The brilliance of Rick and Morty is that, in all the high-concept, sci-fi rigamarole, the most compelling part of the hit series is the characters — who doesn’t love Noob-Noob?
Just two episodes into Rick and Morty Season Eight, longtime fans of the flagship Adult Swim series are comfortable saying that the writers of Rick and Morty have managed to keep the magic going for another year in the 100-year plan. Season Seven drew positive reviews as fans breathed a sigh of relief that the show didn’t fall apart upon the departure of disgraced star and co-creator Justin Roiland.
In fact, the last couple years of Rick and Morty have, somehow, been significantly less divisive in the avid online fandom than the show’s fifth and sixth seasons, when erratic tonal shifts and a general sense of negativity made some fans wonder where the show was headed, and whether they wanted to stick around to find out.
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Last month, Rick and Morty show runner Scott Marder said that Season Eight would focus on the Smith-Sanchez family and their relationships with each other, and, thus far, the show has delivered on its promise to write character and relationship-driven storylines. Fans have welcomed these first few episodes as a sign that Rick and Morty hasn’t lost sight of what made it so great in the first place — so long as those familial relationships don’t lead to another Naruto later in the season.
Following the Rick and Morty Season Eight premiere “Summer of All Fears,” one fan in the subreddit went viral with a post titled, “I’ve Never Felt Like This About the Show Since the Early Seasons,” in which they stated, “This is one of the best episodes ever, and it’s only the first episode, I think they really got it right this time, I feel like the real soul of the show is back, I can’t wait to see what’s coming.”
Throughout the largest online fan-forum in the show’s profoundly online following, fans are reporting similar experiences with the first two episodes, noting how Marder and his team’s mission to focus on the complexities of the character dynamics reminds them of what it felt like to first fall in love with the Rick and Morty cast when both the audience and the writers were still figuring out the rules of the universe.
So far, fans have connected more with “Summer of All Fears” than they did with the most recent episode, “Valkyrick,” possibly because the character of Space Beth is still building that emotional foundation that the rest of the family has had since the pilot. Specifically, fans are starting to get antsy that we haven’t seen much Jerry so far in Season Eight, with one user writing in the “Valkyrick” discussion thread, “This episode was sorely missing a side plot where Jerry gets locked out of the house or something like that.”
Even in Season Seven, Rick and Morty writers struggled to meet every fan’s demands in terms of character screen time, now that each member of the family can support an entire episode plot line on their own. This time last season, fans were complaining that Rick and Morty Season Seven was all Rick and no Morty, and now Jerry is getting the short end of the storyline stick.
However, Jerry stans shouldn’t worry — we still have the Easter episode that the show has been teasing for months coming down the line, and we’ll be sure to see some egg on his face then.
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