the piecing together of dissociated knowledge will open up such terrifying vistas of reality, and of our frightful position therein, that we shall either go mad from the revelation or flee from the deadly light into the peace and safety of a new dark age.’ And given the state of the news media, bringing death and destruction from around the world directly into your living room, who’s to say he was wrong?

Another sketch involves a floop-floopian wanting Rick – as a great warrior – to kill him so he can ascend Viking-style to his people’s Valhalla. Rick, naturally, is on board. However, a minute’s worth of conversation with Morty has the floop-floopian doubting his faith, having never before doubted it or asked for evidence – then, running from Rick, he is in a final cruel twist hit by a car and dragged off to alien hell by horrible void beings. Which, as Morty points out, easily counts as evidence. Again – things you would rather not know.

Of course, I mentioned the mindblowers being colour-coded earlier, and Morty isn’t slow to pick up on this. The pink ones correspond to stuff Beth did, and the first one of these that Morty samples involves Beth being confronted with a classic Sophie’s choice – in which she takes mere seconds to choose to keep Summer alive over Morty. Obviously they all make it out of that one okay, but the damage has been done.

And as for the red ones? Well, do you remember in the memory-parasites episode, in which Morty realised the truth via all his bad memories of Rick? Rick letting him be eaten by star-beasts, Rick pulling his trousers down and shoving him down the stairs, and so on – well, it’s all that come again. In fact it’s worse this time, since as we see, Rick was unwilling to let Morty keep a memory as innocuous as beating him at checkers. (Chalk up another point for my recurring theory that Morty isn’t as dim as everyone seems to think.)

This discovery, that Rick has been forcibly robbing him of memories where he comes out the victor between them, actually prompts Morty to strike Rick – and in the scuffle, both take a blast from the memory eraser. It’s clearly quite a precision implement, since this frenzied use of it leaves them not knowing what’s going on or who they are. Luckily, they have just the equipment at hand for a quick refresher course.

This brings up another particularly Lovecraftian skit, in which Rick, incensed at our primitive earth spirit-levels, demonstrates to Morty what an actually level surface is like. Morty finds the experience so overwhelmingly satisfying that all normal surfaces become maddeningly imperfect, with seconds back in the non-truly-level part of reality reducing him to tears. Rick reassures Summer that he’ll deal with it by giving Morty’s memory the old snip-snip.

Outside of the main power combo, Summer is without a doubt the character who gets the lion’s share of darkness in her plotlines. Earlier this season, she was briefly in a common-law marriage with a post-apocalyptic warlord, she was the one leading the charge to bust Rick out of prison, which resulted in her visiting Cronenberg-world, and lest we forget the time Rick’s car kept Summer safe – her descent into the dark side of Rick-like atavism is at times almost as pronounced as Morty’s. So it’s not a surprise that she’s aware of this particular slice of high-concept sci-fi rigmarole, but the kicker comes with the scale.

Just as Rick and Morty have absorbed enough unpleasant memories to go all-in on a suicide pact, Summer wanders in. Earlier we had an offhand mention of Rick having shown Morty his mindblowers earlier, and then erased the memory – which, it turns out, has happened so many times that Summer can eyeball it as a 4th-level iteration of the Morty’s mindblowers experience, open a cabinet, and then follow a little checklist to sedate them, wipe their memories, and plop them down on the couch none the wiser in front of – what else – interdimensional cable. For which they absolutely don’t thank her.

With a bit of luck, this will result in them playing off any lingering memories of the mindblowers as interdimensional cable-induced dreams, due to their looser feel and vaguely improvisational tone. Still, they’ve covered a lot of dark ground on this one, and from a storytelling perspective, having them remember none of it is a pretty obvious use of the reset button – one which crucially, by nature, won’t work all that well. Even if the mindblowers stay self-contained in this way, the family’s still going to have to live with the wonderful personalities that came up with the mindblowers in the first place.

The darkometer is overloading slightly from the rapid-fire nature of the episode. Fortunately, I can’t think of a much better analogy for ‘Morty’s Mindblowers’ than the post-credits scene, in which Jerry kills ET – adorable figure of sci-fi wonder and intergalactic brotherhood, at once Christ-like and child-like – by leaving him in the car with the windows rolled up.

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