Rick and Morty – Wet Kuat Amortican Summer Review

Sometimes Summer is involved in Rick and Morty’s adventures and with “Wet Kuat Amortican Summer” she has her first episode named after her.

As a reward for completing her chores for Rick, Summer gets an attribute slider. When Morty finds out he becomes jealous, which starts a chain of events that includes Summer and Morty merging bodies, Summer nearly getting killed, and Rick and Summer teaming up to save Morty.

In the episode “Rick: A Mort Well Lived,” Summer showed off her action credentials and was forced to perform a Die Hard. “Wet Kuat Amortican Summer” doubled up by parodying two action films: Taken and Total Recall. The episode makes a lot of references to the Liam Neeson film and a lesser extent, the Arnold Schwarzenegger classic.

Taken was parodied by Family Guy in the episode “Leggo My Meg-O.” It was a straightforward retelling of Taken with Family Guy jokes. “Wet Kuat Amortican Summer” also drew on Taken’s basic plot, where someone disappears and their family members were forced to become vigilantes, with the climax taking place on a boat. However, even though “Wet Kuat Amortican Summer” made overt references to Taken, it was more subtle than Family Guy since Rick and Morty have some differences from the source material.

“Wet Kuat Amortican Summer” used all of Rick and Morty wackiness. This was an episode that gave Summer cybernetic enhancements and showed the underground culture of Kuatos. The Kuatos were like the mutants in Total Recall who had psychic powers but were cursed with physical deformities. Rick and Morty twisted this by showing the Kuatos having nightclubs and having a Kuatos was desirable. As well as referencing Total Recall, there was a reference to Scanners, since there were some psychic-induced head explosions and I am a sucker for head explosions.

Taken was about an ex-secret agent travelling to Paris and finding his daughter who had been abducted by sex traffickers. “Wet Kuat Amortican Summer” toned this down by making the theft of a Kuatos more like an organ theft. Organ trafficking is still a dark subject, but slightly more palpable than sex trafficking. It helped to differentiate “Wet Kuat American Summer” from Taken.

“Wet Kuat Amortican Summer” aimed to explore the relationship between Rick and Summer. In previous episodes Rick had been protective of his granddaughter, as shown in “The Ricks Must Be Crazy” and they went on a heinous adventure in “A Rickconvenient Mort.” In “Morty’s Mind Blowers” Summer acted as Rick’s safety net when things go wrong. Rick trusts Summer, much more than Morty, but Summer does question why she must work when Morty just has to ask Rick for something. This shows Rick still has some toxic attitudes toward his grandkids since Morty will come back to Rick no matter how the boy was treated. Rick also revealed that he saw Summer as being like his deceased wife. Presumably, this is when Summer acts as a badass and cares for her brother and not as a popularity-obsessed high schooler.

“Wet Kuat Amortican Summer” was a middling offering from Rick and Morty that offered a decent parody of Taken and Total Recall. Yet it’s an episode that will be forgotten.