Rickcelled

I'd just gotten a few episodes into season four--the 2019 season--of Rick and Morty when the news broke about co-creator Justin Roiland's public scandal. He's been charged with "felony domestic battery and false imprisonment". The latter charge is vague but suggestive. Was he keeping someone in his basement? Anyway, he's been fired from Rick and Morty and everything else he was working on. Since he was the voice of both Rick and Morty, the show will never be the same. Though his writing credits on the show are few and far between. He did at least co-write one episode per season until season four. Almost the entire writing staff seems to have changed for the fourth, fifth, and sixth seasons, in fact, and just a few episodes into the fourth season I can already see the difference in quality.

The funny thing is, it's only now I'm getting to the writers Keven Feige hired to work on Marvel projects, with the exception of Jessica Gao (She-Hulk) who wrote the third season episode "Pickle Rick". Michael Waldron (Loki, Doctor Strange 2) didn't join the series until the second episode of season four, a lame episode about defecation called "The Old Man and the Seat". Last night I watched the first Jeff Loveness episode, "Claw and Hoarder: Special Ricktim's Morty" from December 8, 2019, a lazy deconstruction of heist movies. Loveness wrote the upcoming Ant-Man in Quantumania and is working on one of the upcoming Avengers movies. Can't you read, Kevin Feige? If you like Rick and Morty so much, why didn't you hire writers from the show's heyday? It's like being a big Beatles fan so you hire The Monkees. All the best writers can't be up on domestic battery charges. Can they?

Along with news of the charges, a series of tweets and DMs have magically appeared, attending the scandal as they seem often to do. In this case, apparently Roiland had some inappropriate conversations with a 16 year old fan. And if you read them, and you're not a tool, you'll see they are inappropriate, not predatory. He's using the same kind of ironic humour the show uses and maybe he figured an avowed Rick and Morty fan would be hip to it. But he should have known better. You can never talk to a kid like that, no matter how dirty their sense of humour is. The poor thing is probably vengeful now because she built up all kinds of castles in the clouds around her famous friend. She should count herself lucky he didn't beat her up or something. Or whatever it is he's allegedly done.

I don't know why studios haven't learned by now to hold off firing someone until the courts have finished doing their jobs. Obviously this is more serious than a James Gunn situation but, even so. It seems like we should have learned the "innocent until proven guilty" lesson by now.

Contemplating the possibility of his guilt has made me think back on the series differently. It's not like Bill Cosby, where the guy had a wholesome public persona. Rick Sanchez is an unapologetically amoral and abusive character. I went back and watched the one episode on which Roiland has sole writing credit, season one's "Rick Potion #9" from January 2014. Morty asks Rick to make a love potion to make his crush, Jessica, fall in love with him. The episode was praised as a "deconstruction of the creepiness of the love potion trope", which seems potentially ironic now. I mean, the episode's humour is ironic already, so I guess this is ironically ironic . . . Actually, one of the appealing things about the first couple seasons of Rick and Morty is that it has some genuine creative thought instead of just endlessly complaining about other media.

In the first seasons, Rick isn't just another lousy dad figure. He really is a pig and sometimes, watching him with Morty, a relatively innocent kid, it's like watching a baby locked in a cage with a rabid dog. You can tell Roiland made the conscious decision to make nearly all of Rick's lines compulsively narcissistic, and the way he manages to make every dialogue exchange about how he's a victim and Morty needs to be punished is genuinely clever and funny. Moreso because it's genuinely worrying. In the climax of the episode, when one thing has led to another and the entire population of Earth has been turned into genetic monstrosities, Rick and Morty hover safely overhead in their spaceship. Rick gloats about how he was right and Morty was wrong about the wisdom of using a love potion. When his attempt to cure Earth's populace has failed, he berates Morty for wanting to gloat about his failure. The episode has a pretty impressively dark ending set to Mazzy Star's "Look on Down from the Bridge" (the episode was directed by Stephen Sandoval, I don't know if he's any relation to Hope Sandoval, lead singer of Mazzy Star).

I come away from the episode feeling like the writer really understands something about the psychology of abuse. I wouldn't say that necessarily means he would become abusive himself, nor would I say it would make him less likely to be abusive.

I'm glad I watched those first three seasons, I feel considerably better informed on modern pop culture now. I also got to thinking, the show feels very much like the next step in evolution from Russell T Davies' run on Doctor Who, which was often about how the Doctor could be amoral and dangerous. Rick and Morty began as a Back to the Future parody and, since Back to the Future was one of the many American projects that "paid homage" to Doctor Who in the '80s, it makes sense. I wonder if Russell T Davies has it in him still to add another knot to this mouse's tail.