Film Theory: The Old Rick is Dead! (Rick and Morty)

Thanks to Incogni for sponsoring today's episode Hello Internet! Welcome to Film Theory the show that's also having its main character recast Wubba-dub-dub am I right oh Sorry about that had a Lee in my throat today We're talking about Rick and Morty gotta be real with you and all the craziness that was 2023 I almost missed that Rick and Morty came back But now that I've got a chance to sit down and actually binge through the whole thing I gotta admit that these have got to be some of the best episodes that the team has ever delivered. Okay, tough problem Definitely a spicy meatball, but we can fix it including some huge moments of closure for these characters Thank you for visiting the fear hole Morty your fear of relying on Rick has been delicious We even wrap up some major stories that previously probably would have been milked for entire seasons I threatened why not just do it because using a weapon like this doesn't get you left alone Morty think I want a bunch of vengeful summers coming after me seriously though ** you don't come after me It won't go well.

But you know me sure the new seasons out. We have some laughs We shed some tears But now it's time to do what we love to do at the end of every season of Rick and Morty sit down and analyze The season's theme look at this batch of episodes and try to figure out what they were trying to tell us What was the thesis of this year? In case you missed our season 6 Rick and Morty theories?

We charted out that Rick was clearly on an arc of healing of Confronting the grief that he felt over losing his original wife and daughter and trying to move forward with a new found family What's more season 6 started to dabble with this idea of dissatisfaction where we watch as everyone who gets what they want are ultimately left Empty and unhappy realizing that getting what you want sometimes isn't exactly what you need. Season 7 though It takes these themes and ratchets them up to the next level We see the climax of these character arcs about grief and dissatisfaction and it shows us the Consequences of the two ways that you can deal with grief through good healing and bad healing and through these stories I believe that we can actually pinpoint who's gonna be the next big antagonist for Rick and Morty to face in the coming seasons That's right loyal theorists We are in the process of witnessing the birth of the next big Rick and Morty story arc and it shows us who's gonna be The big bad facing off against the family from the very first episode. Open up your portals friends It's time to jump in now if you miss season 7 to Rick and Morty I highly recommend that you go and give it a watch It provides some of the best episodes of the series period but it also gives us some of the most Rick and Morty esque Ideas ever to be put to screen I'm talking about planets full of people who turned a spaghetti when they die Rick and Jerry fusing together into one super being Generation-long wars between letters and numbers fronted by Ice-T himself But on top of all the fun adventure of the week stories season 7 also brings together and wraps up some of the show's longest Running plot threads the biggest ones being Rick prime and evil Morty after spending his entire adult life hunting down the man that killed his family the reason Rick is the way that he is Rick and Morty finally are able to Confront Rick prime and with the help of evil Morty of all people they wind up winning Evil Morty serves Rick prime up hogtied on a silver platter and then leaves and so of course mind overtaken by rage Rick goes ham Killing Rick prime with his bare hands and a splatter a spaghetti sauce so brutal that it goes well beyond the point of YouTube monetization.

At first glance this seems like it should be the big climax of the series I mean the show's bringing in four of its biggest players and letting them duke it out Ending in the death of what's arguably Rick and Morty's main villain But with the primary antagonist now off the board the real villain of this series can appear Rick's emptiness in the wake of killing Rick Prime Rick feels nothing he realizes that completing this lifelong mission of vengeance hasn't really healed the part of him That's been aching for years He was given a motivation to track down Rick prime and kill him believing that this would be the magical thing that would help him Feel better the magical thing that could potentially bring Diane back But now without that target to distract himself Rick has to sit there with his pain knowing that he can never really undo this loss This man the smartest man in the galaxy who can heal any wound who has taken down God who has brought himself back from the brink Of death now has to confront the one thing that he can't fix the one thing that he can't just science into submission And what's worse is that Rick prime made sure to twist the knife on his way out letting Rick know that he used a powerful Super weapon known as the Omega device to erase Diane from the entirety of the multiverse no matter where or when Rick goes he can Never ever get Diane back. But perhaps the most interesting thing about this episode was its placement in the season It's episode 5 right in the middle you'd think that this would be the sort of thing that they would save as an epic climax To the season, but it's not because putting it there would miss the point entirely. The battle That's the centerpiece of Rick and Morty isn't against Rick prime.

It was never against Rick prime. It's against yourself It's about finding a healing for your own emotional scars. The death of Rick prime in the middle of the season allows the back five Episodes to answer the really important question then: was any of this worth it?

Sure Rick got what he wanted vengeance But did it actually do anything to heal him clearly not in a way that left him satisfied all in all it was bad Healing its surface level at best it leaves Rick arguably in a worse place than when he first started and it requires a now Directionless Rick to find new purpose and thankfully for him He has all the necessary ingredients for good healing right in front of him his family and especially his grandkids in the episode Rick Fending Your Mort Morty checks in on a clearly depressed Rick and does his best to make him feel better by cashing in his Morty Adventure cards encouraging Rick to take him on another adventure just to get him out of his funk. I'm not right now Morty Definitely next week though A while now buddy, so I think I'm gonna give you a little nudge by cashing in a few of these bad boys And in the episode wet kuat a Mordecai summer Rick admits that he respects summer partially because her headstrong personality reminds him of Diane I treat you like an equal because I respect you. Reminds me of your grandmother.

All of this comes to a head in the season 7 finale fear no more It's probably one of the top 5 episodes The show has ever produced which sees Rick and Morty discovering a mysterious fear hole in a Denny's Bathroom a hole with the ability to manifest the greatest fears of anyone that jumps inside. Though they initially decide to leave it alone Morty rushes back in and jumps down the hole with Rick following after to save him They both fight off monsters until they're both able to escape from the hole later when they arrive home Diane appears out of a portal and Rick and Morty soon realized that they're still stuck inside the fear hole Rick thinks It's because Morty's afraid of losing him to Diane Morty thinks that his greatest fear is watching Rick die Intent to get them both out of the fear hole Morty continually faces his fears in an attempt to overcome them But nothing works until Rick mentions that Morty is irreplaceable. Come on, you're irreplaceable This makes Morty realize that this Rick he isn't real Rick never entered the hole after him Morty's greatest fear is his Overreliance on Rick finally overcoming this true fear Morty escapes the hole awakening to find Rick watching him from the outside This entire experience is a massive step forward for Morty But it also winds up showing how far the positive healing has been for Rick.

After Morty mentions that he saw Diane inside the hole Rick runs back to it for a moment It looks like he's gonna jump in to try and desperately hold on to Diane in any way that he can just like we've seen Him try to do over and over and over again in the series But then Rick stops instead of jumping in the hole He takes out a photo of Morty from his wallet tacks it up onto the wall of victors people who escaped from the hole It's an act of pride in his grandson this person who represents Rick's future instead of just always going back to his past Rick is showing us that he's moved beyond just the empty bad healing that he'd been pursuing this entire time and is starting to work Towards true good healing deeper healing and that's not the only thing that can help Rick heal So can the sponsor of today's episode Incogni. I don't know if this has ever happened to you But sometimes I'll be doing some Google searches while researching for a theory and then like clockwork a day or two later I'm flooded with ads about that exact same topic or I'll sign up for a newsletter for a store that I really like And then suddenly get sent a bunch of spam emails out of nowhere This sort of thing happens because there are literally Thousands of companies out there whose sole purpose is to collect your personal data and then sell or trade that data for their own profit They include your full name your email and home address even your phone and social security number They might even have access to your secret Szechuan sauce recipe Thankfully if you ask these data brokers to delete your information, they legally have to do it But the bad news is that it would take an average person Years of time to do it by themselves time that you should be using doing things that you actually love to do like going on adventures through time and space with your Favorite grandson and this is where Incogni comes in See, it's literally Incogni's job to do all that work for you with your permission They can track down all of these brokers and make sure that your data is off the market We've partnered with Incogni in the past and let me tell you the before and after of my email inbox and text messages is Huge actually went back to take a look at how it was going and they were still fighting for me completing almost 120 removal Requests since late August that saved me by their calculation literally 88 hours of my time And it's also made a noticeable difference in the amount of spam that's clogging up my emails Basically, I haven't had to worry about getting these weird newsletters or shady offers at all So if you want to protect your personal data and keep your private information private Please go to Incogni. com/film theory and then use our code of film theory to get 60% off their annual plan once again, that's Incogni and cog and I dot com slash Film Theory or you know, save yourself the hassle and just click the link in the description because it is so much easier that way You can get a great deal on their great service.

Thanks again to Incogni for sponsoring today's video Now let's jump back in to the multiverse of Rick and Morty for the first half of the season The show really focuses on the concept of bad healing touching more characters than just Rick For example in the episode Air Force Wong We see how President Curtis responds to a breakup by hijacking a hive mind hoping to see his approval ratings hit a hundred percent Cuz if he can't have the approval of the woman he loves well the rest of the United States will have to do This is the perfect example of trying to use external approval as a method for healing Something that ends up hurting both the person trying to heal as well as everyone around him similarly in the season premiere how poopy got His poop back. We see how Mr Poopybutthole is dealing with the divorce and let's say it's not going too well I agree, Beth, I'm a piece of garbage. Instead of letting go of his ex-wife moving on and creating a healthy new direction for his life to go in to support his Son, Mr Poopybutthole goes on a bender with Rick and Hugh Jackman ending up kidnapping poor poopy jr The way he's trying to quote-unquote He'll here is by holding on to everything that he lost to the point that it ends up hurting the people that he cares about The most sound familiar.

Well, it should it's what Rick's been doing to the Smith family for the past six seasons As you'd expect this sort of selfish coping ultimately doesn't turn out all that well for poopy She's in for episode three. Let's go. This is exactly what Rick would have done earlier in the series.

MrPoopybutthole is what Rick could have become but he doesn't because of his family and all the good healing that happens After he kills Rick Prime you want some proof All you have to do is look into the back half of season 7 episodes and you get your answer For example both those episodes I mentioned earlier where Rick leans on Morty and summer to positively heal they come after he kills Rick Prime In Rise of the Numericons we see the Alphabetrians and Numbericons heal a rift between their people That's lasted for generations all because two of them realized that they weren't all that different with the help of Rick I think when we started getting it on that amulet showed us the truth of our origin father in Mort Ragnarok Rick starts the episode trying to take advantage of Bigfoot to gain power enough So that Bigfoot literally wants to kill Rick over and over but by the end of it all he finds common ground with Bigfoot and the Two part ways on good terms. Why are we at the woods? Time to go on home big fella.

Oh Okay, you're free And of course the fear hole represents the end of that growth arc But my favorite example that I want to call attention to actually comes from the episode right before Rick kills Rick Prime In it we see a miniature version of this entire arc that Rick's on in the season standout episode That's a Morty we see a planet where those who choose to end their own life have their internal organs turned to spaghetti Yep, that is really the plot and trust me. They somehow find a way to make it work Their cortisol increases the starch content in their bloodstream changing their intestines into one long spaghetti noodle The most messed up part of this whole thing is that the spaghetti is delicious and everybody wants to eat it despite realizing where it came from This ends up turning into big business for the planet who then encouraged more and more people to cut their lives short all for their Own profits truly it is a messed up idea But it's a brilliant commentary on how sometimes we can only see people as numbers a source for content feeding on their misery and self-destruction Literally finding their pain delicious. So we continue to inflict it and feed off of it So then where does the healing come in?

Well at the end of the episode Rick and Morty broadcast the entire life of an old man showing his pain But also his ups his downs his loves his heartbreak his humanity and afterwards. No one can stomach the spaghetti anymore They suddenly see the people on this planet is more than just content They see the beauty of the humanity in this situation how relatable it all is and suddenly Everyone is able to heal as for Rick. It's the seed That's the beginning of his choice to move forward in a healthy way one that becomes all the more powerful given how far he's come So that's everything that happened the season But obviously it wouldn't be a Rick and Morty theory if we didn't also try to figure out where things are headed to next and I believe that it all comes down to this little guy.

I don't believe it's any coincidence that this season was bookended by mr Poopybutthole in fact these episodes show just how far in the opposite direction He's growing from Rick and the Smith's not only did we see him try to kidnap his own child as I talked about before But in the stinger the last episode mr. Poopy butthole follows the darkest of paths killing and replacing a separate mr. Poopybutthole from another universe to replace him to live his happy life with his happy family Sounds a lot like something Rick used to do huh finding a new universe to start over in when everything falls apart in his life Resetting things back to a status quo so he never has to grow never has to face his own pain What's more the series is gonna need itself a new antagonistic force now that Rick Prime is dead and evil Morty is off the table That is the role mr.

Poopybutthole is gonna be taken here in a similar way to how Rick Prime was the Rickest Rick the person that most embodied The worst of Rick's traits earlier in his life mr. Poopybutthole is gonna become the healed Rick's opposite someone who's felt a lot of the same pain But goes about healing from it in the worst ways possible hurting everyone around him He'll embody all the bad healing that Rick himself used to embrace in the end Rick's ultimate test isn't his own healing But whether he's able to teach others his best friends how to heal, but hey That's just a theory a film theory and cut!