Rick and Morty Season 9 Ep 2 Review
You think that being smart or being able to know what’s going to happen would be a good thing, but as Rick and Morty suggests, its a blessing and a curse. For Rick, it means he knows how little everything matters in the grand scheme of things. For me, it means I’ve watched this show long enough to know where it’s going without even finishing an entire episode. That’s right; I didn’t watch the full episode, and I was still able to figure out that Rick’s little misadventure was going to end badly for everyone. And I think I robbed myself of an otherwise emotional episode as we see Rick vs Vacation Rick. Or maybe it was just my brain’s way of managing having to juggle multiple things at once in my life.
Vacation Rick is Okay, I Guess
The episode starts off on a very strange note as we see Rick traveling to a bowling alley in an old RV to meet up with some friends of his who think his name is Ted. At first, I thought that this was another bit that Rick was doing. He would be pretending to not to be who he is so that he can get away from the stress of his regular lifestyle. And to a certain extent, I was right. This is, in fact, Rick’s way of going on vacation. However, after he gets caught in a robbery at a gas station and winds up killing his attacker, it becomes clear that there’s more to this.
As it turns out, Rick’s idea of a vacation involves him taking a vacation from himself. And that by, I mean he erases his own memories for a few weeks and makes himself believe that he’s an average guy so he can live a normal life. Once he’s done, he restores his memories and goes back to how he normally is. Since Vacation Rick is still Rick, though, Rick had Morty and an army of drones on standby to bring him back by force when he inevitably resists.
The problem? Like I just said, Vacation Rick is still Rick. If he doesn’t want to do something, he will fight like hell to avoid it.
This was pretty much the moment where I lost interest in the episode as a whole. I’ve been watching the show for years now, and I knew that this was not going to end well for anyone. Rick is a man who can do anything he wants, and we know he sees his knowledge as a double-edged sword. He believes that ignorance is bliss and that living a normal life to be the ultimate happiness, and is thus willing to lie to himself by becoming vacation Rick. He may end up having a point, though, as once his vacation friends, people from a world with an early 90s aesthetic, learn about everything, it pretty much ruins their lives.
I kind of knew where this was going
I only watched the remainder of the episode intermittently from this point onward. Vacation Rick tries to fight back against regular Rick, but in doing so, he falls into the trap he was trying to escape. His vacation friends start abusing Rick’s resources for their own benefit, and by the end of the episode, “Ted” is pretty much back to being Rick, two of his friends are dead, and he’s no longer welcome among them. By the time he hits the reset button, there’s hardly any difference between vacation Rick and regular Rick. It’s as Emergency Awesome put it: Rick is his own worst enemy.
Maybe I’m just too accustomed to the show or it’s because I can be good at predicting where things will go in fiction, but this episode just wasn’t doing it for me. I liked how emotional it was, but that’s about it. What made it veer back into comedy though was the post-credits scene where we see Rick doing the exact same stunt on another world, only for Summer and Morty to speedrun everything to save everyone the heartache. That was pretty funny.