Rick and Morty Still Hasn't Topped Its Best, Darkest Year

Every once in a while, someone on Rick and Morty will plead for a return to "classic Rick and Morty adventures." You know, the Season 1 kind, as they'll usually clarify, much to Rick's chagrin. Such meta humor is to be expected on a show co-created by Dan Harmon, whose Community was similarly rife with self-referential asides and characters aware that they're characters. Whether inspired by the feedback of fans or by network notes, this running joke betrays a certain neurosis at the center of Adult Swim's outrageously popular sci-fi sitcom. Beneath the sarcasm, you get the impression that all involved do feel some pressure to meet expectations — to deliver the classic Rick and Morty experience, even if they're as uncertain as Rick is about what the hell that actually means.

Going back to basics has become a little more complicated in Season 7, which premiered October 15. After all, this is the first run of episodes made without Justin Roiland, who was fired back in January following allegations of domestic assault and inappropriate interactions with minors. However much Rick and Morty still reflected Roiland's voice as a writer and creator in later seasons, his literal voice was integral to the show. Soundalike newcomers have now taken over for him, with Ian Cardoni cast as the drunken brainiac inventor while Harry Belden supplies the nervous dialogue of his adolescent nephew.

The good news for those hoping for a clean transition is that Rick and Morty sound about the same as they always did. Still, as if determined to distract from the recasting, the Season 7 premiere surrounds the two with an ensemble of familiar faces, assembled for an intervention that gets out of hand. There's a dramatic throughline to the story, which is all about trying to help a spiraling friend after they've used up all their good will. Mostly, though, "How Poopy Got His Poop Back" plays like fan service, calling back to the show's early seasons mainly by drawing from a pool of old supporting characters. Meanwhile, the involvement of both a guest celebrity voicing himself and a beloved movie monster is about on the level of Family Guy.

The second episode is better. It's a play on the body-swap comedy, though the exact manner of transference that occurs between Jerry and Rick is a little more clever than a mere Freaky Friday gloss. The question posed here is, essentially, would a combination of these very different men be an improvement on them as individuals? Either way, "The Jerrick Trap" is in the grand Rick and Morty tradition of running with a sci-fi idea that could work without the jokes. It's also great fun to parse the dialogue for where Rick ends and Jerry begins.

If it's self-contained fun that defines "classic Rick and Morty," these episodes fit the bill. Truthfully, both are typical of a small-screen comedy that's settled into a groove over the last few seasons, delivering reliable laughs without much evolving or pushing its characters in new directions. In fact, the last time the show felt like it was truly redefining itself was in the third season, when its ratings rose high enough for Adult Swim to broker a deal for a whopping 70 episodes total. That was the year that Rick and Morty went supernova — and also when it effectively, fruitfully blew up its own formula, a change that couldn't keep.

Season 3 remains the creative pinnacle of Rick and Morty. Not coincidentally, it's also the show's darkest stretch. This was the year that Beth and Jerry split up, sending ripples of dysfunction through their broken home and inspiring unhealthy coping mechanisms in their kids, Morty and Summer. It was also the year that Harmon, Roiland, and the rest of the writers really committed to their conception of Rick as a broken person, inflicting constant emotional damage on his family.

It got bleak. The show doubled down on the character's most toxic, destructive qualities, making them into the whole thematic backbone of the season. Brutally incisive character work was often threaded through absurdity: "Pickle Rick," which won the show an Emmy, finds Rick going to truly elaborate, cartoonishly extreme lengths to avoid therapy. And even the most conceptually audacious episodes, like the misleadingly titled tales-from-a-city detour "The Ricklantis Mixup" or the quasi-clip show "Morty's Mind Blowers," had something to say about Rick's psychology and relationships. "Rest and Ricklaxation" was about as close to perfect as Rick and Morty ever got, using an ingenious sci-fi conceit to reveal something telling about the scientist: that he considers his love for Morty an inconvenient liability.

Like any show centered on a charismatic anti-hero, Rick and Morty appealed to fans inclined to idolize a scoundrel. That Rick Sanchez is presented as literally the smartest man in the universe — enduring the stupidity of everyone around him with a cynical rapier wit — made him a fictional role model for trolls everywhere. And if Harmon and Roiland poured any self-critique into the character (the previous season's "Auto Erotic Assimilation," which ends in a very un-jokey suicide attempt, drops parallels to the former's career), it was cut with a certain degree of self-flattery, too. Doesn't everybody secretly want to see themselves as a tortured, wounded genius?

In some ways, Season 3 felt like Harmon and Roiland reckoning with the ballooning popularity of their creation. It was almost an experiment or a dare: Just how bilious, how far gone can we make our protagonist without losing the audience? What if he blacks out and goes full Jigsaw on a team of superheroes? Or wipes his nephew's memory to cover up his worst transgressions? The thrill of the third season was how it built a comic tightrope across the black hole of self-loathing inside Rick, keeping us laughing at the outlandish sci-fi developments even as it found new, increasingly despairing ways to reveal how damaged he was.

Not surprisingly, the show didn't continue down this path. Maybe it couldn't. The third season finale functions, in fact, like a soft reset, returning everything to status quo: Beth and Jerry get back together, the family is whole again, things don't look so dark after all. Rick and Morty wouldn't exactly walk back Rick's worst traits or entirely stop building episodes around them. But going forward, you could feel the series realigning itself — moving back towards something more episodic and less depressing. Which is to say, towards "classic Rick and Morty adventures."

Again, that probably had to happen. The downward spiral of Season 3 couldn't continue for another 40-plus episodes, if only because there's only so low you can take a character before you've hit a rock bottom or numbed the audience. That famously lucrative multi-year deal that Harmon and Roiland inked after the third season was almost a guarantee the show would snap back into something more relatively lighthearted, more sustainably driven by standalone misadventure. That Rick and Morty has now been renewed for an additional three seasons all but kills the likelihood that it will try anything so daring again anytime soon; shows often keep running for years on end by committing to a durable, comforting, consistent formula and following characters functionally incapable of drastically changing.

Still, Rick and Morty has felt a little smaller, a little more arbitrary after hitting its withering peak. The show is still capable of occasional brilliance, mostly of the conceptual variety: Installments like "The Vat of Acid Episode" or "Mortyplicity" find it firing on all brain-bending cylinders. And the delayed payoffs of storylines involving the evil, eye-patched Morty or Beth's space-rebel clone (or is she the real Beth?) prove that the writers haven't abandoned serialization. But it's hard not to lament the dramatic continuity of that third season — to say nothing of its much higher hit-to-miss ratio —as Rick and Morty slouches into the territory of animated sitcoms with indefinite lifespans.

Maybe Season 3 just arrived too early. What could have been a boldly downbeat final act now looks like a brief blip of scathing character study tucked into a super-sized marathon of ongoing science fiction lunacy. If its first two episodes are any indication, Season 7 will continue to strive for traditional Rick and Morty fun, dialing up the planet- or dimension-hopping zaniness while occasionally allowing Rick to roll his eyes at the imperative to do so. But this is one fan who'd rather see it drop some classic Season 3 bummers instead — a few more feel-bad speed bumps on its way to Rick and Morty forever a hundred years.

New episodes of Rick and Morty air Sundays at 11:00 PM ET on Adult Swim. Join the discussion about the show in our forums.

A.A. Dowd is a writer and editor who lives in Chicago.