Deconstruction / Rick and Morty

Rick and Morty

Deconstruction in this series.

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The Show

• The character of Rick Sanchez himself is a scathing criticism of nihilism and insufferable genius tropes. Rick believes that because he exists in an infinite multiverse of infinite possibilities, nothing matters in the grand scheme of things because nothing is unique and it's all on random chance. But it becomes very clear that Rick is a prime example of how destructive and pointless it is to fixate on such an idea. Rick isn’t better for being a nihilistic know-it-all but rather ends up alienating those around him and routinely hurting his loved ones with his narcissistic behavior, and he just ends up becoming a self-destructive asshole who drives away almost everyone who cares about him. He destroys people's lives without much thought and is quick to abandon anyone if he is even moderately annoyed by something. He was the cause of multiple world-ending events, and most of his adventures end with most people either worse off or dead. The worst part is that he will literally give a shrug if he was the direct cause and move on, displaying full on the negative aspects of not caring but using his nihilism and intelligence to justify his incredibly shitty attitude and actions, even as his repeated tendency to do whatever he wants without caring about the consequences causes all kinds of damage to everyone and everything around him, especially to those he cares about. It’s only recently that he even starts caring about others, but then he can still move on to other worlds and abandon friends and family without a moment of hesitation. Furthermore, it also becomes increasingly implied that Rick isn't truly nihilistic and he's just using the idea of nihilism as a coping mechanism, which can be seen when all his talk of nothing mattering going right out the window whenever he feels personally slighted - which highlights how hypocritical he often is.
• The episode "The Rickchurian Mortydate" deconstructed the show. The episode is more or less a systematic attack on Rick and Morty's usual formula of adventures, deliberately making the usual gimmicks anti-climactic by exposing what happens when Rick doesn't have an obvious Eviler than Thou enemy to offend, and when his own attitude and gimmicks get turned against him:
  • At the start of the episode, Rick irritates the US Government for really no reason, acting like a smartass when he really should keep his mouth shut. This leads to Serial Escalation because the POTUS is not an Arch-Enemy, but a Hero Antagonist who is closer to Sitcom Archnemesis, and Rick's behaviour comes across as Disproportionate Retribution precisely because as Dr. Wong notes, he can't handle mundane everyday life, and pretends he's in an adventure when he isn't.
    • Throughout the series, Rick has killed plenty of people with his inventions with casual indifference. When he has a secret service agent killed by his Touch of Death during the standoff, it sours the situation immediately, a cabinet member chides him for not just knocking him out, and the POTUS angrily calls him out for committing murder in the Oval Office. Ironically, Rick did warn the agent not to touch him, justified the lethality as a necessary deterrent, and even tried to de-escalate the situation twice so he understands that he shouldn't pick a fight. However, his ego wouldn't accept anything less than getting what he wants (for Morty to take a selfie with the President), so things still spiraled out of control.
  • His constant nihilism and Contemplate Our Navels attitude to the multiverse and expecting his family to share his attitude and get with his program and crazy schemes get turned back, when they decide to restore the status-quo, and when Rick insists about how meaningless and disposable the multiverse is, Beth simply asks why Rick doesn't go find an alternate version of them that shares his attitude, while Summer in response to his usual Straw Nihilist spiel reacts by farting, similar to how Rick usually reacts to other people's serious concerns by snide toilet humor. Rick's crazy adventures could only break apart the family, while at the same time, Rick does depend on the same family for some kind of connection since he can't do without them. This leads to the status-quo coming back.
• "A Rickconvenient Mort":
  • Morty becomes immediately smitten with Planetina, after seeing her take down a Card-Carrying Villain and saving him from acid rain burns. They go on a date, and Morty thinks that it's true love. Beth goes This Is Gonna Suck, first by gently asking how old Planetina is while Summer says that by Morty's description, Planetina is a sapient bunch of elements and materials. It ends up being that because Planetina has only been summoned to handle ecological disasters and to do PR for her "kids," she has no idea how to function as a human being when Morty "saves" her from the Tina-teers. Case in point, after one date she sends him a living flower topiary of his face, and visits him in his room, having a makeout session with him; that's not cute, that's stalkerish. Beth herself notes that it seems to be too sudden when Morty says he wants Planetina to move in with the Smiths. Rather than talk out other solutions with Morty when they both realize the problem of saving the planet is too big for either of them to handle— and Rick is doing a planet-hopping orgy with Summer— Planetina goes for the violent option, as Morty begs her to stop.
  • The idea of the Planeteers is further deconstructed; the Tina-teers lack the Heart element, which Gaea in the original show said was the most important. Without someone to remind them of their compassion, and with about thirty years passing, the Tina-teers have all Took a Level in Cynic and Took a Level in Jerkass. A living person cannot match up to those ideals. They use Planetina to rake in money and look good, while basically using her as their disposable income.
  • The episode shows one of the biggest flaws of the original Captain Planet and the Planeteers show: not everyone who's causing destruction to the environment in real life is a Card-Carrying Villain polluting For the Evulz, many are just regular people who need to put food on their plate without any better, greener income options available to them. However, Planetina still operates on the Black-and-White Morality of the Captain Planet setting, which is incompatible in a more morally complex setting, turning her methods into Black-and-White Insanity instead.
  • Morty's status as a Hormone-Addled Teenager is further deconstructed. In previous seasons when he did stupid stuff to pleasure himself or get a girl, either Rick bailed him out— or sabotaged the relationship— or Morty would screw up and suffer short-term consequences. He's convinced that because Planetina is a superhero, a Nice Girl, and literally made up of the Earth's elements that she is the one for him, especially when she surprises him for a nighttime makeout session and no Rick-level disasters happened during their donut date. Jerry is disturbed when Morty casually relates how he slaughtered the Tina-teers after they tried to maul him and auction off Planetina to an interested bidder, and even though Planetina is grateful, she questions Morty if killing her "kids" was necessary considering how over-the-top he went. While Beth's ways of expressing her concerns weren't nice— she called out Planetina for Morty wanting to invite her to stay rather than Morty for springing a decision on the family so abruptly — she tries to warn her son that if you think with your pants and believe it's your heart, there will be hell to pay down the line. A date with Jessica was one thing because Jessica is an ordinary girl and around Morty's age; Planetina is literally not a human being, and she lacks the social skills to understand more complicated relationships. After spending a few weeks with his girlfriend, sure enough, Morty goes from loving Planetina to being scared of her when she kills 300 miners that refuse to listen to her when she begs them to not destroy the planet.
• "Solaricks"
  • The show's way of treating universes as disposable and easily replaceable gets deconstructed when Morty gets sent back to his original world, which was overtaken by the Cronenbergs, and is horrified that the world has gotten even worse and more overgrown than when he was there with Summer in "The Rickshank Redemption". Hermit Jerry also calls him out for being so chill about it in the past, reminding us that those universes are filled with thinking, feeling people and that the harm done to them doesn't just go away because they leave them behind without looking back.
  • Took a Level in Badass: Deconstructed with Hermit Jerry; he is now way more competent than any other Jerry we've seen on the show so far, but as he points out to Morty, it's come at the terrible cost of losing his world to an invasion of monstrosities, his wife and daughter dying, and his son leaving this world behind and only returning once to use his old family as a prop to teach Summer a lesson about Rick. Even though he claims his life is great now that he doesn't have to care about anyone anymore, he is clearly heartbroken underneath.
    Jerry: Oh, am I cool enough for you now? Well, that was easy. It only cost me fucking everything!
• "Juricksic Mort"
  • The Alien Dinosaurs turn the world into a Utopia. Unfortunately, it turns out it sucks because everyone is bored out of their minds due to not having anything to do.
    Rick: I do think its kinda funny that you are basically all Jerry now.
    Beth: (Beat) Fuck.

The Comic

• In issue #4 of Rick and Morty vs. Dungeons & Dragons, Jerry, benefiting from his character's heightened Intelligence and Charisma, explains to Morty that Rick isn't actually "cool", but merely acts "cool". That is; whilst Rick normally can exploit his Mad Scientist skills to achieve ridiculous feats and impress people, that doesn't make him a good person—in fact, he's a downright lousy person who, as Jerry puts it, isn't good about caring for other people.
• "Painscape" can be considered this to Rick’s status as a Jerk Sue Invincible Hero, as well as a Spiritual Antithesis to the first series:
  • Like in Chapter I, Jerry’s knowledge and skill allows him to rally everyone together and utilize their skills to hold back the invading horde. Unfortunately, this time, this strategy doesn't work; since Rick tends to create overpowered characters, the longer they remain in the Prime Universe, the more the rules of reality change to suit their needs, until they are eventually able to just No-Sell any and every attack from Jerry and the rest of the army, requiring the intervention of an also-overpowered Rick to defeat them.
  • The flashback also shows how Rick, Munchkin that he is, kept creating D&D characters that he soon discarded for not being strong enough for his standards. Him doing so is what causes the entire conflict "Painscape", which is made worse by the fact that the characters he created are, like him, overpowered by anyone else's standards to the point of eventually becoming invincible.