"Rick and Morty Season 1" Rough Around the Edges, but Still Shiny

 


    I remember when I first started watching Rick and Morty. I mean I was in elementary school for god's sake, but I loved it. I mean it's hard to believe it's going on for seven seasons now. I mean, as seen form my reviews of Community I love Dan Harmon's work, and I hold him in an incredibly high regard. So with season seven coming back, and clips of the show generally popping up into my feed, it felt right to go back all to where it started. In retrospect, it looks kind of funny, and almost bootlegish. There were a lot of staples of earlier Rick and Morty seasons that were just kind of ignored in later seasons, and frankly for good reason too. But before I get ahead of myself, let's discuss the good of this season.

    I mean, in general it's just more grounded. Like Community before it, if you want your show to go balls to the walls with the weird wacky high-concept idea's, you're going to need to establish the norm, and the characters breaking from that. While a lot of the lore that makes later seasons good hasn't popped up yet, you also have to appreciate the moments they are at school. Frankly, I kind of like that Morty actually still attends high school, and sort of feels like a kid. Let's just say that age becomes very ambiguous by the later seasons, and frankly you mostly just forget that Morty is fourteen, or really much of a kid, he's just oddly shaped like other characters. 

    What I don't miss though is how useless all the characters started off as. I mean when I say I really hated the Jerry divorce arc, I mean I really hated it. Like it's ok to have weak characters, but am I wrong for liking modern day Jerry, Beth, Summer, and Morty? I mean there are way less incest jokes in this season so that's a plus, but in my opinion I think the characters in general are weaker in this season, but it's the first one so I'll give it a pass.

    Lastly, this season really just does look wack compared to the last ones. From the voices in the pilot sounding a little off, to the way the animation looks, it really feels like they've smoothed over everything in later seasons. That's not just animation and quality wise too, but in the gimmicks that hit in the first couple of seasons, but have fell off as the show goes on. Interdimensional cable? Wubba-lubba-dub-dub? Rick being an alcoholic and constantly burping? It all goes away and frankly I think it's for the better. Rick's catchphrase always felt so painfully forced, even though I know that's the point, and honestly it just sounds better when he's not constantly burping.

Final Score: 78/100

        I don't think there's really an episode here I hate, but I don't know if any of them have really wowed me in the way I expected to be wowed. Maybe part of is it that the shock factor doesn't really shock me anymore. I've seen better Rick and Morty animation and episodes, I know what's going to happen, I'm not quite in awe of everything. I suppose that just speaks to how iconic the first season of the show is to me, if you held me at gunpoint I'd be pretty confident I could explain most of the episodes without too much of a struggle, but I did used to binge it all the time, so it could be that. Either way, I'm excited for the rest of this re-watch, and do I appreciate this show.

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