‘Rick And Morty’ "Rick: A Mort Well Lived" Review: Die Hard With A Video Game
Image Source: Adult Swim
Yippee dippie doo, baby! Last week, in Rick and Morty’s sixth season premiere, Rick cleaned out the Citadel’s corpses from outer space. Oh, and the Smith family is now entirely displaced from their home dimensions. So this week, grab your Jewish falafaflutens; Summer does a Die Hard.
The episode begins with a group of troublemakers outside of a convenience store. It almost looked as if the Smiths’ new homeworld differences were about to be explored. However, a person in Morty’s outfit approaches, even looking like him, but if he was combined with Squidward’s first chiseled beautiful face in “The Two Faces of Squidward.” Not the memed one, the one between it and his normal face. Things start becoming more apparent as characters not only have Justin Roiland’s voice but the Morty technique and his mannerisms. At a rally, it’s revealed by Rick in his Roy avatar that he, Morty, and Summer went to Blips and Chitz, but it was attacked by alien terrorists.
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The power went out while Morty played Roy: A Life Well Lived, and when the game reset, he was fractured into the billions of NPCs of the game’s world, so Rick went in to rescue him so he didn’t die at the completion of the game. He is not a religious figure. While Summer is told to do a Die Hard, Marta is the main Morty the episode follows, and the terrorists are revealed to literally be playing out of a Die Hard playbook. In-game, Roy is building spaceships for the entire population to go into space, as the game’s engine allows them to go beyond the edges of the map, kicking Rick and Morty out before it resets.
As the mission gets closer, even more pieces are in Morty outfits, and Marta explains they’ll be unified in support if Roy tells them he loves Morty. A single moment of pause causes the “holiest war ever.” Summer is still guns blazing with the terrorists, and decades pass in the game, as time dilation was established earlier. Marta now wants to live out her life in-game but has a daughter who wants to go. Her father, who had joined her cause early on, is now dying but also wants to leave, causing Marta to realize she was wrong, so the ships go off.
Image Source: Adult Swim
The terrorists have made it to Rick and Morty’s bodies, and we reach the climax. Summer taunts the Gruber stand-in, and it turns out she read their playbook, so now she’s all caught up. Rick and Morty escape the game and finally get to help Summer. While the Gruber stand-in doesn’t fall off the building, one of his cronies has a realization and eats him instead before transforming and flying off. Morty, though, is suddenly blindingly unquestioning of Rick after his remarks about the crony. It’s believed those parts of him that were more skeptical of Rick were left behind in the game, so it remains to be seen what kind of impact it will have.
With the destruction of the Citadel still fresh in our minds, it was interesting to see a different take on a world of Mortys so soon after. Heck, Rick and Morty using avatars means they weren’t onscreen for most of the episode and made for quite a different feeling. I’d call it surreal. Both the insistence that Rick’s mission had some sort of religious basis and Summer’s lack of knowledge of Die Hard leading her to do whatever she thinks the methods are were hilarious. The religion thing even made its way to the President NPC before the holy war thing put it aside. While the episode didn’t follow up on established plot threads, it was still a fun excursion to return to Blips and Chitz for the first time since “Mortynight Run.”
In Pocket Mortys, the new Mortys are Marta and Larry, and the new trainer skin is Roy. Last week added Bloodthirsty Morty and Helmet Morty, and the new trainer was Hermit Jerry. While there were no parents this week, next week’s episode is “Bethic Twinstinct,” so it’s probably gonna be a Jerry episode. Kidding, of course, but the preview only showed Summer and Rick playing a Street Fighter-adjacent video game, so we’ll once again be finding out what they’re hiding then.
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