‘It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia’s Official Rickety Cricket Timeline Is Appropriately Hard to Look At
Over the course of 15 seasons, Father Matthew Mara’s existence has gone from a life of faith to a living hell. But, just like Dennis in a pair of jorts, he can always go lower.
On It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia, Rickety Cricket is essentially the Paddy’s Pub Gang’s picture of Dorian Gray. While Rob McElhenney, Kaitlin Olson, Glenn Howerton and Charlie Day all have teams of real-life aestheticians and stylists working tirelessly to mitigate the effects of aging on their rich, famous faces, Always Sunny writer and executive producer David Hornsby has been working with prosthetics professionals to create the visage of a man who is, figuratively, spiritually and physically, melting.
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Since his debut in the It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia Season Two classic “The Gang Exploits a Miracle,” Rickety Cricket’s fall into sin and grotesquery has been equal parts gradual and unseemly. But thanks to the It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia social media team, we can speed up the timeline of his descent into holistic deformation in a slideshow that can make any stray dog fully aroused:
While it may have taken the better part of 20 years for Rickety Cricket to go from a respected and valued priest in the Catholic Church to a scarred, burned, one-eyed, homeless boy pimp as we last saw him in the It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia Season 16 episode “The Gang Gets Cursed,” the Cliff’s notes on his de-evolution are surprisingly brief.
Rickety Cricket returns to the Gang’s ecosystem in “The Gang Exploits a Miracle” and rediscovers his childhood love for Sweet Dee, then he leaves the cloth to be with her, only for Sweet Dee to shut him down and leave him jobless, loveless and homeless. His new life on the streets is disrupted when Charlie and Dee convince him to sell cocaine for them, accidentally getting him hooked on blow himself and causing the mob to break his legs when they give him up as a scapegoat. Later, Frank slices Cricket’s neck during an amateur wrestling match, giving him a massive, festering, dog-vagina-like scar.
From there, things really start to get real weird with Cricks, as he pretends to turn his life around and return to the church just to steal bling from his high school reunion, takes a job cleaning out cages at the dog pound before losing a fight (and his left eye) to a chocolate lab, begs Charlie and Dee for death, arrives uninvited for the Thanksgiving beef-squashing and gets horrifically burned in the ensuing blaze, rejects his father’s offer of assistance in getting out of his cycle of suffering and, eventually, enters the flesh-peddling business as we last learned.
Considering where he started and where he is now, it’s safe to say that, of all the Always Sunny side characters who have survived their encounters with the Gang, Father Matthew has suffered the absolute most at their hands — not that The Gang even noticed. After all, what beef would they need to squash with that guy?
