RJ Writing Ink

Rick and Morty S8 EP 4 Review

For a show mainly focused on sci-fi adventures, Rick and Morty manages to have a lot of holiday episodes. The Christmas episodes can be some of the best in the entire series, and the Thanksgiving episode was insane. When the first teaser for Season 8 revealed that we’d be getting an Easter episode, though, I’ll admit I was skeptical. How could a special about Easter end up being as crazy as what fans have come to expect? As it turns out, all it took was Jerry, a few movie references, and the not-so-wholesome origins behind Easter icons like the bunny and eggs.

Easter Ruined by Jerry

It all starts a few days before Easter Sunday, and while Jerry is wholeheartedly embracing the holiday, his family couldn’t care less. Until Jerry accidentally runs over and, apparently, kills the Easter Bunny. This curses him to transform into a were-rabbit in a plot straight out of The Santa Clause, forcing Rick and Morty to go in search of a cure. In doing so, they uncover the true meaning of Easter: it’s a war between aliens.

Someone on the Rick and Morty team must have thought it would’ve been funny to satirize the entirety of Easter, because this episode doesn’t hold anything back. The opening has Jerry acting like Easter is Christmas, complete with hanging up decorations and singing a retooled version of “Deck the Halls.” At first, it looks like he’s just being overly into the holiday, the show wastes no time in having his family call him out for his love being based on shallow commercialism. The fact that he can’t even name what day Easter is only cements this. That’s a big jab at how capitalism has turned the holiday into one less about Christ or pre-Christian traditions, and more about selling candy. The show’s not wrong, either. Unless you’re a kid looking forward to the candy and eggs, or are actively religious, most people have no reason to care about Easter.

The satirization goes even further, though, as the main plot of the episode tackles the opposing aspects of the holiday. And it does it through aliens.

Easter Ruined by Aliens

Like several other major holidays, Easter started as a pre-Christian celebration. In this case, it celebrated the arrival of spring, with the rabbit and eggs serving as symbols of fertility and renewal. Christianity co-opted it like it did with Christmas and made it into a more wholesome holiday. And as Rick and Morty discover, the reason for these different versions of the holiday are because of interference from aliens.

It turns out, the Easter Bunny is an alien sent by other aliens to act as a living aphrodisiac. This would compel a population to breed until overpopulation brought about their collapse, with Earth being one of their targets. The Easter Aliens rivals opposed this by sending their best warrior to kill the Bunny on Earth, only for him to get crucified as Jesus and start Christianity.

That’s not even the craziest part. While the Easter aliens (who look like Easter Island heads with bodies) are never given a motivation, the Christian aliens reason for oppossing them is because…they don’t like s**. They think it’s gross and hate it.

The Less you Know about Some Holidays, the better

Honestly, this is a hilarious take on the different versions of Easter. The idea of two alien races fighting a war over chastity vs lust for the sake of it is so dumb, it’s funny. Rick and Morty sum up how the show wants the audience to react when they acknowledge how dumb it is. And by the time they manage to stop the Easter curse, the entire family is dissillusioned with Easter altogether. As the last Christian alien crawls away missing half their body, Morty tells his mom that it’s not worth knowing. What it does do, though is lead the family to spend the rest of the year destroying decorations for all holidays. And somehow, they forgot about Summer, forcing her to spend the last eight months on Spring Break!

If last week’s episode was the best-written episode of the season right now, then I think that this episode is the funniest. It’s stupid, nonsensical, and completely skewers Easter as a holiday. I loved it, and my only regret is that it didn’t release around actual Easter. I’m going to have rewatch it next year when the time comes!

I Give “The Last Temptation of Jerry” a 4.5/5

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Rick and Morty S8 EP 3 Review

For almost as long as there has been Rick and Morty, there was the Citadel of Ricks. The idea of an entire society being made up of variants of two people was one of the show’s strongest aspects, and some of its best moments have had to do with the Citadel. So when it was ultimately destroyed by Evil Morty at the end of Season Five, it was the end of an era for the show. Ricks and Mortys would continue to exist, but they no longer had a place where they could gather, leaving many stranded in whatever dimension they were in. While this wasn’t the first time the Citadel was seemingly destroyed, there was always the chance that it could be rebuilt in the future. However, the third episode of this season confirms that this time, the Citadel isn’t coming back.

Exit, Stage Left

The episode starts off with our Rick and Morty forced to make an emergency landing while scavenging the wreckage of the Citadel, leading them to discover a few stragglers still hanging around. The episode teaser made it seem like our Rick and Morty would be getting into conflict with these other Ricks and Mortys. However, the episode quickly makes it clear that it tricked us. Our Rick and Morty exit stage left and don’t appear again until the aftermath of what goes down.

The Citadel of Ricks Tries to Rebuild

This episode serves as a spiritual sequel to the Season Three episode “The Ricklantis Mixup,” which focused exclusively on the Citadel of Ricks and its populace. It was one of the series’ best episodes, showing just how good a story could be gotten out of a society essentially made up of two people. Now that that society has fallen, though, we get to see what its population has been up to. In this case, that population consisting of clones of Rick and Morty created by the Citadel to maintain its population. When Rick reset portal travel, they were left stranded due to not having a home dimension to return to. In true Rick fashion, most of the surviving Ricks are trying to rebuild the Citadel under a Rick created to be a mascot for a gumbo restaurant. And they’re kidnapping any Mortys they can find, hoping to use them to restart the cloning process to gain more slave labor. The sole exception to this is Farmer Rick, who serves as the focus of the episode. When the other Ricks try to kill him in their latest raid and torch his homestead, he goes on a path of revenge.

The Citadel in the Wild West

Like it’s name implies, this episode is pretty much a fusion of space westerns and John Wick, with Farmer Rick serving as the John Wick. It’s revealed that he was in charge of cloning at the Citadel halfway through the episode, but like our Rick, he’s come to see the place as a failed experiment. He knows that bringing it back will only cause more pain and suffering, and, while he flat-out denies it, it’s obvious he stuck near the Mortys as a form of penance. It doesn’t make it a good person, but it demonstrates how Rick has always had it in him to be a better person. Case in point, while he doesn’t have to do it, he winds up saving the surviving Mortys and helping them escape the Citadel while he stays behind to finish the job. And by the time he’s done, what was left of the Citadel of Ricks is a smoldering crater with presumably no survivors.

While it’s possible that another version of it might come about down the road, the Citadel as we’ve known it is gone for good. If the destruction of the actual Citadel isn’t enough to hammer that home, it’s the fact that the remaining Morty clones decide to go their separate ways. They each find new lives based on their own interests, away from the usually toxic relationship they have with Rick. The sole exception to this is a Morty called Arcade Morty, who chooses to live in Farmer Rick’s homestead. He has no other place to call home, and as the episode ends with him watching how much healthier our Rick and Morty’s relationship has become, he’s even denied that.

Great Ending to the Citadel Story

This might be the best episode of the season thus far. It not only closes the book on the Citadel, it does so by fusing John Wick with sci-fi westerns. If shows like The Mandalorian have shown in recent years, there’s still an audience for the western genre, even if it’s acting as sci-fi. Even if the show does bring the Citadel back, this episode is still pretty solid.

I Give “The Rick, The Mort, and the Ugly” a 4.5/5

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