How ‘Rick and Morty’s Season 4 premiere marks a new era for the show

This article contains spoilers for the Season 4 premiere of Rick and Morty

While basking in the excitement of watching a brand-new episode of Rick and Morty on Sunday after a long two-year wait, this slow, creeping realization dawned on me: This feels… different.

Not bad, necessarily. Not better, either. What the Season 4 premiere of Rick and Morty definitively declared is that we’re embarking on a new era of Adult Swim’s hit animated series, both in terms of the show’s relationship to fan demands and also its notoriously time-consuming, delay-ridden writing process that caused three-year gaps between seasons.

The premiere announced the old Rick and Morty dead within the first four minutes, by sending its titular character hurtling through a window to be impaled on a spike. Sure, we’ve seen lots of other Ricks die before, and assumed there’d be a clone-type solution for it. But even his temporary death felt different, the camera lingering on its gruesomeness and Morty’s shaken reaction. It’s almost like the writers were giving the audience a moment of shock, then time to process the metaphorical death of what Rick and Morty used to be.

Don’t trust my word for it, though.

The premiere announced the old Rick and Morty dead within the first four minutes

A majority of the episode consisted of both Rick and Morty themselves wrestling with the existential question of what the “new” Rick and Morty should be from now on. A litany of fourth-wall-breaking meta-jokes served as mouthpieces for criticisms that a subset of fans waged against the last season, with others serving as stand-ins for co-creator Dan Harmon’s response to those criticisms (to paraphrase: “fuck off”).

When fascist Morty pointedly kills fascist Rick for being “too political,” he says it’s because he wants instead to go back to the “fun, classic Rick and Morty adventures like in the old days.” 

Later on in the space ship, a classic fan-favorite Season 1 character Gearhead sits inexplicably in the backseat, unaddressed, as fascist Morty rants again about how his new Rick needs to, “stop doing meta-commentary. Just have fun. We’re going on a simple, fun classic adventure.” Annoyed, Rick says it’d be easier to give fascist Morty what he wants if he could name one specific thing he liked more than what they’re already doing. “I like Mr. Meeseeks,” he replies.

Sure enough, the fan-favorite blue servant creatures from Season 2 make a brief, flaccid, unnecessary return as well later in the episode, defending regular Morty from the police as he’s destroying the town.

The Season 4 premiere even ends with a rant from both characters about how “from now on Rick and Morty will do a little of this and a little of that,” and that, “sometimes we’ll do classic stuff, you know, other times we’ll do whatever,” before calling for “100 years of Rick and Morty not sticking to one path! Trying different things!”

This premiere-ending rant was yet another callback to previous seasons: the now-infamous Season 3 premiere rant that ended with Rick declaring there’d be a nine-season Szechuan sauce story arc — with that rant itself being a callback to his Season 2 rant about having 100 more years of Rick and Morty.

It’s hard to say exactly what this Russian nesting doll of callbacks means. But they start to make some sense when put in the context of how Harmon’s trolled fan expectations in the past, how the Season 4 premiere marks a departure from how he’s approached writing the show before, and how that all fits into the massive, unheard of 70-episode deal they signed with Adult Swim.

The first possibility is that the premiere’s heavy-handed callbacks are essentially another fuck you to the fans who raged against the “politics” of Season 3 (aka having female writers) and demanded a return to “classic” Season 1-2 Rick and Morty. 

With the extremely meh return of Gearhead and Mr. Meeseeks, Harmon gave those “disgusting” “idiot” “knobs” exactly what they wanted — only to show them that what they wanted sucks. Because these fan-demanded reprisals meant nothing, did nothing, weren’t funny, and at most gave some people a small easter egg nostalgia dopamine hit of, “Hahahaha, I remember that character!!!!”

What’s indisputable is that bringing back these fan favorites for seemingly no reason is not the cautious, thoughtful approach Harmon and others previously insisted was necessary to justify their return.

In a 2015 Comic-Con panel, Harmon said, “There was a heavy impulse in Season 2 to not call anything back from Season 1,” because he was scared the show would devolve into a bunch of insular inside jokes. 

His opinions on that rule did soften a year later, when he told Slashfilm that if they came up with a great idea or reason for bringing back the Meeseeks, why not do it?

Co-creator Justin Roiland added that, “Throughout the course of Season 3, we’ve had Meeseeks in two or three episodes and ultimately cut it,” because, “it’s just like a background. It’s not really servicing something new. It feels too cutesy.”

Show writer Ryan Ridley added that, “If we’re going to do that, it’s motivated by what do we know about the Meeseeks and how can we open up that mythology instead of just having Justin going, ‘I’m Mr. Meeseeks.’”

Yet that’s exactly what the Meeseeks’ untriumphant return in the Season 4 premiere felt like: cutesy, not new, adding nothing but a background of Justin Roiland saying, “I’m Mr. Meeseeks!”

But the episode’s meta jokes and callbacks also seem to hint at something much larger than just Dan Harmon giving a convoluted “fuck you” to shitty fan backlash. Because the Meeseeks weren’t the only “meh” whimper from a show that’s known for kicking off new seasons with a bang. 

Which points to a potentially more worrying shift in the overall show.

Don’t get me wrong, the premiere episode was certainly serviceable: Some good laughs, pretty smart, a satisfactory arc. But did it feel anywhere close to the revolutionary juggernaut that inspired a million glowing think pieces about how it’s continuously evolving to push the boundaries of what TV, comedy, and animation are capable of? No.

Again, don’t take my word on that. Rick says it himself during the rant at the end of the episode: “Rick and Morty pushing it to the limit! But also not anywhere near the limit sometimes!”

The new era that Season 4 premiere ultimately feels like it’s ushering in is a Rick and Morty that’s come to terms with the fact that doing OK episodes sometimes is just going to have to be good enough. And those are also words straight out of Dan Harmon’s mouth.

Doing OK episodes sometimes is just going to have to be good enough

“That ‘good enough’ concept is very nuanced. It’s something I’ve been talking to my therapist about,” he told GQ in a 2018 profile after Season 3. “I need to form a new neural pathway that allows for ‘good enough’ the same way someone would to quit smoking or drinking. My brain just hits this wall. Like, Oh God, they’re going to find out I’m a charlatan. I don’t know how to write. But the only way they could find out I was a charlatan is if I didn’t turn in a script.”

In the past, the writers of Rick and Morty gave themselves the luxury of time and endless rewrites until each episode reached Harmon’s nearly impossible bar for the highest possible quality script. He’s stated repeatedly that was the reason for the massive, years-long delays and inconsistent periods between season releases.

But the fact is Rick and Morty isn’t the niche, underdog Adult Swim animated series we fell in love with anymore — and I don’t mean in the sense that the show itself changed drastically. 

The context around it changed forever, transforming it from a show into a phenomenon that requires a new approach that’s neither wholly worse or better than what it was before.

In the years since “classic” Rick and Morty debuted in 2013, it became the top-rated comedy on TV in 2017, breaking all sorts of records for Adult Swim and animated shows in general. It inspired a fan movement so rabid that not even McDonald’s could handle its masses, leading to packets of fucking shitty Schezuan sauce to sell for $15,000 real US dollar. It’s a huge draw for events like the upcoming Adult Swim Fest, which will show an exclusive early screening of an episode during a prime time slot. Rick and Morty is the flagship show for an entire network now, with a lot of money riding on it releasing on a more consistent basis than the previous “it’ll premiere when it’s done” deadline.

Something had to give. And like another crappily animated underdog animated series that turned into a cultural phenomenon, the creators of Rick and Morty have had to make some changes to what it originally was. But that doesn’t mean it’s lost any of its heart. And it also doesn’t mean there isn’t a lot to be excited about as we watch it evolve and change for many years to come, with the understanding that some evolutions will produce greatness and some will produce “meh.”

Much like the lesson Morty learns from the death crystal fiasco in the Season 4 premiere, “You have to think ahead and live in the moment.” The new Rick and Morty will need to find a balance between the predictability of a certain timeline and the more exciting unpredictability of a timeline.

As Morty says, it’s about splitting the diff, sacrificing a little bit of the fun chaos of its earlier seasons for the more consistent release of future seasons.

Of course, this is all based on only a single episode of Season 4, and who knows what the nature of the season to come will even be. But if we want to take the characters at their own word, this is what we can expect of Rick and Morty from now on. And honestly, that’s pretty great if you ask me.

Because as it turns out, even “good enough” Rick and Morty is still pretty fucking great.