Rick and Morty – Rickfending Your Mort Review

The previous episode of Rick and Morty, “Unmortricken” was a surprisingly serious and important episode. The follow-up episode “Rickfending Your Mort” aimed to lighten things after something so heavy.

Rick has become depressed and dejected. To get him out of his funk, Morty attempts to cash in a load of his Adventure Cards. Rick questions this and attempts to have an audit, which leads to Rick and Morty being put on trial by the Observers, a species of alien rocks.

“Rickfending Your Mort” was an attempt to re-capture the magic of “Morty’s Mind Blowers.” “Morty’s Mind Blowers” was a hilarious episode that showed numerous fun and twisted adventures that had been erased from Morty’s memory and it was Rick and Morty‘s version of a clip show. It was better than the “Interdimensional Cable” episodes since it was more focused.

“Rickfending Your Mort” had a different framing device to “Morty’s Mind Blowers,” both had the same premise, showing lots of mini adventures. “Rickfending Your Mort” was a more mixed affair than “Morty’s Mind Blowers.”

There were some terrific and hilarious sequences. The story of Morty and Churry’s friendship was silly and wholesome due to their fun antics before Morty performed a dick move. Another highlight was the sequence where Morty turns into a boat and along with two bullies ends up re-enacting Castaway. It was funny and went into dark territory.

However, other sequences weren’t as strong. There were many pop culture references like Rick and Morty being in the Blade Universe, and Rick pointing to one of the adventures being like Legend of Zelda. Other segments were too dependent on references from previous episodes, like “Analyze Piss” or being too similar to sequences in “Morty’s Mind Blowers,” such as Rick tricking Morty into doing something gross. All this came across as a rehash and being lazy at times. To be fair, the Pet Sematary skit was a brilliant twist on the Stephen King story where Rick and Morty employed the scientific method with the resurrection soil.

The use of a trial as a framing device for a clip show has been used before in other animated shows. I thought of The Simpsons when Kang and Kodos judged humanity on Homer’s memories in “Gump Roast,” the American Dad episode “Most Adequate Christmas Ever” where Stan Smith’s actions were tried in court, and in Star Trek: Lower Decks episode “Veritas” the crew of the Cerritos were put on trial. Two of those three episodes were good offerings from their respective shows. During their trial Morty said that he and grandfather were not bad people: a bit hard to justify considering they abandoned their original world due to Morty trying to give Jessica a love potion, Rick destroying a planet with his heist robot, Morty killing a number of bullies, police, and soldiers, and Morty destroying a Medieval civilisation.

Rick’s solution was what audiences would expect from the mad scientist. He used his genius and cynicism to show the hypocrisy of the Observers, and he did what he does best, destroy a society.

“Rickfending Your Mort” was a simpler affair from Rick and Morty due to its skit-based nature. There were some great sequences that will be remembered as classic moments of the show, but this episode wasn’t as coincident as “Morty’s Mind Blowers.”