Rick and Morty “Final Desmithation”: Destinies Wild
Image source: Adult Swim
So it seems we all had the fortune of seeing Rick and Morty this weekend, didn’t we? Another wild Rick and Jerry adventure! What could it possibly entail? Well, a lot. Some interesting secret ingredients to “Final Desmithation,” for sure.
The episode starts at Panda Express with the family, and Jerry’s excited to go to the zoo. Turns out he eats the animal feed because of their gumball machine-like dispensers. They’re then given their fortune cookies; while Beth, Morty, and Summer get fortunes so watered down they’re barely fortunes, Jerry’s states that he will …get intimate…with his mother. It sets him off in a panic, understandably. And then his mother Joyce, last seen in season one’s “Anatomy Park”, starts calling. The family starts making all sorts of jokes about Jerry and his mother, even doing photoshops, and making a doll of Joyce that falls face first into his lap when he hides in the closet. He gets to a point where he dresses like Morty for reasons not worth unpacking, but it explains the first scene in the season trailer.
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Jerry is unable to go to the zoo because Rick lies about picking up readings in his probability field that confirm “strange powers” for the fortune. However, when he does use the machine, it turns out there was truth to it. Space Beth takes Beth, Morty, and Summer to the zoo, surprisingly marking their exit from the episode, and they don’t appear again until post-credits. Jerry is put through a test to see if the fortune may actually be doing anything, and he fails to defy it, even after multiple reconfigurations.
They go back to Panda Express, where Rick slaughters the employees. except for two in the back, who lead them to their fortune cookie distributor, Fortune 500. They go undercover and Jerry gets a Sailor Moon transformation sequence into his assistant outfit. The company is run by Jennith Padrow-Chunt, and it turns out they’re controlling fate for profit, as the employees receive cookies and know in confidence and fear that it will happen. Rick must fight security hand to hand when his tech falters. Jennith sees Jerry has an unresolved fortune, so she has her employees capture Joyce and presents her to Rick and Jerry after they crawl through the air vents to the production room.
Image source: Adult Swim
There, they discover that the company is keeping an alien with a digestive disorder from a species that eats chaos. Its stomach strips randomness from space-time, leaving behind pockets of energy that bend in such ways that create fate, and thus excrete fortune cookies. It’s very “Fry and the Slurm Factory” from Futurama and “Meat the Legends” from Legends of Tomorrow, but it certainly wasn’t bad for Rick and Morty to have its own spin. Jennith pushes Joyce down, getting her…excited. Rick takes down all the armed guards with superpowers provided by prototype fortune cookies. He takes out a bunch using a guard’s “headshot-only” ability. Another that could control water dissolved another guard by taking control of the water in their body. Not even Avatar'‘s waterbenders-turned-bloodbenders could figure that out! He also launches cookies into others to transform them into all sorts of things to disarm them, so that their guns and armor just aren’t on their being anymore. He makes Jennith vulnerable by fulfilling her fortune: Becoming the most successful businesswoman.
In revenge, she turns Akira-esque. She frees the alien, who kills its caretaker; Jennith hopes to escape through a black hole, but the alien eats her too. Joyce has been approaching Jerry innocuously, and he runs away terrified. The capsule with the black hole opens after Jerry trips and kicks it, pulling everything in the room to it. It catches the alien in its pull, so Rick has to pull it back, but also Jerry’s mother, pants, and underwear. Jerry loses his grip, so he’s sent barreling toward his mother until Rick hastily crafts and launches a cookie to create a new fate. When they get home, Rick’s last fortune becomes unexpectedly resolved when Jerry calls him his friend. He was functionally immortal for that entire battle.
The gags in this episode were surprising; we saw an appearance from Sleepy Gary, one of the beloved parasites from “Total Rickall”. It was a fantastic callback that showed how the intimacy of their relationship still affected him, and that he didn’t forget him after he was exposed and gone. The use of the theme of Taxi reminded me of Adventure Time’s usage of “Where Everybody Knows Your Name” (the Cheers theme song) in “Simon & Marcy,” even if the contexts are vastly different. Everybody has a mother, but only one is named Smith. It was a fine episode. It gets a 7/10. Next week it appears to be an Arrival parody. Pocket Mortys avatars this week are Assistant Morty and Jennith/Businesswoman Morty, and Joyce is the new trainer.
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