The Rick and Morty Darkometer: S3 E9 – ‘The ABCs Of Beth’

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.

As Summer points out and I’ve been pointing out for the past eight weeks, the younger generation have plenty of trauma to point to. However, Beth can also compete on those terms – there’s a news spot about the a man’s execution for killing and eating his own son, Tommy, a boy who was one of Beth’s childhood friends. This prompts her to start reminiscing about how she rationalised his disappearance by thinking he had gotten lost in her imaginary world of froopyland – which Rick overhears and immediately becomes defensive about, claiming that even if froopyland wasn’t his best work he’d like to see her do better.

Beth will have the horrific realisation at about the same time the viewer does – that what she thought was her precocious childhood imagination at work was Rick taking a lazy route towards parenting, like an early version of the Jerryboree. Morty and Summer’s objections only last until Rick zaps them with the bubble-gun and sends them off for a custody weekend with Jerry – just as surely as ‘The Whirly Dirly Conspiracy’ was a Rick and Jerry adventure, this one’s Rick and Beth.

Froopyland is just like Beth remembers it, a colourful jolly marshmallow realm that wouldn’t look out of place in Adventure Time, or Summer’s never-past-bedtime-land. Beth, now able to evaluate it through a parent’s eyes herself, accuses Rick of putting her in danger by leaving her to roam froopyland – Rick refutes her by throwing himself off a ledge and then sticking his head in a rainbow river, neither of which are harmful, because it is of course a padded play area. Unfortunately this demonstration comes seconds before a twisted vulture-y beast scoops him up, and Beth is unable to take his cries for help seriously.

Being hostile, aggressive, and apparently carnivorous, the vulture is, by froopyland standards, an anomaly – and over the course of butchering it and its young, Rick acquires some of its flesh to analyse to find out exactly why. Somehow, human DNA has gotten into the ecosystem. Given that a human may well have been left loose in froopyland for the past thirty years, it’s not hard to speculate exactly how – or, indeed, how that human’s been staying alive by keeping a fresh stream of monstrous hybrids coming.

Rick is initially sceptical of this theory, since this would result in the human’s ugliest and most non-cannibalisable children eventually forming a medieval-level society that worships Tommy as a god. It is at this point that they are jumped by some particularly bulbous specimens wielding cheerful-looking spears, and taken to Tommy’s castle. The froopians have remained cutesy even having formed a civilisation based on incest and cannibalism, enacting a grade-school-level play about those very societal tenets – which has the shock revelation that Tommy didn’t just get lost in froopyland, but that Beth abandoned him there.

Back in the real world, Beth denies having kicked Tommy into a lake of honey and left him stranded, but Rick is perfectly ready to believe it, describing her as a ‘messed-up kid’. As evidence, he cites his own state of messed-upness, and brings out the big box of adorable weaponry he made her as a child – the jewel of which is probably the sentient switchblade, who on seeing Beth again is eager to get back to some stabbing. This is of course just as damning towards Rick’s character – if not more so, since he was an adult – but the difference is, he doesn’t care.

Beth, for the moment, still does care – and decides to get Tommy back out of froopyland to clear his father’s name and make things right, taking along her box of deadly childhood memories. There’s an old saying that ‘when all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail’- Beth is utterly unequipped to apologise to Tommy, but is fully equipped to start slaughtering froopians when he turns on her. And even she notes (with glee), as she kicks off a Rick-style rampage, that she has turned into her father.

She returns from froopyland without Tommy, but with enough of his genetic material that Rick can throw together a quick-and-dirty clone. They drag the new Tommy along to his father’s execution, arriving just as he is about to be lethally injected, and the day is saved! There isn’t even a final twist of the knife like him then dying of shock, which – and this is saying something – is a bit of a surprise on this show.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=24Eq6h1mjVI

But what of Beth’s moment of self-discovery? Rick, of course, knows perfectly well that he’s not a good person and she has been idolising the wrong man – but this is, at last, Beth seeing through her obvious blind spot towards him. And Rick, to his minor credit, addresses her as an equal in response – not even attempting to manipulate her as he has done so many times, instead crediting her as having the same driven, nihilistic intelligence as him.

With her identity in crisis, she asks Rick who she is, and what she should do. And Rick’s response? We know Rick’s response. To leave the family and take reality for a ride, just as he did. He even offers to create a clone of her to fill in indefinitely, so that she faces no consequences. Beth asks the obvious question – why do this, if nothing matters? Rick gives various possible answers, one of which is that he possibly loves her. Aww.

Looking at the fridge-photos of the family, Beth makes her choice. Which perhaps sounds conclusive, but remember, she’s just been given a crash course in how Rick-style parenting fucks up your children. And in the final scene, when Morty and Summer get home, we are presented with Beth greeting them cheerfully, asking them about their day Stepford-mother-style, with no hint of the day she’s had. It’s ambiguous, it’s very deliberately ambiguous – as you’d expect for a show that had so much fun with the speculation about Rick’s backstory in the series premiere.

But what have the kids been up to all day, over in the b-plot? Well, as I mentioned, Jerry has custody on the weekend – and, to their amazement, has cleaned up his awful apartment. He’s moved on, very slightly, by getting in an overly-serious rebound relationship with a huntress alien named Ciara.

It’s a straightforward case of fetishising her race, made all the more so because this is an alien race we’re talking about. Jerry loves how having sex with her gives him telekinetic powers, and is very into her whole badass, rough-and-tough vibe – but when she actually invites him and the kids on a hunt (surely the highest honour in a hunter alien culture) he finds it boring and annoying. He seems mainly interested in the image – and indeed her appearance, her three-tittied appearance – rather than her herself.

The kids instantly peg it as a rebound relationship that Jerry’s taken way too seriously – actually having gone so far as to get soul-bonded (left ambiguous, but you can probably guess). And it’s kind of sad how they’re so attuned to their parents’ faults, yet are blind to the same faults in themselves. Sans Rick coming in to shake up the format, it’s not impossible to imagine how Morty and Jessica might have eventually ended up like Jerry and Beth. And of course, in ‘Rickmancing the Stone’, Summer was married to a warlord who – in a contemporary suburban environment – basically became Jerry.

Jerry, of course, doesn’t want to hear it – instead speculating that it’s them, of all people, who find Ciara’s race weird. (Jerry is oddly fixated on Ciara’s head size – a feature that makes her look oddly like the evil Gigeresque version of Beth he created in couples’ counselling. But I’m sure there’s nothing to that at all.) They hold the line and tell him to break up with her. And he does – but because he’s Jerry, he puts it down, entirely, to his children’s racism.

The first they get to hear about it is when Jerry takes them out of school, planning to flee for Alaska because she’s after their hides. This is decidedly a dick move on Ciara’s part, even if they had been space-racist, but then she did decide what was missing from her life as intergalactic huntress was a puny human called Jerry, so she may not be the most stable of people.

The Alaska plan goes off the rails when she catches up to them and wrecks Jerry’s car, so they try to take shelter with the Nosferatus they’d been hunting with her only the day before, with Ciara in hot pursuit. When Summer insists Jerry needs to break up with her properly, Ciara begins to telekinetically choke her – even given this, it takes Morty and the Nosferatus screaming at him for him to finally pull his finger out, and admit Ciara was a rebound intended make him look good to Beth.

Ciara begins to vent her spleen about humanity’s cowardly and self-serving nature (who’s the space-racist now?) before, appropriately, her ex shows up, finding it odd that she’s ended up on a planet he hunts on. It is only just dawning on Jerry that he was also a rebound by the time Morty and Summer kindly lead him away, leaving Ciara and Trendor to their drama.

The darkometer, which goes from ‘puppies’ to ‘parasites’, rates ‘The ABCs Of Beth’ as ‘Schrödinger’s cat’. Because how dark this episode really is mainly depends on some questions that are still unclear – IF Beth has left or not, and IF she then does something better with her new life or goes full Rick, and IF Jerry can finally learn from his mistakes.

As to that last one, we should remember Schrodinger was no stranger to purely hypothetical situations. That’s the interesting thing about Schrödinger’s cat, as a thought experiment – Schrödinger was using it as an absurd hypothetical to mock the idea of quantum superpositions, that state in which the cat, while unobserved, is somehow both alive and dead. In reality, he argued, it must be one or the other.