RJ Writing Ink

Rick and Morty Season 8 Ep 5 Review

Sometimes, the best episodes of a show with serialized storytelling are the one-off ones. The silly ones where nothing of real consequence happens and viewers can enjoy the ride. Granted, this is still Rick and Morty, so whatever they do has consequences; if not for them, then for someone else. In this case, those consequences are felt by the residents of a cryoship they find, leading to a wacky class war that turns into Wacky Races in space!

Oh, and Rick experiences what it’s like to have loving parents, broh.

Rick and Morty Wake up a Cryoship…

While Rick and Morty are cruising through space one day, they stumble across a cryoship, full of sleeping refugees fleeing their destroyed world. The two proceed to get into an argument, with Rick wanting to rob them blind while Morty wants to take the high road. Naturally, this leads to the ship waking everyone from cryostasis. Rather than run for it, Rick doubles down by having them posed as two (apparently) dead passengers. Rick gets mistaken for the son of two wealthy passengers, while Morty is stuck on the lower decks doing cleaning work. Chaos ensues as both wind up in positions of power on opposite sides.

#RickAndMorty pic.twitter.com/weNdxhWPmf

— Badgerclops 3.0 Deluxe Edition (@beeclops2) June 23, 2025

At first glance, the episode makes it seem like the plot will be about Rick and Morty coming into conflict with each other. Morty leads the lower class known as the “Makeys” while Rick throws his lot in with the elites, AKA the “Takeys.” However, it doesn’t take long for the episode to subvert this expectation. Morty quickly realizes that he’s in over his head, but it’s too late to call the workers’ revolution. Meanwhile, despite deceiving the couple, Karen and Doug, he genuinely grows to care about them for the love and pride they give their “son.” It’s been hinted that Rick never had the best relationship with his parents, so this experience is something he enjoys. Sadly, the episode makes any epiphany or lesson learned a moot point halfway through the episode, as its revealed that the vault is empty.

…And it Turns into Wacky Races in Space

Plot-twist time: it turns out that the two passengers on the cryoship that Rick and Morty were posing as, Jimmy and Chachaco, weren’t dead. Not only were they alive, but they had already robbed the vault of all its resources and bailed. And Jimmy put a dead monkey skeleton in his pod to fool his parents because he thought it would be funny. What a little brat!

From then on, the entire episode shifts gears, going from being a class war on a cryoship to what can only be described as Wacky Races in Space. Everyone starts racing for the treasure in this increasingly silly sequence that people will either find hilarious or incredibly stupid. The show itself even lampshades how nonsensical the situation is, and I dont blame it. Rick and Morty even fly through a space coop, and Rick rolls down the windows to have the full experience. That should have killed them in the process!!

#RickAndMorty pic.twitter.com/pAKjZNVnET

— Badgerclops 3.0 Deluxe Edition (@beeclops2) June 23, 2025

In the end, though, Morty decides enough is enough and shoots the treasure out into deep space. In true Rick and Morty fashion, though, people keep fighting over the loot in space suits. But at some point, everyone decides to call it quits and go back into cryostasis. Rick helps Karen and Doug wrangle their bratty son, and installs compliance chips that will force everyone to get along. No one ends up walking away with anything, and it seems like Rick doesn’t learn his lesson, as he opts to go after a medical cryoship minutes later. And Morty? All he does is ask Rick to share the drugs.

What a Silly Episode

This was a very silly and pointless episode of Rick and Morty with no impact on the series as a whole. However, I find that it is often the one-off episodes of a show that I end up going back to rewatch the most. And given how silly the wacky race was, I think that this qualifies for the occasional rewatch. It’s not as strong as the last episode, but they’re not all going to be winners.

S8E6 promo!
WE'RE GOING TO EARTH WORLD!#RickAndMorty pic.twitter.com/0Ye7Xm40Hm

— Badgerclops 3.0 Deluxe Edition (@beeclops2) June 23, 2025

I Give “Cryo Mort a Rickver” a 3/5

Click here to see my other animation stuff. 

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

Click here to see my other animation stuff. 

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

Click here to see my other animation stuff.