Rick and Morty – The Jerrick Trap Review

Rick and Morty re-explores the relationship between Rick and Jerry with the second episode of Season 7, “The Jerrick Trap.”

During an argument between Rick and Jerry over a rake situation, Rick attempts to prove a point by swapping bodies. The pair are forced to work when Morty gets captured by some alien gangsters and they end up getting closer because of the experience, metaphorically and literally.

The relationship between Rick and Jerry has evolved drastically since the show’s inception. The pair originally hated each other. Jerry saw Rick as a bad influence on his son and wife, vying for his family’s attention, whilst Rick had nothing but contempt for the man who knocked up his daughter and saw him as an idiot. Their relationship got so bad that Rick was able to break up with Beth and Jerry at the beginning of Season 3.

Rick and Morty did air their grievances towards each other in the episode “The Whirly Dirly Conspiracy” but the episode ends with a thawing of tensions. Whilst the episode “Final DeSmithation” showed the pair were able to work together, and that Rick did care for Jerry with the episode ending on a sweet note with Jerry calling Rick his friend. In “The Jerrick Trap” Morty succinctly dissected their relationship by saying that they cared for each other more than they’re willing to admit. Rick even told Jerry that he will say mean things but he doesn’t always mean them.

The episode showed that there were still tensions between the pair. The cold opening resulted in Rick losing his cool with Jerry and goading his son-in-law into a body swap. The first half of the episode was when “The Jerrick Trap” was strongest since there was a lot of comedy from their bickering. The moment when Rick suffers an existential crisis was hilarious and felt like a joke from Rick and Morty’s heyday. The first two minutes of “The Jerrick Trap” was funnier than the whole of “How Poopy Got His Poop Back.”

“The Jerrick Trap” did lose a lot of momentum when Rick and Jerry ran away. They ended up becoming petty criminals on another planet and lived like they were in Scarface or Miami Vice. After such a high of Rick and Jerry experiencing their body swap the episode falls into familiar territory with the pair’s crime wave taking on the same gangsters they had to save Morty from. It wasn’t bad but nearly as memorable as the first half. At the very least there was some ‘what the fuck’ absurdity when Rick and Jerry become Jerricky.

“The Jerrick Trap” aimed to twist the body swap story. As Rick described it, they were putting minds into new hardware. Basically, Jerry got Rick’s intelligence and cybernetic enhancement, whilst Rick had Jerry’s mediocrity, hence his extreme reaction. They ended up getting major head injuries which meant they ended up having parts of each other’s brains inserted into the other bodies. It resulted in Rick still having a high level of intelligence and invention when in Jerry’s body. Rick and Jerry ended up having similar personalities and they have traits amounts of each other’s bodies. The post-credit scene suggests that this episode could have a bigger impact than expected since a part of Rick is in Jerry’s mind.

“The Jerrick Trap” was a massive improvement over the previous episode. It managed to be a funny and more inventive episode of Rick and Morty and hopefully, Season 7 will be more like this.